Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I note that the member for Brisbane does not have media favourites so that is why she did not go down the path of naming all the publications, but it was widely published today. The fact is that Labor hid 14,500 job losses in the public sector before the election. How unbelievably embarrassing. Whoops, how did that happen? Fourteen and a half thousand people just lost their jobs under Labor in the public sector and they forgot to tell us about it.

But if you believed the Shadow Treasurer this morning, he said at his press conference, 'It is all in there in all our economic statements released just before the last election.' I went thumbing through it again and I read it again and again. I even put a little orange tab here. It says nothing about 14,500 jobs in the public service. But it gets better. The Leader of the Opposition, as Minister for Workplace Relations in the previous government, on 16 August 2013 went to the union movement, the Commonwealth Public Sector Union, and said 'we believe that the necessary savings should not impact unduly on the overall number of public service jobs'. Hang on, so there you have the Leader of the Opposition saying 'do not worry, we are going to have efficiency dividends but nobody is going to lose their job'. And then after the election we discover that 14,500 jobs are going in the public sector. But it was not just his spoken but was his written word as well to Nadine Flood, the national secretary of the CPSU. He said it is possible that public sector savings and the efficiency dividend outcome may be achieved through a range of measures including targeted non-staff savings at the agency and sector-wide levels and the possibility of mergers or a reduction in the public service. There was nothing about 14,500 jobs going under Labor as a result of their efficiency dividend.

Senator Wong said, in estimates today, how did that happen? We asked for an efficiency dividend out of the public sector and oh my goodness aren't we surprised that there are job losses? The problem is: every cupboard we open on the budget there are more spiders put there by Labor. We went to the last election saying there would be 12,000 redundancies through natural attrition and every day we had to suffer the member the Griffith standing in this place talking about the job losses in Queensland and all the hypocrites on the Labor side talking about job losses under Campbell Newman.

Opposition members interjecting—

It is true; you are hypocrites.

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