Page 2264 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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One of them picks up on part of Mr Seselja’s original motion, and that is calling on the commonwealth government to protect commonwealth public servants in Canberra from bearing a disproportionate burden of its efforts to save money. This is an important one in the original motion. We have taken a disproportionate hit with these cuts. We have taken quite a slug. That is very concerning. We now do need to have a look at how we can try and absorb some of those people who will lose jobs. Some people may be retiring, but there will be others where we need to look at whether we can absorb them into the ACT public service or whether we look at how we could assist for them to be absorbed into private sector jobs.
There are a number of jobs in the private sector in the ACT at the moment that have not been filled. We know we have had skills shortages. Wherever we can match up someone who has lost their job in the federal public service that has the right skills set who could work for one of our private sector companies, I think we should do whatever we can to facilitate that. It is important that we acknowledge and that we call on the commonwealth government to acknowledge that they have hit us very hard. It has been a disproportionate response to what has happened across the rest of Australia.
I have also included the Chief Minister’s amendment to Mr Seselja’s motion that acknowledges that she has written to the prime minister seeking an urgent meeting to talk about the impact of the cuts. I think that is important to put in there, because it also puts on the record that that has been done. We can also ask the Chief Minister to come back and tell us how she put the case, because we need some really good leadership there. We need the case put very strongly to the Prime Minister that this is a disproportionate burden, that they really need to sit back, they need to reconsider the job cuts that are going to come in the ACT and understand clearly the impact on the ACT economy.
My amendment also includes that the leader of the federal Greens has proposed a series of alternatives that will prevent the need for public service job cuts. Greens leader Christine Milne has repeatedly reiterated this morning the value of the public service and the costs to the community of slashing public service jobs.
In fact, the Greens are the only party that has a comprehensive plan to avoid the need for public service cuts and to deliver a budget surplus in a much more sustainable way. In response to the federal budget, Christine Milne said:
We believe we should be working towards balancing the budget by cutting wasteful handouts to fossil fuel corporations who are making multi-billion profits rather than sacking public servants working for the good of the country, or cutting support for families struggling to get by, or cutting back on much-needed funding for research and development.
The Greens have been very clear for a long time now about our alternative priorities and have clearly laid out exactly how to do that. The Greens did want the full amount of the super profits tax on mining to be applied. Unfortunately, along the way that got watered down. If we had that now, that could have been another way that we could have avoided these cuts. We also could have seen $5 billion or more go into education
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