Page 1760 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 May 2013
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engage with business and stakeholders.” When Julia Gillard says that locating an agency outside Canberra helps its ability to engage with stakeholders and serve the community, apparently that is a good thing, according to Dr Bourke. But when Tony Abbott says that it is important that service delivery agencies be located amongst the people they are seeking to help, that is somehow scandalous. That again demonstrates the kind of hypocrisy we are dealing with.
The Labor Party are the party of recession. They are the party of high unemployment.
Mr Barr: You are borrowing my line there.
MR SESELJA: The statistics bear it out.
Mr Barr: Trying to turn it around, are you?
MR SESELJA: Mr Barr, as Treasurer, could not even refer to any of the numbers. He could not refer to any of the numbers. Mr Barr is around my age. He might remember when youth unemployment in the early 90s in the ACT was over 30 per cent. He may remember when it was over 30 per cent under Hawke and Keating. He may remember that, because many Canberrans do. They remember how many jobs were lost under the last Labor government when they lost control of the finances. He may actually refer to the statistics. He did not want to refer to the statistics. But when we look at the actual numbers in terms of average employment during the Howard years in the ACT versus average employment during the Hawke-Keating years, we know that the average unemployment rate was higher.
In fact, when the Howard government left office, we know that our unemployment rate was at record low levels here in the ACT. People enjoyed real wage growth. They saw jobs growth. They saw their real net worth grow. That was the experience of Canberrans. The Labor Party’s hypocrisy is evident today. They criticise the Liberal Party at a time when they are sacking Canberrans. Everyone in Canberra who knows a commonwealth public servant—and that is all of us—knows about the chaos in our commonwealth government departments right now as they desperately scramble for savings. We know what is going on.
People would look in the various agencies. They would look at the Public Service Commission figures, the 716 jobs lost in the Department of Defence, 408 jobs in the Department of Human Services, 244 jobs in the Australian Taxation Office. These are just some examples of the thousands of jobs lost. What we are being asked to do today, given this record, is to believe Julia Gillard and to believe the Labor Party when they say they are committed to Canberra. How can we believe the Labor Party on anything? Does anyone in our community believe that when Julia Gillard and the Labor Party say they are going to do something, that they will do something if they are elected?
How many broken promises have we seen just in recent days? We have seen some months ago the broken surplus promise that they repeated time and time again. I well recall Julia Gillard saying that she would deliver it. It did not matter if economic circumstances changed. She would deliver it. We have seen just this week their
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