Page 5884 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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The Greens will fall in behind Labor, as they did in the last election. They will ignore the job cuts. They will ignore the fact that Labor go to every election and say one thing and do the exact opposite. How many times are they going to lie to the electorate and be taken seriously? This is why they are a morally bankrupt party; this is why they cannot be taken seriously.
What we have today from Andrew Barr—and no doubt we will have it from the Chief Minister—is an endorsement of that. Andrew Barr went out there and told some of his own porkies, didn’t he? Nadine Flood from the CPSU, affiliated with the Labor Party, went out and said, “It will be 3,000 jobs.” What does Andrew Barr come back with? “No; it is only going to be 300.” What a load of rubbish. How dishonest. Instead of actually saying, “I am concerned about this and I am going to stand up,” he says, “Well, it is not really 3,000; it is 300.” That is not true. That is a lie. Any reasonable person looking at these cuts knows that that is simply not true, that the Treasurer was not telling the truth. And why was he not telling the truth? He was not telling the truth to ingratiate himself to his federal Labor colleagues.
Now we have the position where a motion in virtually the same terms was supported by the Labor Party in this place previously. When it was about hypothetical Liberal cuts, they were prepared to support it. But when it is about actual job losses that are going to take place now and in the coming months here in Canberra under this federal Labor government, they cannot bring themselves to do it. They are going to look the people of Canberra in the eye and say: “Liberal cuts bad; Labor cuts good. We will support the Labor Party here and the ACT will support the cuts if they are done by a federal Labor government.”
That is disgraceful from representatives in the ACT. There is a lot of Canberra bashing that goes on nationally. There is a lot of Canberra bashing. Unfortunately, both major parties—all parties—engage in it from time to time. I remember the comments from Kevin Rudd that he was going to take a meataxe to the public service. Andrew Barr, Katy Gallagher and Jon Stanhope cheered him on. They did not take him on. They did not take—
Ms Gallagher: No, we did not. We did not.
MR SESELJA: We did. We heard Andrew Barr on the radio at the time. The Chief Minister does not like it, but Andrew Barr was there. He was even defending the cuts to the NCA when they cut it by 40 per cent. Now he is pretending to stand up for the NCA. He was right behind it. Kate Lundy was leading the charge and Andrew Barr was the local cheerleader.
Chief Minister, tonight you have got a chance to actually stand up and say, “We don’t care who is doing it; we will stand up for the people of Canberra.” It is not about who is implementing these cuts; it is about working people in Canberra facing all of the uncertainty that goes with these cutbacks. And we know that there are likely to be more to come.
I talked about the moral bankruptcy of Labor. Let us just look at what they had to say when there was a 1.25 per cent efficiency dividend. This is what Kate Lundy and
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