Page 852 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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Ms Cheyne has outlined two individual agencies which have been relocated, unsuccessfully in large part. But it is broadly destructive to the good work of the Australian public service and has a clear negative economic impact on the Australian Capital Territory.
Decentralisation was a Turnbull government buzzword; the Morrison government refers to our city as a bubble and says that we all exist within the Canberra bubble, as if this city and everyone in it are somehow leading a life divorced from real Australia. Both categorisations do a significant disservice to every single Canberran and they show a federal government that is willing to cause harm to the national capital for ideological reasons or for very marginal electorate benefit.
Ms Cheyne has outlined in her motion the facts as they relate to the commonwealth government’s actions since 2013, through the loss of 6,700 federal public service jobs in the ACT and the ironic loss of nearly 750 jobs in regional Australia, while there has been a growth in public sector jobs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. That is the truth of the policy. Ironic as it is, we have not seen a transition of jobs out of Canberra into regional areas; we have seen a transition of jobs out of Canberra into inner Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. That is farcical in light of the stated policy intent but also in light of the debate we have been having in this nation in recent times in relation to population and infrastructure pressures in certain cities—principally Sydney, Melbourne and south-east Queensland, of which Brisbane is obviously the major city.
The commonwealth has been a net contributor to those challenges in those areas and has now, in the last 24 to 48 hours, made a range of policy announcements, particularly as the hours tick away towards the New South Wales election, relating to population pressures in Sydney. Over the last four years, nearly one-third of the public sector jobs that have been taken out of Canberra have moved into inner Sydney. That tells you something about the misguided priorities of this federal government.
Fortunately, we are a matter of weeks away from a federal election, when it is widely expected that this federal government will be voted out of office. The risk, though, is that between now and then there will be further destabilising announcements in relation to Australian public service agencies. Ms Cheyne has highlighted some of the most egregious examples, not least of which was Barnaby Joyce’s decision, that could best be described as selfish and is probably bordering on morally corrupt, to move the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority from Canberra to his own electorate in Armidale.
We are hearing of proposed moves for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and we have had the ridiculous decision in relation to the Australian Space Agency. So we are seeing a pattern of behaviour from this government, and I suspect that, as it gets closer to the inevitable end of this parliamentary term, we will see even more desperate and extraordinary decisions that will have an impact on the ACT.
To put that in perspective, our territory’s gross state product is estimated to be cut by $110 million a year for every 1,000 Australian public service jobs that are cut from
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