Page 1772 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 May 2013
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public best. The editorial goes on to say that Canberra is the centre of federal public administration for good reason. Basing the bureaucracy in the national capital offers the efficiency of a workforce in close proximity with the decision makers that guide it.
This is the city where our diplomats do business with 96 diplomatic missions, where national security and intelligence agencies work in specialist facilities, where world-class scientific and sporting advances are made, where national cultural collections are preserved and archived, where payments are made to people in hardship and where political leaders are advised on decisions that affect all Australians. This work is nationally significant, and the people who do it should not be reduced to political fodder.
Mr Abbott’s claim that the public service has grown by 20,000 since 2007 is false, and his views that it can lose this number through natural attrition without any damage to the quality of the public service is mistaken. His agenda is ideological and is not based on evidence or policy needs. It is based on the belief that the private sector is better than the public and that the pursuit of profit motivates people more than the sense of public duty.
The agenda is also a political strategy to talk down the national capital and its people potentially for some light-hearted humour and some political point scoring around the country. I said yesterday when I was asked about his comments of wanting services to be delivered close to where people receive them that he almost implied that there are not people in Canberra who rely on the delivery of services by the Australian public service. His comments also demeaned the role public servants play in terms of treating their livelihoods and their future so flippantly off the cuff at a press conference.
The Prime Minister’s commitment to Canberra made on our 99th birthday on 12 March 2012 was an important statement. It came after a number of representations were made to me by members of the local business community about getting a commitment from the Prime Minister around the role she sees the national capital playing and its role in relation to being the natural home of the Australian federal public service.
Now, that does not for a moment mean that there will not be changes or fluctuations in staffing numbers, priorities or agencies that move outside of the Canberra, and we are not saying that that should not be the case and that it should not continue. What we are asking for is some advice on what the plans are to devolve outside of the ACT to other places departments or agencies that are currently here. If there are such plans , what are they, and let us be up-front with the ACT community about what that means.
Similarly, we are not asking for there never to be any change in employment levels in the commonwealth public service. It would just be crazy to do that. There will be changes, and there will be changes in policy priorities. We understand that if there is a change of government there will be changes in policy priorities for a federal Liberal government. But we are asking to know what those plans are. We do not think natural attrition can meet the efficiency targets that Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey have talked
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