Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

He said, ‘Oh, they’ve increased; they’ve expanded by millions of dollars,’ these DLOs—these rapacious characters who have their snouts in the government trough, if you listen to Senator Ray. He had a go at DLOs. Now, those poor unfortunate people who dare to sit up at night and listen to the Senate need to understand what job DLOs do. Senator Ray understands fully what they do. He would know because he had one seconded to his office during his time as Minister for Defence, when we know the disastrous Collins class submarine project was conceived and badly managed, and a range of other absolutely disastrous defence policies were implemented. Perhaps Senator Ray could have in fact improved his performance as defence minister if he had had another DLO.

What is a DLO? A DLO is a departmental liaison officer, for those who live outside the beltway. These are people who come out of the department, so they are departmental officers working for the Australian Public Service. I suspect they have their salaries negotiated through processes generally negotiated by the Community and Public Sector Union and approved through processes that have absolutely nothing to do with the Prime Minister of Australia. They are departmental officers working for the Australian Public Service who go through all of the selection processes that every single person who works for this Public Service goes through and get seconded to work in Parliament House in a ministerial office. What is their job? It is to prepare all of the correspondence, all of the advice, and make sure that you get a flow of information, of correspondence between the ministry, the department and the ministerial office—an absolutely vital role in government that Senator Ray and even Senator Faulkner would remember from their dim, distant past when they were ministers. Yet this bloke comes in here and attacks the departmental liaison officers and says they are getting overpaid. He walks in here and attacks DLOs who do—