Page 3476 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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be no new recruitment; there will be no opportunities for people to come in. I presume that is what a freeze means. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the policy, but presumably that is what it means. That means that there will no new graduate positions. Think about that impact on Canberra families and all those young people who are currently working their way through our universities around town, thinking that the public service is a place they would like to work, a place where they can help serve Australia as well as find themselves a good job with good opportunities.
For the next couple of years, those graduates will not have those opportunities. What impact is that going to have on Canberra families? That means that some of those young people will have to leave Canberra. They will have to move away from their families, because the opportunities will not be here in the ACT. That is one potential impact on graduates. In addition to that, if we do not bring in graduates, are we renewing the public service in a way that we need to? Are we bringing in the brightest young people coming out of our universities into the public service? We want a solid public service; the public service delivers policy advice for government as well as the rollout of other services around the country, and we want our governments to have the best advisers working for them. I am particularly concerned about the impact on young people who are aspiring to work in the public service and the families of those young people who may have to see their offspring leave the ACT in search of a decent employment opportunity.
The other area of concern—it has been touched on in the debate this morning already—is the impact on small business. Several members have spoken about it already: we know the reliance that many small businesses in the ACT place on the work that comes to them from the federal public service. This debate has been going on for many years. For a long time we have talked about the need to diversify the economy in the ACT. I can remember Kate Carnell talking about this more than a decade ago. We have seen over time, to the ACT’s benefit, an increasing proportion of the economy driven by the private sector, but the reality is that much of that still thrives around a strong and stable commonwealth public service.
The potential ripple effects of these sorts of cuts are perhaps challenging to exactly quantify, but, again, everybody in this place knows that they will take place. They will happen; they will have an ongoing effect and it will take Canberra a long time to recover from those. It will see us lose some of those gains we have perhaps made in the last decade or so as we seek to reduce our reliance around the public service.
In the context of having a clear picture of what the federal Liberal Party’s proposals are for the public service, there was a very telling moment at the Liberal Party launch in Kingston on Sunday when Joe Hockey came along to cheer for the Liberal Party in the ACT. He stood up there and he said, “You know, Gary Humphries came along and told me that this was going to be really bad for Canberra, and Gary gave me a bit of a mouthful.” Then he said, “But, frankly, we’re going to do it anyway.” To me, that underlined the simple ineffectiveness of the current senator for the ACT for the Liberal Party. Gary can stand up all he likes and say: “I’m going to take this up to my party. I’m going to stand up for Canberra.” But the bottom line is that he is an irrelevant backbencher in a party machine that is happy to use Canberra as a political football, because it suits them in marginal electorates to stand up and talk about, “Canberra this, Canberra that. Canberra is fat cats. It’s this, it’s that.”
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