Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Canberra is a nice place; I do not mind it at all—not at the moment, maybe; it is quite chilly. But maybe I am just a bit sensitive to that, being from the Top End. There are nice days here, when the sun comes out and the fog burns off, and I must say that the ACT is definitely my second favourite mainland territory! No guesses as to which is my favourite: the great Northern Territory. But, while people in Canberra crack out the beanies and scarves, up in the Top End people are cruising around in double-pluggers and board shorts, enjoying the dry season.

This weekend, whilst people down here in Canberra will have their beanies on and their crocheted scarves and so forth, I hope to be heading out to the MUF Festival in Darwin, which is the Mandorah Ukulele and Folk Festival at Wagait Beach. You have to catch the ferry out across Darwin Harbour to Wagait Beach. I am very much looking forward to it.

I truly do say this with all due respect to my colleagues the member for Fenner and the member for Canberra: I do not know how people can compare the 'Berra, here, with our Top End barra. They are very different places.

Despite this, there has been a shift of jobs, away from our Northern Territory. When I was speaking with the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory the other night, he was going through the different federal agencies where there has been a movement of federal public servants away from Darwin, including the ATO and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. We have also heard complaints that when you lose public servants out of the Territory then, unfortunately, there is also a loss of service, and our constituents have brought a lot of those occasions to our attention.

This loss of jobs and loss of services for Territorians is very unfair. The ACT has about 37 per cent of the total federal public servant jobs in Australia. In contrast, the Northern Territory has a paltry 1.4 per cent of the total Australian Public Service jobs.

At the moment, the Territory is experiencing a loss of jobs. The latest figures for population growth show that it is at about 0.3 per cent in the Territory, in contrast to the ACT, where it was at about 1.5, and Victoria, at about 2.1. So there is a slower rate of population growth in the Northern Territory, and this is partially due to the shift of government jobs away from the Territory.

The Deputy Prime Minister likes to make a lot of noise about decentralisation and how we need to be getting jobs out of Canberra to regional areas. I just want to know: where is the Territory in this decentralisation plan? What are Darwin and Palmerston getting out of this move to decentralise? I can tell you: all that we have seen are cuts to federal public servants in the Territory.

We have heard a lot about 'jobs and growth', 'jobs and growth', but all that we have seen are these moves like the ones in the budget as to the AEC jobs: to get rid of them altogether or to move some to the eastern seaboard. This lack of vision for the development of the Northern Territory is unfortunately inhibiting growth in tourism, inhibiting the growth of our businesses, and we still have seen not one dollar out the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. The single mention that Darwin had in the budget was the axing of those jobs from the Australian Electoral Commission and its Indigenous Electoral Participation program. This, for the Territory that has the lowest enrolment in the country, leaves us Territorians scratching our heads, and we would very much appreciate any new jobs of a federal department into the Territory.