Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak briefly on this MPI today. One thing that we do know after two years of the Abbott government is that, no matter what area you look at across public administration or national affairs, the Abbott government has either created turbulence or systematically gone out to have fights. This is in almost in every single area when you look across the board—whether it be attacking pensioners or people on disability pensions; whether it is attacking their own public servants through outrageous wage offers and cuts to conditions; whether it is attacks on women who are accessing paid parental leave; whether it is looking at what they said prior to the election and what they actually delivered after the election.

In almost every area you go to, you can see what they said before the election and then Tony Abbott's own words: 'Measure us by what we do.' The people of Australia are measuring you by the actions you take—actions like saying one thing before an election, then getting in and fragmenting the social compact that exists across Australia, and actions like creating fights and instability in almost every area of public administration.

Look at health; look at industrial relations; look at the ABC and SBS; look at education—look at all of these important areas. Before the election they said: 'There will be no cuts. There will be no changes. We are on a unity ticket'. Then, after the election, in the first budget—who will forget the 2014-15 budget?—no-one was left untouched by that budget. That was when the cuts came, and that is when the true colours of this government were displayed in hundreds of papers, and they cannot avoid that now. They tried to cover up a bit of it in 2015-16 budget, but the damage was done.

If we look at the area of science, there is a classic quote from Tony Abbott:

I’m pleased to pledge the incoming Government to continue to support science to the fullest extent possible.

… … …

… I’d say to all of you, please, judge us by our performance.

Well, let's have a look: $115 million cut from CSIRO; $300 million from the Sustainable Research Excellence fund; $75 million from the ARC; $107 million from the CRC; $28 million cut from ANSTO; $16 million from Geoscience Australia; $120 million from Defence Science and Technology Organisation; 1,400 jobs gone from CSIRO, and 200 more to come because NICTA, which has also been defunded, is forced to merge with CSIRO just to continue its very existence.

Canberra is the jurisdiction that I have the privilege of serving and have served for many years at a local level. We always see Senator Seselja's mug on TV here, smiling happily behind Tony Abbott when he does his press here in Canberra. So let's have a look at what Canberra can be proud of: 8,000 job cuts, constant attacks on the integrity of the public service, cuts to health, cuts to education, cuts to community organisations and too many others for me to name in the next one minute and 30 seconds.

There has been $26 million taken from the University of Canberra to establish a centre for quality teaching to actually learn and understand exactly the benefits of needs-based education funding. That is just gone—awarded under one government, cut-up under the next—but not before a recruitment exercise had started. There have been cuts to all of the national institutions. They have all been cut—a bit of a saving here, a bit of a saving there.

Let's look at the Tony Abbott propaganda document that was released yesterday, 'Sticking to our plan'—and didn't everyone look happy about that in question time today? On the infrastructure page it tells us about all the infrastructure that has been delivered. When we look at the summary of major infrastructure, all of the states and all of the territories are there—except the ACT. And there was Senator Seselja, smiling and nodding behind Tony Abbott as they released this document yesterday, but there was not one cent for the ACT outlined in this document.

Yet the ribbon-cutting continues. We have seen Senator Seselja snip the Majura Parkway, the Bowen underpass and even hospital beds in the cancer centre. It was all funded under a federal Labor government and has not one thing to do with the Liberal Party, and yet there he is, cutting the ribbon, getting his mug on TV and taking credit. All this is happening at the same time that Canberra is being savaged by this government—without any advocacy from the government side of the chamber to stand up for Canberra and the proud city that we are—and he should be ashamed.