Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Coalition governments have got form when it comes to cuts to Public Service jobs. In 1996, we saw 30,000 Public Service jobs cut throughout Australia and 15,000 of them were cut here in Canberra. What did that mean for Canberra? What that meant was that Canberra went into recession. We had people leave town, business bankruptcies went up, non-business bankruptcies went up, local shops closed down, house prices plummeted, our population fell and thousands and thousands of Canberrans lost their jobs.

Fast-forward to the election of the Abbott government and what did we see? Since the Abbott government has been elected, 8½ thousand jobs have been lost in Canberra—6,000 jobs lost in just one year. Coalition governments have got complete disdain and contempt for the Public Service—the servants of democracy—the people who serve this government. They have complete contempt. They have shown it in the past in 1996. We are seeing it again now with the Abbott government—as I said, 8½ thousand lost here in Canberra; 6,000 jobs lost in one year alone.

We saw in the budget that the government had also slated getting rid of 1,150 Public Service jobs. That was on top of the 2,400 that had already been axed from the defence department, despite the fact that the First Principles Review said, 'We recommend that the focus on Public Service reductions as the primary efficiency mechanism for Defence cease.' It also comes on top of comments from the Secretary of Defence, Dennis Richardson, who said at an ASPI dinner in November 2013:

There is a bit of a tendency for some to see Defence civilians as constituting something called a ‘back-end’ supporting the ADF ‘front-end’ … We have an integrated work force where many civilians report to uniformed personnel and many of the latter report to the former.

Also, in 1996, the then Prime Minister said that the coalition government was going to get rid of 2½ thousand public service jobs through natural attrition. As I said, that ended up being 15,000 here in Canberra and 30,000 across the nation.

Given the fact that the government have already axed 8½ thousand jobs here in Canberra, with 6000 in one year, and have slated in the budget 1150 public service jobs, and have already gotten rid of 2400 jobs and, given the importance of the civilian workforce to the ADF's capability, what are the government's plans for the future of the civilian workforce in Defence? I am particularly interested in knowing what further plans it has for job cuts in the public service in Defence.

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