Page 3801 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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I am not suggesting for a moment that federal Labor governments have never adjusted the size of commonwealth agencies. Yes, from time to time some commonwealth agencies have got smaller under Labor governments. Other areas have got bigger according to the particular policy priorities of the time. But I do not think any federal Labor government has done anything that approaches the 1996 effort of the last federal Liberal government that came in saying similar things to what Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey are saying now.
We saw 9,000 Canberra public servants lose their jobs in 1996. That federal Liberal policy sent Canberra into a sharp economic downturn. Employment plummeted by 2.2 per cent in the 1996-97 financial year. It impacted significantly on house prices in the territory. A lot of equity was lost for Canberra homeowners.
The population declined as people had to move out of the territory to find work. I was relatively young in 1996. I think it was just my first year out of university, Mr Speaker. So I remember that time particularly well. It was very difficult for an entire cohort of students who were graduating out of the territory’s higher education institutions to find employment in that year. The impact that it had on the commonwealth public service and the long-term opportunities for commonwealth public servants were significant.
I do not think anyone wants to see that exercise repeated. As Ms Hunter indicated, the impacts of those changes have been longstanding on the makeup of the commonwealth public service and on the impact on the ACT economy, particularly our capacity to diversify economic activity. The one amusing element in all of this is that it lent weight to a particular argument from Mr Smyth about the proportion of employment between the public and private sectors in the territory.
At the time I think he was very busy crowing about how this did wonders for the proportion of private sector employment. There are two ways to improve and to increase the level of private sector employment in the ACT. The first way, and the sensible way, is to grow the number of jobs in the private sector. Therefore, if the growth in private jobs is faster than the growth in public sector jobs, the proportion of people employed in the private sector will continue to rise.
An alternative way to do it, of course, is just to decimate the public sector. Then if you have so many fewer public sector jobs, the proportion of public sector employment in the economy will, of course, shrink. That is what the federal Liberal government achieved in 1996, egged on certainly by their local colleagues who were in government at the time. Certainly, the impacts of those decisions in that financial year did dramatically alter the balance of employment between the public and private sectors. But it was done to the detriment of total employment in the territory and done with a particular ideological agenda that we are again seeing from the federal Liberal Party.
All of Mr Seselja’s efforts so far would appear to have come to nothing. I think perhaps this reflects his capacity to influence federal Liberal Party policy.
Mr Smyth: So you will stop cuts to cultural institutions?
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