Cathy O'Toole (Herbert, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I am proud to stand in this place and take up the fight against the Turnbull government's severe job cuts to Public Service jobs in Townsville, and I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that ongoing cuts to public sector jobs in regional cities like Townsville have had a detrimental impact on the local economy and include:

(a) the relocation of Royal Australian Air Force's 38 Squadron King Air fleet from Townsville to East Sale in Victoria resulting in the loss of more than 40 aviation jobs in Townsville;

(b) the Government's change of process in second division resulting in the loss of up to 10 Townsville Australian Public Service defence support staff;

(c) Townsville having 50 fewer defence staff in June 2017 than it had in December 2012;

(d) 19 jobs having been cut from CSIRO in Townsville over the last few years;

(e) regional Queensland Customs staffing being cut by 50 per cent with 30 job losses from Gladstone to Thursday Island with Townsville being one of the hardest hit; and

  (f) the consolidation of the Australian Taxation Office in 2014 resulting in the loss of 110 jobs in Townsville;

(2) acknowledges that maintaining public sector jobs is important in regional Australia and notes that job cuts are harmful to regional cities like Townsville; and

(3) calls on the Government to ensure the coming federal budget puts a moratorium on these regional jobs cuts in public sector agencies.

I am here to say loudly and clearly: enough is enough. I will fight against these job cuts, and I will fight for the workers of Townsville. I will stand up for both white- and blue-collar jobs because, without a shadow of a doubt, Townsville needs and deserves both. I have had enough of the Turnbull government's job cuts, and I want real action that delivers jobs for everyone, not just a few.

I am on the ground talking and meeting with regional Queenslanders, unlike this completely out-of-touch Turnbull government, and I can assure you that the impact of the job cuts delivered by the Abbott-Turnbull government has been nothing short of devastating to my community. These cuts directly affect jobs in the heart of Townsville's CBD, and the flow-on effect from these cuts has been widely felt in the broader community. It has been felt in businesses that have thrived in the Townsville CBD, like Batik Bazaar, a small business that has traded for more than 34 years, which has just closed its doors. This is a business that thrived under prime ministers like Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard and is now being forced to shut its doors under the Turnbull government. This is a clear indication of the effects that the Turnbull government is having on the ground on small businesses in my community. They are closing their doors, and jobs are being lost.

As reported in the Townsville Bulletin, business confidence in Townsville continues to nosedive. A strong presence of government departments and government jobs brings confidence to our region and particularly to our city. When we have a strong government presence in terms of public sector jobs, the take-home message on the ground is that the government believes in our community and that we are a safe place for investment, and that does create jobs and grows small-business opportunities. However, this has not been the case under the Turnbull government, because this government doesn't care about public sector jobs. They are being cut, time and time again, and the people of Townsville are tired of it.

The Turnbull government took a 'jobs and growth' slogan to the last election. Well, let me tell you, the people of Townsville have seen that for what it actually is: a political slogan and nothing more. Under the Turnbull government, the only growth that we have seen is in our unemployment and underemployment figures. Under the Abbott-Turnbull governments, unemployment has doubled in our community. While industries have gone, jobs have also gone. This is the coalition's track record in Townsville.

But I must say that the government needs to be aware that the people of Townsville have very long memories, and they will voice their memories when it comes time to vote at the next election, because we deserve better, and our young people deserve opportunities for jobs, particularly in the public sector. So I call on the Turnbull government to immediately reinstate the hundreds of jobs that have been cut from the Townsville public sector. The public sector has been the backbone of our community for decades and decades, and it is absolutely essential that the government pays attention to this fact and stops the vicious cuts to our public sector. We have been flat out recovering from the Newman era, and we've walked straight into the same opportunities and job cuts that the Abbott-Turnbull governments have delivered us.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her contribution. Is the motion seconded?

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member and give the call to the honourable member for Parramatta.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Herbert for raising this in the parliament today because it gives me an opportunity to speak about what's happening in my community of Parramatta. We are the geographical heart of Sydney. We are the centre of the workforce; we're the centre, geographically—the middle, literally—of Sydney itself.

