Page 2970 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 2013
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The staffing purge, Madam Deputy Speaker. That is what is happening. That is what is happening right now as a result of Labor and the Greens, and that is what is happening right now in our public service. When these people get up on their high horse, complain and run the fear and smear campaigns that they do, just remember the staffing purge that is happening right now after six years of chaos under Rudd and Gillard and Rudd again—who knows who is next—ably abetted by their mates the Greens. It is hypocritical.
What did Mr Barr say on 30 November 2011? He said that the job losses would be limited. He said:
… it’s not as dramatic an impact … as you might have feared …
No, nothing to see here! He said:
… there’s a sense that it could be around 300 within the total public sector.
He has got his figures wrong by an order of magnitude, because we are now looking at at least 10,000. Mr Barr was saying, “No; just 300.”
You can go through the Hansard and see what people like Gai Brodtmann said. We know what Andrew Leigh said on the ABC. He said that the impact will be limited. Be limited? He said:
This is a modest change.
A modest change? He said:
The efficiency dividend has been in place for a long time and I’m confident that it shouldn’t lead to job losses.
That is what we were being told—no job losses here. The reality is that we are seeing a staffing purge under Labor and the Greens. Meanwhile they are telling us that there is nothing to see here.
Gai Brodtmann was out there saying that there were not going to be any job cuts, that they are bad for the economy. She said:
Unlike the Liberals, we believe that a strong public service is essential to support the community …
That is simply not true. Show me where any Liberal has said that we do not support a strong public service. Show me that. Anybody? No. This is exactly right; what we are seeing is hypocrisy.
The federal coalition has been honest about what it is going to do. What it is going to do is have a hiring freeze over the forward estimates. It has said that we are not going to employ people as essentially a position becomes vacant—voluntary redundancy. We do not like that; we do not want to see that. But as Andrew Barr said, whoever
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