Page 2128 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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Liberal colleagues about that. Couple this with the fact that in some agencies workers on contracts outnumber those in permanent employment, and there is little question of this conservative commonwealth government’s agenda to undermine, privatise and outsource Australian workers, even their own workforce.
Madam Assistant Speaker Cody, this is a very important motion. Thank you very much for bringing it forward. It highlights the difference between the public sectors of the two governments in the ACT: the Liberal-National commonwealth government, which limits wages growth, limits workers’ voices, undermines the work of a professional public service and, on the eve of the federal election, announced a further $1.5 billion cut to the public service; and the ACT Labor government, which respects its workers with fair pay and conditions, prioritises secure work and sets the highest standards for employment in the ACT by working collaboratively with workers and their representatives. I would like to acknowledge the public sector unions, who work tirelessly to represent their members in all government sectors. Their work is critical in supporting their members across both the territory and commonwealth governments.
I thank Ms Cody again for bringing this matter to the Assembly. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MS ORR (Yerrabi) (3.17): I rise in support of Ms Cody’s motion and thank her for acting to protect Canberrans from the coalition federal government. The Australian public service is the backbone of our city and our nation. We all rely on the public service, whether it is in the delivery of key services such as Centrelink or Medicare or the development and implementation of policies that create a stronger and healthier Australia.
As a former public servant, I know just how brutal coalition governments are when it comes to cutting jobs. In 2013, the policy unit I was working in was disbanded overnight by the Abbott government. This left me in a situation where I did not know what was to come next. I had gone from working in a good, secure job where I was contributing to improving infrastructure for cities across Australia. I valued this job, but unfortunately the coalition government at the time did not. While I was able to find another position within the department, because of the conditions put in place by the federal coalition government, I was not able to be permanently put into that position. In the course of 18 months, I had to apply three times before staffing caps were lifted and my supervisors could confirm our working conditions.
At the time this was going on, the coalition government had put in place one of the toughest bargaining policies ever seen in the public service, which stripped many conditions from the rights in our EA, things that really should have been a no-brainer. The one that I still feel quite strongly about, even to this day, is changing the wording for mothers returning from work from saying that their position would be held for them to saying that it may be held for them. Women should have the right to come back to the job they left. It should not be a condition of them having a baby that they give up their position of work.
I was not the first person in my family affected by coalition governments and the impacts they have through slashing the public service. In the 1990s my dad was
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