Page 3474 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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scared they are not going anywhere. People will stay on because they are too scared not to.
So who bears the brunt of it? It is those people on short-term contracts, the microbusinesses that are actually providing someone with work for three months or six months. There are people in this chamber who have family members who are contractors to the public service. They will lose. They will be the first to go. We cannot afford those people to go; we just cannot afford it.
Every one of them belongs to a family. Every one of them has to pay rent. Every one of them has to pay a mortgage. Every one of them has to eat. I can remember the despair that was around in 1996. It motivated me to run in 1998 and it motivated Annette Ellis to run in 1996—to stop it. But we could not. It went into a rebuild and we are now back.
We have seen so much Canberra bashing over the years by a bunch of tourists who come to this place, pitch their tent, abuse the hell out of the place and go home again. They irritate me. Mr Smyth says, “Where were you when they were bashing people?” I can tell you where I was: I was standing up and abusing them back. The worst kind of Canberra bashing that people can visit upon this place is to send it into a recession. We have to look into the eyes of our kids and say: “Well, you know, I would like the world better for you than I inherited it, and we can’t deliver that, sorry. We can’t have the comfort of a public service job for a decade to give some training in the real world. No, forget it. The best thing you can do is try and get a job outside town.”
We also have a regional responsibility. Where are the guys from around the area and the rural properties going to go? I can tell you where they are going to go: they are going to go to the bigger cities, and they are not going to make it there either.
Now is the time for this chamber to be united and reject this notion of an impending recession. Now is the time for us all to stand up and say that the future of our kids is more important than political expediency. Tony Abbott standing up there and saying, “Pick me, pick me, because I will rip the guts out of Canberra,” should not be acceptable to any of us in this chamber. Writing a letter to Tony Abbott is not good enough; it is just not good enough. We should be united. We should be passing this motion unanimously today and getting on with it.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.20): I wanted to start by talking about some of the numbers. The motion today is about the impact on the public service and the ACT economy if the proposed cuts to the public service go through. Mr Smyth stood up before and gave us a speech that was all about numbers. He did some rather interesting conflating of numbers and attempted to attribute certain things to certain people, particularly my friend from the Greens Lin Hatfield Dodds. We can hope it was accidental that he distorted the story so badly, because I would hate to think that he had some other motivation.
Mr Smyth talked about a number of different figures, and he tried to say that somehow Lin was responsible for all of them. He talked about 30,000. Well, that comes from an ACTU report, and I think it is important to put that on the record. The
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