We think of ourselves as a community that has a large public sector. We have the Jessie Street Centre there; the tax office is there; Medicare is there. We have quite a strong public sector presence—at least, we did, because, in the last year, between 2016 and 2017, the number of Public Service jobs in Parramatta halved. The number actually dropped from 3,078 in 2016 to 1,567 in 2017. That is nearly 1,500 jobs gone in a year. They are solid, full-time, safe, secure jobs. Those jobs are the ballast; full-time, secure employment in the community acts like a ballast. They are less responsive to upturns and downturns in the economy. Those workers are still going to get their hair cut. So other business actually survive on the stable employment base that you get from your public sector—and from other full-time jobs, but particularly from the public sector. So it has been an extraordinary blow to Parramatta. But it is really just the tip of the iceberg.

When you look at what has happened in the six years of this government, you can see that the Public Service has essentially been gutted. In the years from 2013 to 2017, there have been 14,000 jobs slashed from the public sector. That is 166,000 down to 152,000—nearly 10 per cent of the public sector. You might remember that, when the member for Warringah first became the Prime Minister, he cut over 8,000 public sector jobs in just his first year. And we are well and truly seeing the results of that. People are waiting, on average, for over 15 minutes to speak to someone at Centrelink—up from the previous year. Young people are waiting over half an hour to speak to someone about youth allowance. People are phoning about disabilities and waiting just under 30 minutes. This is unacceptable. In my electorate, I know of cases where people have waited over three hours to speak to someone at Centrelink. I know people who have rung every day and hung up and, over a two week period, have been unable to get through because they didn't have the time to wait on the phone for that long.

It's not universal, though. The cuts aren't spread evenly. Jobs are actually moving into the CBD. In the Sydney CBD, for example, the number of jobs increased by 2,000 in the last year. Fifteen hundred jobs have gone from Parramatta; 2,000 jobs have gone into the CBD, from an already high base of 13,700 employees. In other areas of Sydney, the number of public sector jobs has roughly stayed constant, although it has significantly declined across the west of Western Sydney as well.

So we are seeing not just a cut across the board but the moving of the public sector from the outer regions or the centre of Sydney city into the CBD, and those of us who live in Western Sydney or further out know how long the travel times are, and we know that those workers actually come from where we are—that workers get on the train and travel sometimes an hour or an hour and a half into the CBD to take up those jobs. It actually doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense in the days of high-speed internet—though not so much in Parramatta; we're not even on the rollout, but, you know, the government departments have high-speed internet. In the era of people working from home and people being able to work remotely, it makes no sense whatsoever to be moving the public sector from outer regions into the CBD. It makes no sense at all, and it makes no sense to cut 1,500 jobs from the geographical centre of Sydney's workforce and move them to a place which is essentially on the edge of it. It makes no sense at all. We've lost 1,500 secure, stable jobs from Parramatta in the last year alone.

It's not okay. It's really not okay. It's not okay to slash our Public Service generally by this amount and it's not okay to slash the amount in my electorate. The member for Herbert is absolutely right; there are communities that depend on the stability that Public Sector jobs give their communities, and mine does too. I call on the government to rethink this move into the main centres. You can see the increase in Melbourne and in Brisbane, but declines virtually everywhere else. It's turning back a tide which was moving in the right direction. In the last years we've seen it completely reversed. It's the wrong way to go, and they should rethink.

Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Parramatta talks about turning back the tide. Under this government, we have turned the nation around. This motion is a phoney motion. Never before in the history of this nation have we seen such strong jobs growth. In January, 16,000 new jobs were added. Last year, in 2017, 403,000 jobs were added. That is an absolute record since records began. We have now had 16 consecutive months of jobs growth, the longest run of jobs growth ever recorded in this nation. As I say, this is a phoney motion.

Labour is grappling with what to do, because this government is delivering. It is delivering in spades, building a stronger economy and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs and new opportunities right across this nation, in metropolitan centres and in regional Australia. This builds on the many other investments that we are making. Our business tax cuts are helping small businesses invest, hire and grow. Our school funding reforms are improving results; the best and record school funding we've seen in this nation. We're making child care more affordable, where we've guaranteed Medicare. We're keeping Australians safe. We are delivering for Australians when it comes to jobs.

