Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for his contribution, and particularly for the fact that he's focused so much on the controversial and, many argue, completely failed and botched decentralisation program, and I'd like to ask some questions about that. On 19 April last year, the then Minister for Regional Development—they have had two since then, but the then Minister for Regional Development—the then Senator Nash, said that government had embarked on a massive decentralisation program. The program was referred to in Budget Paper No. 4, but no funding has been attached to it and, according to the 2017 budget paper, business cases for entities being considered for relocation are expected to be completed by December 2017. You don't need to be a maths genius to know that that was five months ago. We could have reasonably expected there would be some big announcements in this budget—and indeed, we were encouraged to expect big announcements in the budget. Sadly, no such thing has been the case. On budget night, we found out what was being planned: 98 jobs earmarked for decentralisation and, if you look at the details, 82 of the 98 jobs are moving public sector workers from one capital city to another capital city. Some of my favourites include the 40 jobs that are going to be relocated from Canberra to Adelaide, and the 25 jobs—and this is a cracker—that are going to move a massive 20 kilometres, from the CBD of Sydney—

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