Page 3482 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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many other fields of endeavour have flourished by servicing and supporting the Australian government across a broad sweep of activities.
We are able to draw on a large pool of skilled and experienced people in maintaining the long-term health and vitality of the ACT’s own bureaucracy. It is common practice for the territory to benefit from crosspollination of fresh ideas and approaches that come from supplementing our considerable home-grown talent with new recruits that work either directly or indirectly for the commonwealth.
I am sure that there are many specific examples that we could point to about the way the ACT and the Australian governments work together. The Australian Federal Police, for example, is a federal institution that provides a range of security-related services both to the ACT community and to the nation. Conversely, the fire and ambulance services are provided by high-quality people in the ACT, both to territory and federal institutions.
So we see that the territory community benefits from these arrangements in two ways. Our community is protected by the most sophisticated and professional police force in the country and the added operational scale provided by the ACT emergency services allows us to effectively spread our costs over a larger population.
We do need a strong commonwealth public service in the ACT and we do need to protect ourselves against Mr Abbott’s job cuts.
Motion agreed to.
Australian Greens—policies
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.48): I move:
That this Assembly:
(1) notes:
(a) the cost of living pressures on Canberra families, particularly in the areas of housing, education, health care, childcare and utilities;
(b) the policies of the Australian Greens Party which will put upwards pressure on the cost of living, including electricity costs, non-government school fees, student levies and childcare fees;
(c) the policy of the Australian Greens Party which would remove funding for the private health insurance rebate;
(d) the immediate and significant pressure that removing this funding would place on the public health system in the ACT;
(e) the policy of the Australian Greens Party which would gut funding to non-government schools;
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