It's very disappointing, and I want to put the facts on the record. Contrary to claims made by the opposition and their CPSU mates, the number of Public Service jobs in regional Australia has increased under the coalition. In December 2012, there were 20,163 public servants in regional locations. This is compared with 21,572 Public Service jobs in December 2016, an increase of seven per cent. Fourteen per cent of Australian Public Service staff are now located in regional Australia, up from 12 per cent under Labor. We are not only delivering jobs in spades across this nation but also increasing the number of Public Service jobs in regional communities. As I say, that is why this motion is a phoney motion.

I reflect on what's happening in Geelong, an area that I proudly represent as the member for Corangamite. We are building the National Disability Insurance Agency headquarters, which will bring hundreds and hundreds of Public Service jobs to our region. That builds on the incredible investment that we are making. We've also, as you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz, brought the Australian Bureau of Statistics national data centre to Geelong—again, hundreds of new Public Service jobs. This builds on the 403,000 jobs across the nation, with 100,000 new jobs in regional Australia.

It is regrettable that the member for Herbert has initiated this motion. I think it's probably through some degree of embarrassment, because the Townsville City Deal, Australia's first, was signed by our government and the Queensland government on 9 December 2016. The Commonwealth is making more than $250 million of funding contributions to Townsville through the city deal, including the construction of the North Queensland Stadium, which will employ over 2,000 people. What a shame that the people of Townsville do not have a champion in the member for Herbert. What a shame that, in this member, they do not have someone celebrating this investment, leveraging this investment and looking at other opportunities. All we hear from the member for Herbert is whingeing and complaining, when in fact the unemployment rate in the 12 months to December 2017 fell from 11.2 per cent to 8.5 per cent, so not only are we driving hundreds and thousands of new jobs into Townsville but we are also seeing a significant decrease in the unemployment rate, driving confidence, investment and a new wave of absolute fervour for Townsville, and it's all absolutely due to the hard work of the Turnbull government.

Susan Lamb (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the member for Herbert for raising this motion this morning. She is a great local member, and I completely understand her frustration with this government, because I feel it too. The Prime Minister is looking down on Australia from corporate boardrooms and a harbourside ivory tower. When you do that, you don't see what's happening in the regions. Sure, the white-collar suits that he surrounds himself with are doing well. Company profits are up, big businesses are thriving and for the most part the capital cities are doing fairly well, but this prosperity hasn't made its way to the regions. As the member for Herbert explained a little earlier, areas like Townsville are struggling. In my role as the chair of Labor's Australian Jobs Taskforce committee, I've seen this firsthand. The committee travelled to Townsville last year, where I saw countless 'for lease' signs in the windows of buildings on Flinders Street Mall and throughout the CBD. The member for Herbert drives past and sees new ones regularly. It feels not too unlike my local area of Caboolture.

These regions have so much potential. The people are friendly and incredibly hardworking. The natural environment is beautiful. You don't have to go too far from Townsville and the Strand or the Centenary Lakes in Caboolture to know that the regions are beautiful areas. The locations are perfect for businesses and for public sector opportunities. One fatal element is holding these regions back: the absence of a government that cares. A government who cares, like a Labor government, would be standing up for the regions, not letting them down. Just last week—a prime example—Labor's leader, Bill Shorten, visited a number of towns in regional Queensland that have been all but ignored by the coalition. While the Liberals have been focusing their efforts on giving a $65 billion handout to big businesses, Labor has been hard at work announcing significant infrastructure projects that will create thousands of jobs and truly benefit the regions.

People in Caboolture, Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville are not interested in the private lives of members of parliament, I can tell you that. They're not interested in the coalition's continual infighting; they're simply interested in jobs. The people in the regions want to know that decent and secure work is available to them, where they're renumerated fairly and the EBA agreed to by their employer isn't thrown out the window just for the sake of switching to a dodgy labour-hire company. That's what they want. Wherever possible they want to know that their jobs will benefit their community, not the interests of some huge foreign business.

