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Jason Howden

Submission: 

While I can see the benefits of having a more flexible workforce by using contractors and non-ongoing staff there is a huge issue in respect of how we manage these staff in accordance with our ASL caps. By counting non-ongoing staff in the ASL cap we are often unable to utlise these staff to fill short term gaps as they will be counted in our ASL. We therefore need to use labour-hire/contractors to do the same role. These are more expensive, and are not able to get the same system access as non-ongoing staff, so they are not able to do many of the admin functions we need, such as contracting and procurement around the start/end of financial year.
If non-ongoing staff were excluded from the ASL cap we could have a pool of temp staff vetted and ready to go, who could start quickly without a procurement process, and who would have the right access to do many of the seasonal tasks that require full system access. They'd also be much cheaper too, as we would not have to pay a % to recruitment firms.