Page 3429 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 2010
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$300 million across the bureaucracy. That is $450 million in IT and $300 million across administration. So do not think for a minute that the Liberal Party federally are the only people who are going to be making some cuts.
The difference is a bit like Julia Gillard and her speech. When Tony Abbott stands up and makes a speech, if he is reading from a script, he will say that is the case, not like Julia Gillard. I invite you to have a look at the news about that. Her great speech at the Labor Party launch was actually not unscripted, was not done off the cuff. Her entire speech was put on the podium in front of her, and she was telling, and her spin doctors were telling, people that she is this wonderful orator, that it was done off the cuff, no script. Again, that is more Labor spin, just as we are seeing here about job cuts in this town. Labor will cut deeper, because they have a history of that.
The difference is that, when we cut these positions, no public servant will lose their job, because it is done by natural attrition. But we know already that people in the IT sector are losing their jobs. I spoke to a woman two days ago whose son had lost his job in the IT sector. He got how much notice? Absolutely none, because their contracts were just not extended.
It is a mischievous and cowardly way to do it, and that is what we see from the Labor Party. They hide behind the fact that it might be contractors or they call it an efficiency dividend. Let me tell you, the volume, the scale, of those efficiency dividends have meant, as Mr Smyth outlined, thousands of Canberrans losing their jobs. And they were not positions that went; they were actual people. And that is a real difference.
Kevin Rudd described what he was going to do to the public service as “taking a meataxe to it”. Where was Mr Stanhope? Where were the Greens? Where was Ms Gallagher? Where were you, Madam Deputy Speaker, when Kevin Rudd said, “I’m going to take a meataxe to the public service”?
In actual fact, the Labor government here were quite happy with that. They said: “Oh, we welcome it. You know, it could have been worse. It’s only a small meataxe, I suppose. It’s not a big meataxe.” But what hypocrisy from Labor and the Greens that when Kevin Rudd says, “I’m going to take a meataxe to the public service,” and when he actually does, and he strips our national institutions and spends three years putting public service infrastructure and new departments anywhere but in Canberra and spending what should have been rightfully spent in the nation’s capital in Melbourne, in Sydney, in Brisbane instead of in Canberra, we do not hear a squeak out of the Chief Minister; we do not hear a squeak out of the Treasurer; and we do not hear a squeak out of the Greens.
This is not about their concern for Canberra. This is not about the fact that Kevin Rudd has taken a meataxe to the public service. This is not about the fact that he has put public service departments anywhere but Canberra. This is not about the fact that he has invested, in just about every electorate other than the ACT, in things that should have been put into the ACT. No, this is simply about the fact that the Greens want the balance of power in the Senate and Labor want their colleagues there with them. That is what this is about. It is a shallow, a mischievous and a false premise that
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