Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always a challenge following the member for Riverina because he always sets a trap for me. He throws me off my game. So I've always got to respond to the ridiculous claims he makes. What he conveniently forgets to tell the House is the opposition voted for the motion to set the time limit on the appropriations debate. So it wasn't the government gagging debate. It was a joint decision by the House, including those opposite, to set the time limit.

If he wanted to speak so badly on the budget, he could have got in early, like the member for Mallee did—due diligence to the member for Mallee, speaking on behalf of her electorate—but, no, he left it to the last minute. For somebody who thinks this bill before the House is not that important, he's spent his full 15 minutes talking about it. And the man can talk under water, under wet concrete, I reckon.

He did mention one thing I'd like to talk about before I get to the substance of the bill before us. He said that this government is not getting things done in a hurry, that we're not getting on with legislation. That got me thinking about what occurred in the Senate yesterday. Here we had a bill ready to go, a $10 billion housing package, voted down—or blocked, rather—by those opposite and by the Greens in the Senate. It was ready to go. If that had being passed by the Senate yesterday, appropriation for that fund would have gone through and those houses could have started to get built. So that is getting things done. The people stopping getting things done are those opposite, the member Riverina and also the members of the Greens.

Things that this government has done over the last year: aged-care wages; better pay and condition legislation; the legislation for an independent corruption commission; cheaper medicines; and fee-free TAFE. The list goes on and on of what this government has achieved in our first year. Unlike those opposite, we haven't been popping the champagne corks and we certainly haven't been breaking out any cigars, despite the success of the budget with the first surplus in many years, because we know there's so much work to do. There is so much work to do on behalf of Australians who are doing it tough with the cost-of-living crisis. We acknowledge that there is one but we also know it's a global issue. Countries around the world are facing higher interest rates and higher inflation. It's a shared problem, and Australia is weathering the problem better than most.

Before us today, we have the Public Service Amendment Bill. The member for Riverina took great delight in throwing some shade on this bill. But I just say to every public service worker in this country, thank you for the work you do. To the Clerks here—I know they're not members of the APS but are of the parliamentary services—to the attendants, to the security guards—everybody who works in this House—the Comcar drivers, thank you.' When I think of the multitudes of people who work for the public sector and the incredible work that they do, whether they're backline or frontline staff, thank you for the work that you do.

I think in my home state of Tasmania—and I'm sure I'm going to miss a few people out here—of biosecurity, health care, education, child protection, Indigenous rangers, Centrelink, NDIS, Veterans' Affairs, border security, AFP, defence personnel, intelligence personnel, our security agencies, and the numbers of public servants and public sector workers who work behind the scenes diligently doing all that really important admin work, often a thankless task. They're often derided in the public sphere by people who should know better—people in positions of national leadership—for the work they do. There's this false narrative that runs around about how much better, supposedly, small government is than so-called 'big government'. But I tell you what, for business to work best, you need an efficient and effective public sector. When you drive down the efficiency and the effectiveness of the public sector, when you hollow out the public sector, the private economy also falters. The regulations don't go through, the applications take longer to be approved, the reviews take longer—all the necessary checks and balances start to grind to a halt. It affects productivity. So there's a wonderful symbiosis between the public sector and the private sector.

Under the former government we saw a false narrative. They used to champion how many fewer public sector workers there were under their watch, but what emerged, of course, was the phenomenal growth of contractors and labour hire. What would normally have been done by public sector workers was being done by those in the private economy, often for lower wages and fewer conditions. I know personally of examples where staff would be employed by an outsourced provider of aged-care services and would have a Commonwealth crest on their name badge and would go to people's homes on behalf of My Aged Care. For all intents and purposes, anybody would think they were dealing with a member of the Public Service, but they weren't. These were members of private operators who were contracted by the department to offer those services and those workers were on less secure conditions. They didn't get the 15.4 per cent superannuation—they got the nine per cent superannuation at the time—and, of course, if the contractor lost their contract with the Public Service, they had no job security. But they were expected to do the same job as Commonwealth public sector workers.

Some years ago—I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here—I spoke to COMAR drivers and learned that traditional COMCAR drivers were employees of the public sector, but then the former government decided to contract out to a new mob. They brought in a labour hire company to put in new drivers on labour hire conditions, which were pretty much that, if you worked a shift, that was your only contracted work. Your work ended at the end of that shift; you had no ongoing entitlement to work, even though you were a casual driver. That was a loophole out of the casual provisions, where even casual drivers had to have protections for leave entitlements and so forth. So these sorts of things were going on even in the remit of this building and this city. There was a complete devaluation of the importance and the value that the public sector can bring.

