Page 1115 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 3 May 2022
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what we have seen from this government, this coalition government, is that they will back their Labor mates on the hill before they back Canberrans, before they back our economy and before they back jobs.
The question was asked of me this morning about people who have retired and gone back in the public service as a contractor because they are 54/11s. I am sure Mr Gentleman would know many of these people. Under this policy, are you going to sack them all? If you are a 54/11 and you are now working as a contractor back in the public service, are you going to be sacked? Or is it only one in four of those people that is going to be sacked? That is based on the rough numbers I have. Which one in four of those people is going to be sacked? That is what the policy is.
It is very important that we do not fall for the Labor line, which is, “Oh no, we’re just taking people out of contracting and putting them back in the public service.” That is not what is happening here. As far as I can estimate, only a fifth of the jobs, or thereabouts, are not in Canberra. As I said, these are often, as the announcement says, front-line service providers rather than people that do policy work in the departments.
I note that there is an amendment coming around, so I assume this has the support of the Labor Party and the Greens. They are going to back their federal colleagues rather than back Canberra jobs and people working as contractors here in Canberra. They talk about a decade of cuts, privatisations and outsourcing. It is pretty interesting because when the cuts were mooted back in 2012-13, there was a Senate estimates and Dr David Tune, who was the head of the finance department then, presented evidence. You can actually read about it if you go online and the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times. You can actually go to the Hansard itself. What it shows is that those jobs were already embedded by the Labor Party as voluntary redundancies regardless, without the money there to pay for the redundancies.
Although there was lots of talk a while back about a reduction in the size of the public service and so on, the Labor Party actually did it by stealth when they were still in government. They embedded those job cuts. Dr David Tune was the head of the finance department. You can shake your heads as much as you like, but I can get you a copy of the Hansard, if you like. You can read the articles. They are in the Canberra Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. That is the reality.
I note that proposed amendment from Labor talks about Greens policies, so I assume this has got the loving support of their Greens colleagues as well. It calls on the federal coalition to drop their policy of massive job cuts in Canberra. How ironic. It is not the government that is doing that. This is a motion that is talking about the reality, not just the spin—it is not just a spin from this mob—that this is $3 billion worth of job cuts from the federal Labor Party, not from the coalition.
I think there is a myth out there. There are many myths and I am going to work hard to dispel them. “With the Labor Party it is all about jobs”. Well, it is not, and the policy makes that very clear. You cannot replace $3 billion in Canberra with $500 million, predominantly in the regions, without cutting thousands of jobs in Canberra. If someone would like to explain how that policy can do it otherwise, how that magic works, I am all ears. It cannot.
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