Page 2265 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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to improve opportunities in education for our children right across the nation, to move on with the Gonski report recommendations to ensure we have a fairer system of funding for education in this country.
So I have included that, because it has been the Greens at the federal level who have been saying that we cannot have these cuts. There are so many other ways we can trim back on the budget to ensure that these cuts do not go ahead. That is why I thought it was important to recognise that.
Mr Seselja in his original motion said in paragraph 4:
… demands of federal politicians of all parties that they recognise and respect the contribution made by commonwealth public servants, rather than denigrating them …
What I would say there is that the federal Greens have been acknowledging and respecting the role of federal public servants. As I said, Christine Milne not only today but for the time that she has been in parliament—as have all Greens—has been talking about the importance of the public service, has not said that we should be cutting federal public service jobs and has been also putting forward the alternatives for funding streams to get the budget back into surplus or to identify sources of funding for new initiatives or new programs.
For instance, denticare is such an important one. We must get denticare up and going. When we talk about the importance of oral health to our overall health, it should be seen as an extension of Medicare. It should not be having to be up to people to be able to afford dental care and to be able to look after their health. We should be looking at how we can extend and put in place the denticare system.
That is why we were so pleased to see in this budget a considerable amount of money, something like $540 million or more, put into the public dental health program. This is a good step forward. We need to clear that backlog, but we do need to move on denticare. Our federal Greens counterparts have been respecting the federal public service. I commend my amendments. (Time expired.)
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.47): In closing, I have to respond to some of what Ms Hunter had to say. It causes me to reflect on the lack of genuineness that the Greens bring to the table on this. I would just make a couple of points.
Ms Hunter failed to comment on the 12,000 job cuts that federal Labor is now imposing as a result of last night’s budget. She just refused to use the number. She was very happy to bandy numbers around about the coalition. What is clear now is that we have a federal coalition policy, their stated policy, to reduce the commonwealth public service across Australia by 12,000 through natural attrition over a period of two or three years. We now have a federal Labor position which is to reduce the size of the commonwealth public service by 12,000 jobs over the next three years, partly through natural attrition and partly through redundancies. So we have two very similar policies.
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