Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It undermines our democracy, as the member for Moreton has said, and it also creates this false dichotomy that there are public servants in Canberra and then there are people in business and there are farmers and there are people who are doing the important stuff. The fact is that, without those public servants, all these other critical parts of our economy cannot function. It's not only that I've grown up in Canberra, that my father was a career public servant and one of the most professional and hardworking people—I am so pleased to have his example—and that I represent so many but that I understand the way that democracy and our economy work and how critically important it is to have a public service that lays the foundations for that. Our public servants are the people who deliver the services we need every day.

After a decade of neglect, we had around a third of public servants who were actually contractors. After a decade of outsourcing and underinvestment, we are investing back into the APS to ensure that it has the people it needs to meet the expectations of Australians. We know that the former government artificially suppressed the size of the Public Service with an artificially low and misleading headcount augmented by a shadow workforce of tens of thousands of more expensive consultants and contractors.

And they let the veterans down, as the member for Solomon has said. There is also addressing waiting lists, the backlogs of visas and people making Centrelink claims. That's what our government's about: getting things back on track. (Time expired)

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