Government Appointments

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (15:57): I refer to a Media Watch program in the year 2000 and quote a caller to radio station ABC Radio on 22 August 2000. Catherine was calling to support a Labor politician's complaint that Darwin police had failed to investigate a burglary at her home because she told them she opposed mandatory sentencing. Catherine said:

They were there very quickly but as soon as they found out I was not a supporter of mandatory sentencing, they um, they really gave me the impression they didn't want to know, and I felt really, really cheated by the whole process. They didn't take any fingerprints, they didn't sort of follow up, I never heard from them again. They sort of left me with the impression that because I didn't support it, they weren't really interested.

Paul Barry, the host of Media Watch, then pointed out that Catherine was not really Catherine; Catherine's real name was actually Adele Young, and she was the chief of staff working for the Labor leader, Clare Martin, in the Northern Territory.

Various other references to Ms Adele Young in the Bushranger column, 3 November 2013, stated:

Adele Young—the strategist who is attributed with spearheading Labor's three Northern Territory election victories—is off to Adelaide after 16 years in the territory.

A profile piece written in The Australian on 22 July 2008 by Natasha Robinson says:

There is a wily political team behind the [Labor] minister, driving the policy. His chief of staff, former union power broker Adele Young, is the bovver-girl and policy powerhouse of the Territory government, not afraid of launching verbal tirades on the telephone to backbenchers who step out of line.

The reason I have given that background of Adele Young is that Premier Jay Weatherill has just appointed Adele Young as the Director of Reform in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet here in South Australia, together with Mr Paul Flanagan, Director of Government Communications, a former Labor government staffer, together with the Executive Director, Implementation and Delivery, Mr Rik Morris, another former Labor government staffer—and, of course, under the tutelage of Mr Kym Winter Dewhirst, another former Labor government staffer, as the chief executive officer.

What we are seeing in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet at the moment is the politicisation of the senior levels of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet and the senior levels of the Public Service right across the board, as Labor government staffers and fellow travellers are parachuted in—in many cases, without competition—to the various executive positions.

This has come to the fore because many long-serving public servants are furious at the way Mr Weatherill and his chief executive treated 11 executives in the last week of January who were sacked on the spot and escorted from the building. Some of these executives had been loyal servants of both Liberal and Labor governments for between 30 and 40 years. They were aware that they had accepted fixed-term contracts, which meant that they no longer had permanency, but their criticism, and the criticisms of their friends and colleagues, is the fact that they were treated by this Premier and his chief executive as if they were dirt.

They were marched into the chief executive's office. They were told that they were being dismissed; in one case, one executive was only one year into a five-year contract. They were told that they were would be escorted from the building immediately. In one case, they were unable to go back to their desk to take their personal belongings. In another case, they were able to go and get their coffee mug. In a couple of other cases, they were quickly able to go back to their desk to get some of their personal belongings before someone from human resources escorted them from the building.

These public servants were not accused of anything, other than that the Labor government and the Premier had decided that they wanted jobs for Labor supporters and Labor fellow travellers and Labor staffers to be plonked into these senior positions within the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.

I laugh at the fake outrage of the Premier and other ministers and Labor members in this chamber when they talk about the attitude of conservative governments to the public sector when here their own Premier treats long-serving, loyal and hardworking senior executives in the Premier's own department like dirt, like criminals and outcasts and dismisses them and, as I have said, escorts them from the building, in some cases without their being able to collect their own personal belongings.