That brings me to the guts of this legislation, which is about properly valuing the role of the public sector. But before I get onto that, I want to talk about the importance of the regions, because my colleague, the member for Newcastle, talked about this. I've talked for some years now about rebuilding the regions and the importance of stopping the hollowing out. It's a natural consequence of economic change. With transport and everything else, people don't live in country towns much anymore. They gravitate to the big cities, and they'll often commute in and out. One way to try to arrest some of this is to reinvest in public sector jobs in the regions. They can provide economic anchors. They are good, well-paid, often secure jobs, and they provide a vital service. Aged care, health care, education, Centrelink, Australian government services—all these sorts of jobs can provide economic anchors for regional towns, and then you can grow from there. I thank the member for Newcastle for reminding me about the importance of the regions and what role the public sector can play in the regions.

That brings me very briefly to my hometown, Sorell, where we've had a one-person desk for Centrelink for some years now. I was very pleased during the election to secure a commitment from Mr Shorten, now the Minister for Government Services, to enlarge the Sorell Centrelink office to six full-time staff. So a fast-growing region of Tasmania, one of the fastest growing population areas in the state, will finally get a fully staffed Centrelink office when that is built and staffed in the months ahead.

Canberra is absolutely unfairly derided, nationally. I've been coming here for seven years as a member of parliament. I've been coming here for many years previous to that for family reasons. It's a wonderful city, with wonderful staff not just here in Parliament House but also across the city.

I've talked about the false economy of outsourcing, the less secure and less well-paid, but there is a lot of work to do to regain trust in the public sector, and that's what this legislation seeks to do. I hesitate to talk about this because it does cast some shade on some sections of the public sector, but I don't think we can have this debate without talking about robodebt because that was a grand failure. If there is a grand failure under the former government then robodebt is certainly it. The testimony that has been heard at the royal commission is that we had middle-level and low-level public sector workers, who should have been valued for their expertise and their advice, telling their superiors and supervisors: 'You can't do this. It's illegal. You can't do it. We're advising you. It shouldn't happen.' But they were ignored. It goes to their importance—the role, expertise and advice of our public sector workers should be valued. They often know the best of what is needed and yet they weren't listened to. The top managers reckoned they knew best, they were trying to keep their ministers happy at the time, and robodebt is perhaps one of if not the biggest scandal this country has ever faced, where a government of the day actually engaged in what can only be described as criminal behaviour, actively stealing from its own citizens through either neglect or wilful neglect at the very least.

The Public Service Amendment Bill before us represents a significant milestone in the Albanese government's plan to rebuild and reform the APS. It seeks to restore public trust and faith in our government and government institutions. One of the primary objectives is to establish a clear and unified purpose for the APS. The Thodey review highlighted the need for a shared understanding of the APS's role and purpose, emphasising the importance of a collaborative approach across various departments and agencies. We all know that siloed thinking can really—I don't know how we get across it, to be honest, because it's really difficult. If we knew how to deal with siloed thinking, we would have dealt with it before now, but, gee, we've got to keep trying because siloed thinking really gets in the way of progress in a lot of areas, and at least it's being addressed here. The bill addresses this by requiring the Secretaries Board to develop a single, unifying APS purpose statement which we review every five years to ensure continued relevance. By articulating a unified purpose, the APS can work as an integrated organisation focused on serving the Australian government, the parliament and the Australian public. This shared purpose will guide the APS in delivering policies and services that do meet the evolving needs of the community. Agency heads will be mandated to uphold and promote the APS purpose statement, along with values and employment principles, further reinforcing a cohesive and collaborative approach. To enhance these core values and culture, the bill introduces a new APS value of stewardship.

There's a lot in this bill. I know the member for Riverina wasn't a huge fan. He derided it, much to his discredit, but it's an important bill. Getting the architecture of this stuff right is important. That's what this government do. We're not into showboating. We're not into doing welding with our helmets off—those silly photo ops! I just had that vision of the former prime minister with his helmet off while he was welding, with the sparks, and I thought, 'No, we're not into that.' We're into doing government right because it is important to get the structures right. It's not sexy, it's not something that makes good headlines—it's just good governance. It's just competent government, and that's what we are about—calm, collected government, doing the right thing for the right reasons.

A key aspect of the bill is to safeguard the impartiality and apolitical nature of the APS. It clarifies and strengthens provisions in the act to reinforce that ministers cannot direct agency heads on individual staffing decisions. That's important because, as we know, there's a very unwelcome trend in the US, in particular, where the public service is increasingly being politicised. Even the FBI and police agencies are being derided by political leaders and being heavily politicised. We don't want to see that culture take hold here, so we need to protect the impartiality of the public sector. The bill takes note of transparency and other issues.

Before I finish, I will give a shout-out: on 23 June, it's United Nations Public Service Day. In advance, happy public service day to all our public servants all across the country.

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