Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to reflect on a couple of remarks made by the people on the government side, first of all the suggestion that this government has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in Townsville. Are they going to start asking primary school and high school children to work? There are just under 200,000 people that live in Townsville so I encourage members when they get excited in this place just to be careful of the language they are using. They might cause a bit of a mad stampede to Townsville if this government has been so successful in creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. It's just not true.

I also want to pick up on something that the previous speaker said about how we need to make sure that our public sector jobs are where they are needed. There is no greater case than northern Queensland for us to have a strong Public Service. Melbourne is closer to Brisbane than Townsville. Townsville is a long distance from Brisbane, and what we are seeing happen under this government is a consolidation of our Public Service and the frontline services in our metro cities. So it is really rich of this government, which claims to represent the regions, which claims to be the voice of the regions, both the Liberals and National parties, to say to the people in Townsville, the people in Cairns, the people of Mackay, 'You know what? Your shopfront, your ability to talk to the Public Service, is in Brisbane.' You might as well say it is in Melbourne. In my part of the world, we too have suffered under job cuts, since his government got elected, in the Public Service.

The other point I would like to make is what this government has engaged in is not job creation in the regions but job transfer. It shut down the Bendigo ATO office, which serviced north and central Victoria. We are now basically down to about three shopfronts where people can go to get face-to-face support in Victoria. There is a Geelong office that is in the member for Corio's electorate, there is Dandenong and there is Melbourne CBD. So everybody in the north, if they wish to have a face-to-face meeting about tax—and our tax is complicated—whether they be individuals or whether they be small businesses, have to go to Melbourne CBD. It is simply unacceptable. That is what this government has done.

This government has also shut down the Australian Emergency Management Institute on Mount Macedon. The government will say it was for operational reasons. No it wasn't; it was a land grab. It was the former Attorney General's Department and the razor gang in the 2014 budget that looked at the property prices of Mount Macedon and said, 'Beautiful, we can make a profit,' without engaging with the local community, without even talking to the local real estate agents, who are members of their own political party, who would have told them that the bushfire overlay would make it impossible to build on this land. So they shut down the Australian Emergency Management Institute, a world-class facility training people to have expertise on how to deal with emergencies whether it be floods or whether it be bushfire risk. They transferred it to an online virtual institute run from Canberra. We are lucky that the state government bought the facility off the government and has in the last few weeks reopened it as the Victorian Emergency Management Institute so at least the Victorian firefighters and at least the Victorian people involved in emergency management will still have access to that facility and the training they require.

What has happened to Centrelink? It is another disgrace of this government. Rather than directly employing people, rather than engaging their casuals and getting them on full-time jobs and onto a pathway to a career, what this government has done is keep them on contracts. What this government has done is keep them as casuals. I have a smart centre in my electorate, just like the member for Herbert does in Cairns. They are based in regional areas. That happened under a former, Labor government. But what this government has done, rather than continue to give the casuals the training they require so they can become full time and can help people when they call and as they need it, is outsource it. This government's waste on consultants and waste on contractors is an example of how it just doesn't understand how to deliver a quality Public Service that Australians can depend upon.

Whether it be Townsville, Bendigo or Ballarat, the government have dropped the ball. They talk about what they're doing in Geelong in relation to the NDIA—which, again, was started by the former, Labor government, which made Barwon Heads in Victoria the home of the NDIS and NDIA. That is not the case with the current government. They've just slowed the rollout of the NDIS. The government have let the regions down when it comes to public sector jobs, and that money being lost from our communities hurts. It hurts our regional economies and it hurts our regional communities.

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