Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

) ( ): For the last four months we have had National Party MPs wandering around the length and breadth of this country shouting the words, 'Decentralisation, decentralisation, decentralisation!' I am sure there is a pet shop in the main street of Tamworth and, if you go in there, there will be a galah sounding remarkably like Barnaby Joyce. It will be saying, 'Decentralisation, decentralisation!'

An opposition member: It would probably make more sense than him.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense and probably be a lot less florid!

Given the amount of noise the National Party have been making and what they have called a campaign that they have been running about decentralisation, you would expect to find something in the budget which backs in their idea that they are going to move vast swathes of public servant jobs out of Canberra and into regional Australia. You would expect to see some money in there. We know you would need to have some money for it because we know the cost to the public purse of the failed experiment of moving the APVMA out of Canberra and into the Deputy Prime Minister's own electorate. We know that that has cost in the order of $130,000 per employee. It takes a lot of effort to move an agency from one town to another. It was a cost of $130,000 per employee, leaving half the staff who refused to go, including the agency head, and having to recruit almost half the entire workforce.

We also know that over the time they have been in government this government has had an appalling track record on public sector jobs. Around 18,000 jobs have been cut out of the public sector. They have not spared regional Australia. Over 200 jobs, for example, have been pulled out of the tax office in the regional town of Townsville. The CSIRO has been shedding jobs hand over fist in regional places around Australia as well. And 150 jobs were lost out of other regional tax offices around the country.

We expected to see something in the budget that was going to back in the plan that the government says they have about decentralising public sector jobs. There is nothing in the budget. The only thing we see in the budget about public sector jobs is a plan to axe nearly 1,200 jobs from the Department of Human Services. Anybody who knows anything about the Department of Human Services knows that it is the most decentralised department in the public sector. So my question to the minister is quite simply: is the government going to quarantine the regional offices of the Department of Human Services from the 1,200 job cuts? If it is not going to quarantine the regional offices from these 1,200 job cuts, we know that this decentralisation campaign that the National Party is running is nothing but a cheap fraud on regional Australia. It is nothing but a hoax and nothing but a cheap fraud on regional Australia. It would be an expensive fraud if they put a dollar in the budget to back it in. But there is not a dollar in the budget to back it in, so we know it is a cheap fraud.

While I am talking about cheap frauds, I would like to minister to respond to the impact of the freeze that the government have put upon financial assistance grants to local government. I note that they followed Labor in removing the freeze in this budget, but the cost to regional councils and other councils has been permanent. Nearly a billion dollars has been lost to these councils, and the councils that are suffering the most, the communities that are suffering the most, are regional communities like yours, Deputy Speaker, and like mine and other regional communities around the country. These are the communities that Gough Whitlam had in mind when he put in place the Financial Assistance Grants program: regional councils around the country that were struggling to meet their basic services. The National Party say they support them, but they have ripped a billion dollars out of their bottom line. There is nothing in the budget to put it back.

So my question to the minister is: what are they going to do to ensure that councils around the country and the regional communities they support can catch up to the money that the government have cruelly ripped out of their budgets and have no plan to put back? They have no plan to put it back. What are they doing about decentralisation? Is it anything more than a cruel fraud? What are they doing to refund the local governments to ensure that they can provide the services that regional communities rely upon?

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