Page 3475 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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ACTU last week released a report in which they had people do work for them, and they sought to project the numbers out of what the flow-on effects might be as a result of the cuts of 12,000 public servants. Mr Smyth seemed to suggest that that was something Ms Hatfield Dodds had made up, and it was unfortunate that he did that.
He then went on to try and conflate that with the Australia Institute figures. The Australia Institute have done an interesting report this week in which they have sat down and tried to work out the impact of these 12,000 public service job cuts across a number of electorates, to come up with some sort of geographic impact. That was an Australia Institute report, and that was the one Ms Hunter quoted.
What comes out of all of this is that nobody actually knows what the numbers are, because we do not know how many jobs it is going to be and where they are going to be. We have got all sorts of things hanging around. For Mr Smyth to try and somehow smear various of my colleagues particularly who are simply reflecting on some of those numbers that are in the public discourse was unfortunate at best. The real question is: how many jobs is it in Canberra? We have this line being run that somehow it is not going to be so bad in the ACT. That is interesting because we cannot get a straight answer from anybody, particularly Senator Humphries, as to how many jobs it will be in Canberra.
When you start talking about numbers, one of the parts of the policy is that front-line staff will be exempted. When you sit down and start to think about that and analyse it, you think: “Well, hang on a second. That probably will result in a disproportionately negative impact on Canberra.” How did I draw that conclusion? I have not done any modelling, but basic common sense tells us that most front-line staff are outside the ACT. The front-line and uniform staff are the sort of people in the Customs Service and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, for example. They are the kind of public servants we are talking about here. They are the front-line public servants, and most of them are not in Canberra; they are out in the states. If they are exempted, that means there has to be a disproportionate impact on the ACT.
What is implicit there is that the policy staff, the staff who do the hard thinking on how to design programs, how to roll them out, how to make them happen and how to feed them out to the regions, are largely in the ACT. That is certainly what staff here in the ACT tend to predominantly do, as a broad generalisation. So the exemption of the front-line staff intuitively tells us that there will be a disproportionate impact on the ACT.
I think the numbers remain unclear. In the context of Ms Porter’s motion about what the impact will be on the ACT economy, that is of particular concern. It is an area where the ACT should be nervous, because the importance of a strong and stable commonwealth public service to the ACT is undoubted. I think all members have acknowledged that here today, and it is certainly something the Greens are very concerned about. We are aware of the potential impacts of significant cuts to the public service. I would like to dwell for a moment on a couple of those potential impacts that are of particular interest to me, aside from the broader ones.
The first is one I touched on briefly in the debate yesterday afternoon—that is, the impact on graduate recruitment. A public service job freeze will mean that there will
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