Page 229 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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the limit in what we can do in cost cutting. Phil Lynch started this with his first razor gang in about 1975 or 1976 and for 15 years there has been constant pruning of the ACT budget, year and year after year. I know the exercise the Labor Party went through last year and I think we are all coming to the view that it has gone about as far as it can go. There is a limit to what you can cut, and I would certainly agree with Mr Jensen that Senator Walsh is a skilled exponent of that art. But there is a limit.
I am sure the Priorities Review Board is going to have the greatest difficulty in telling you where 3,000 jobs can go. You may not sack people, Mr Duby, but it means you are going to take people out of the housing branch, or out of the Education Department or somewhere else. People are going to go; jobs are going to disappear and services to the community are going to suffer because behind every person there is a service to the community.
I have been interested in this for some time. Since the figure of 17,000 public servants is often bandied around, I asked the Chief Minister late last year for some detail of that. It is true, we have about 17,000 public servants, 16,834 equivalent full-time, as at some stage in September last year. It seems a lot of people but bear in mind that in our administration we have state-type functions, we have municipal-type functions and we have the functions that in other places are often performed by statutory authorities - like water and electricity servicing. So we do need that large force. Where are these cuts going to come from? Does it mean 200 people a year? I am sorry, Mr Duby, it might not be people, they are being attritionised or whatever, but there are likely to be 200 jobs a year disappearing out of the education sector. That is what it is going to mean over five years. I do not know where they are going to come from.
I know the education sector fairly well and I can speak about it. I do not know the health one so I will not touch that one. There is no fat at all left in the education sector. You cannot cut that sector any more; it cannot be done. Mr Moore expressed a view last year that the office was bloated; there were too many people in the office. I am sure Dr Kinloch and Mr Humphries, now having some experience of it, would agree that the Education Department is not bloated. There is no fat left in the Education Department. If you start to take 200 jobs a year away from that then the Education Department, the teaching system, the delivery of education to our students, will all suffer severely. This will be the case all over. It cannot be done.
Mr Duby, I see you have notes for your speech which you will no doubt stand up shortly to deliver. You might tell us whether you agree with your Treasurer about those 3,000 jobs over five years. I would be most interested to hear your response to that.
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