The member for Herbert and I have been continually standing up for our regions in parliament. We've been holding the government to account and calling on them to support Queensland's regions. This is unlike government members in the regions, like the member for Dawson or the member for Capricornia. The member for Dawson knows just how badly the Liberals have been treating Queensland. He has threatened to cross the floor a number of times, but in the end always votes with the Liberals to benefit big businesses. Instead of doing any meaningful work to strengthen Queensland, he has been doing a photo shoot that makes light of the recent gun violence, and I think that's absolutely appalling.

As I mentioned before, what I've heard from people all over Australia in my role as the chair of the Australian Jobs Taskforce is that they feel that they've been let down by the government. Instead of listening to them, the only discussions that the government have been involved in have been in the shadows, in corporate boardrooms, hidden away from average, hardworking Australian people. I've heard this wherever I've gone right across the country. What I also hear is hope—hope that at the next election Australians will vote in a government that cares. The Australian voters will take a really good, hard look at the ballot paper and know that when they put pen to paper only Labor will stand up for the regions, for jobs and for hardworking Australians.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government has a very proud record and, in fact, a very exciting tale to tell on jobs at the moment, with 403,000 new jobs created in the economy last year, and 75 per cent of those being full time. That's a record job creation package. It's a great performance and we should be very proud of it.

To the motion, let me say it highlights lots of government jobs that have gone missing from Townsville, particularly in defence, but it also mentions CSIRO, customs and the ATO. Firstly, let me say that I am not aware that any of those jobs have been moved for anything other than operational issues. Would we expect anything less, as taxpayers and as a nation, than that these departments should run themselves in the most efficient manner? What else should we do? Defence will decide where their resources need to be, as will the ATO and the other government departments.

The second issue I'd like to raise is that the member's motion carries the implication that government employing people is a way of fixing unemployment problems. It is not. That is a clear misunderstanding of how our economy runs. Basically governments tax businesses and individuals to raise money to provide services. Those services result in people being paid and getting jobs. Really it has only shifted a job out of the business that generated the income in the first place and therefore paid taxation. It's right and proper that that should be done—I'm certainly not suggesting that we don't tax businesses and individuals in Australia and provide government services; of course we should, and we do—but we should provide the services where the services are needed.

This comes back to something I spoke of many times in the House, for instance, with the paucity of doctor supply in rural and regional Australia and the fact that largely their incomes resolve around the public purse, if you like—the subsidy scheme—but we seem to have no mechanisms of actually controlling where they deliver those services. That is a digression from this particular motion, but I just make the point that what we should be focusing on is growing jobs for businesses and individuals to grow employment in the communities.

Of course when you've got bigger communities you will need more government workers. Unfortunately in so many of our communities—particularly in South Australia, I must say; the good people of South Australia have the ability to pass judgement on their current state government in just a couple of weeks' time—those jobs have been reducing in regional and rural areas and not growing. But that's not because the government jobs have disappeared; it's because the primary jobs have disappeared.

I would love to speak on this subject in my electorate in three or four weeks, by which time, I'm very hopeful, we will have announced the recipients of the Regional Jobs and Investment Packages around the Upper Spencer Gulf, which was a government action to move in when we had the very tough times in Whyalla and Port Augusta with the closure of the power station there to generate economic outcomes to employ more people. There are three possible ways people can apply to that $20 million worth of funding. There can be public infrastructure, and I know some councils have put some bids in along those lines; there is education and training; and, of course, there is support for businesses to grow their businesses to employ more people.

That is certainly where I hope the bulk of that money goes. It will be up to the minister of course and the department to make those decisions but I'm hoping that's where it will go. I know some of the bids that are in the mix. For instance, there is crane company looking to purchase a mobile crane that at this stage is not available in Australia and is tall enough to reach the latest of the new windfarms going into my electorate and into others. There is another company looking to grow their kingfish operation. They are breeding kingfish fingerlings, feeding them up and capturing premium markets overseas. It is a wonderful fish. I recently toured their facility. I am looking forward to that package. We've got a good story to tell but we need to be focused on those primary jobs, the jobs in private enterprise that feed the rest of the economy. (Time expired)

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to 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.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.