Page 3675 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007

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I am really concerned. I have seen the Hawke and Keating governments and, yes, the early days of the Howard government make significant cuts to the ACT Public Service. We have heard some very, very ominous statements coming from federal Labor in relation to the public service. I have named a few areas where cuts have, in fact, been flagged. Our public service in the ACT now stands at about 52,000 people. Our public service nationally is 146,000. That is up from what it was when the federal government took over.

As a result of changes to government, we have seen significant benefits pour into the ACT in terms of new buildings and new areas of public service departments. Over the last few years we have seen significant increases in investment in the ACT. Even the Chief Minister welcomed the $70 million investment in relation to Constitution Avenue. Even he, at the federal budget breakfast, praised what the federal Liberal government was doing in the ACT.

It seems that Mr Rudd has to make his cuts somewhere. There are some significant promises in what he has promised nationally. He has highlighted cuts to the public service, and guess where they will come from—the 52,000 federal public servants in the ACT, the one in six of the Canberra population working in the federal public service. You do not have to be Einstein to work out where those cuts will come from. If those cuts are savage, if 5,000 jobs, for example, go in the ACT, if 5,000 public servants lose their jobs, it will cause huge problems for our economy.

MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the Environment, Water and Climate Change, Minister for the Arts) (5.39): I am very pleased to be able to debate this motion today, a couple of days out from a federal election, when I think it is relevant that we discuss what is in store if a Howard government is re-elected as opposed to the enlightened, progressive policies of a Rudd Labor government federally.

But it is ironic, is it not, to have at this juncture, 11 years after the election of the Howard government, the Liberals in this place again raising the claim that every bit of economic joy that the ACT has experienced since the Labor Party came to government in the ACT is directly a result of the intervention and the actions of John Howard and a federal Liberal government? It is ironic how we skirt over the implications for the territory of the election of the Howard government in 1996 and how the devastation, the pushing of the ACT virtually into recession as a result of the election of John Howard and the Liberal government, is actually not considered or credited to John Howard and the Liberal Party.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say that all of the economic joy, the good management, the strongest budget surplus ever delivered by a government in the ACT, the fact that we now have sustainable surpluses over the terms and we have a budget position that has a bottom line that is sounder, stronger, more secure and sustainable for the first time genuinely since 1989 is all a result of the management of John Howard, without then having to concede that John Howard was responsible for producing a mini recession within the ACT in those years of the Liberal government. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.


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