Page 3471 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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Chief Minister? Indeed, where are the Greens on this? I have got a copy of the CityNews. Look at this: “Lin Hatfield-Dodds, ACT Senate Candidate, ACT Australian of the Year 2008”. What does it say? “What kind of Canberran would axe 12,000 jobs from the public service”? There you go—12,000 jobs. But we have just heard from the parliamentary convenor here that it is not 12,000. So the big lie. Yet again, we have the big lie from the Greens. The Greens will say anything they can to get the balance of power in the Senate to put in place their anti-family, inflationary policies that everybody will have to pay for.
That is the problem with this debate. The lack of honesty from those opposite is just amazing in this regard. We have got the chief cheerleader for the cuts, Andrew Barr. We have got the Chief Minister, who forgets what he did. It is interesting that Mr Stanhope actually worked for Mr Beazley when Mr Beazley was caught out in Orange, I think. He was asked where should certain things go and he said his preference was that things did not go to Canberra. I did not hear of Jon Stanhope’s resignation at that comment. I did not hear of Jon Stanhope standing up.
What did Jon Stanhope say in the minister’s office in those days? We have not heard a word about that. Did Jon Stanhope stand up for Canberra when Infrastructure Australia did not come to the ACT, when Climate Change was going to go to Melbourne and when national broadband network went to Sydney? Oh no. Where was Jon Stanhope when the tax office, under Kevin Rudd, sent jobs out of the territory? He was mute, silent, because that is the sort of person he is. We have said to Tony Abbott that we do not want these cuts, that we do not like these cuts.
The motion is about a strong public service. You only have to talk to people in the public service to know that they have not appreciated the Rudd-Gillard treatment of public servants with brief after brief, written and rewritten, sent up and ignored, blocked in the myriad of corridors that the Labor Party had filled with staffers who were not up to the job.
We have heard the disgraceful story of the Chief of the Defence Force who was made to sit like some errant schoolboy in the foyer of the Prime Minister’s office for hours on hours, while Australian troops were overseas, at the whim of a prime minister—who was eventually dismissed—because he did not have time to talk to him.
I was at a function a couple of weeks ago when a journalist told the story of being invited to one of Kevin Rudd’s regular meetings with journalists for lunch or dinner at the Lodge. When they went in at about seven o’clock there were four or five public servants with their folders and briefcases waiting to talk to the Prime Minister. When they left after 11 o’clock those public servants were still sitting there waiting to talk to the Prime Minister. It is that arrogance that Labor in government is so special at, dutifully assisted by the Greens, the lackey of the Labor Party, that is upsetting people in the ACT.
If you do not think there are cuts going on, go and talk to people in the departments. There are cuts going on surreptitiously in the departments now. But no, we do not hear the Greens standing up for those people. We do not hear the Labor Party saying, “Stop it, stop it.” No, no, no. I read the numbers out yesterday. If you add up the
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