Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service and Integrity) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canberra for her question. As a champion for the public service and a champion for this city, it is not surprising that the member for Canberra would have been alarmed to say the least when she saw the newspapers this morning. The policy announcement—or leak—from those opposite this morning, which has been roundly discredited and laughed at around the country since its original publication, actually contains some pretty appalling, very old ideas demonstrating yet again the intellectual desert that is opposition policy making.

In contrast, as we have heard, the government has a clear and substantial framework containing policies such as the Australia in the Asian century white paper announced by the Prime Minister in October. The opposition's simplistic thought bubble of arbitrarily relocating substantial parts of the Australian Public Service comes after its repeated statement it will axe 12,000 jobs from the Australian Public Service. That is bad policy followed up by stupid policy.

There are 168,850 federal public servants, with a great majority of them working and living in major and smaller centres outside of Canberra. All of these public service positions are under threat under the opposition's grand plan to transport components of federal departments and agencies north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Let us be clear: nearly 60 per cent of the nation's public servants live outside of Canberra, as they should, to deliver efficient and effective services to the Australian population.

There are 22,300 public servants based in Sydney alone and over 23,000 in Melbourne. There are nearly 12,000 in Brisbane, 9,400 in Adelaide, over 6,600 in Perth and over 3,300 in Hobart. There are public servants living and working in numerous regional centres from Bundaberg to Bunbury. The location of Australian public servants is about effective, efficient service delivery. In 2012, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development declared that the Australian Public Service was an exemplar of public service efficiency. The OECD said that Australia is an example for all other nations to follow, including the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, for efficient public services.

It is important to note that just this week we had a Liberal senator make the point that Canberra will need to have a champion should there be a Liberal government elected. A Liberal senator made that statement. That Liberal senator made that statement because of his concerns for the job losses of what we are told so far to be 12,000 public servants.

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