Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I relish the opportunity to speak on this matter of public importance in this very important place. The matter of public importance today raises the real question that I have been asking myself across the last two days, and that is: What does this government have against anything with 'community' in its title? Everything that relates to community seems to have been slashed.

The member for Batman rightly pointed out in his contribution that what we are dealing with today in talking about the cuts to community services across different sectors are the remnants of the cruel 2014 budget that those opposite realised, probably too late, was not translating with the Australian people. The Australian people had cottoned on, and some of that was because groups like community legal centres ran a campaign when they saw the savage cuts to their programs, when they saw the dollar figures in that first budget. So they got busy and they ran a community campaign.

If you want a lesson in a community awareness campaign, you might want to talk to the community legal centres, because they ran such a good campaign that those opposite decided, 'Oops; we had better put some of this money back.' But they put the money back after community legal centres had already lost staff. I had a roundtable in the electorate of Lalor with the community organisations that work so hard on the ground in my community—organisations that work with refugee resettlement programs, our community legal centre and people who work with the most vulnerable on their worst days to provide them with relief and provide them with financial counselling. At that roundtable, in an hour and a half, each of those organisations relayed to me how dramatic the cuts were and the impact they were going to have on the services they could provide to the most vulnerable in my community. It was an eye-opener.

I had been through the 2014 budget with a fine toothcomb and then we had some announcements that said that money was going back. But when I sat with those community organisations they were not grateful or happy, because the funding that was put back was not put back for a long enough period of time to ensure that they could continue those services. They highlighted for me something that most of us who have been in any kind of management position will understand, and that is that retaining experienced staff is one of the toughest things to do in any business and any organisation, They highlighted for me very, very clearly that staff retention was their primary concern and that this government's 'chop, put back, chop, put back' had impacted directly on their ability to retain their experienced staff. It is still impacting now, and it will impact again.

There is not a business in the world that works in six-month cycles. Nobody puts their hand up to say, 'I'll take that temporary job for six months,' when there is a job around the corner with a three-year contract. We can talk about dollars but what we should talk about are the impacts. Community organisations in my electorate do not have the staff on the ground that they had two years ago when this government came to power. They do not have the same level of resourcing and they do not have the staff. It is an absolute disgrace. That leads me to ask again: What does this government have against communities? Communities have been hit and hit and hit.

What we are hearing today is absolute denial. I was a school teacher for a long time, and I understand the principle of, 'If you are caught, deny, deny, deny.' I am very practised in unpacking the deny, deny, deny principle. (Time expired)

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