Page 5876 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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Putting aside the nonsense of Labor being the party of working people, I was under the impression that there are more than 12 million people in Australia who are working people and not all of them vote Labor by any means. Ms Porter says that Labor is the party that creates jobs. Let us consider that statement in a bit of detail. Just last week—on Tuesday, 29 November 2011, to be precise—the federal Treasurer brought down a mini budget.
This is not the time to go into details of this magical event of smoke and mirrors in an attempt to concoct a surplus in the federal budget for the year 2013, but the critical issue raised by this mini budget is the imposition of an additional efficiency dividend of 2.5 per cent which has been placed on larger federal government departments. This efficiency dividend is expected to save $1.5 million over three years.
What has been the response to the additional 2.5 per cent? Here is one headline from the Australian of the following day: “$1.5 billion cuts will slash 3,000 jobs”. This article is based on comments made by that well-known member of the Liberal Party—whoops, it is actually a report based on comments from the National Secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, Nadine Flood. I assume she was in Sydney last week for some conference and I assume some members of this place may have taken it up with her and said: “We’ll back you to the hilt on this. We won’t let them cut up to 3,000 jobs.”
The main public sector union is right on top of this increased efficiency dividend. It will be implemented by targeting people who are employed and, typically, it is done at the lower levels in the public service. Some might say that the claim of a cut of 3,000 jobs is extreme. Well, let us consider the other comment that is floating around. Again, this comment has been made by that well-known member of the Liberal Party—whoops, actually it is the Deputy Chief Minister in the ACT. He is predicting that the job losses will only be limited to 300 jobs. That is interesting—300 jobs at approximately $100,000 a job. That accounts for about $30 million of the $500 million.
At 6 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.
MR SMYTH: Of course, we had the predictions from Mr Barr that it would be limited to 300 jobs. I am not sure where Mr Barr gets that number from, but 300 jobs at $100,000 a job is about $30 million. That leaves about $470 million unaccounted for in cuts in a full year. I am not sure where they will come from, but the reality of modern budgets and public services around the country—ours is the same—is that about half your expenses are staff. If you assume that even half of these cuts go to that, you could say there are at least 2,500 jobs at risk.
The answer is that we do not know because the federal government do not know. If they do, they are not telling us. They have not got the courage to announce that. It made me think back to another budget where the federal Labor Party, after a period in office, had blown their budgets and had to cut public servants. Of course, that was the
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