Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk today about the appalling damage this government has done to our proud public sector and the services they provide to Australians. Over the 2016-17 year alone, public sector jobs were cut by 3,500. Since this government came to power in 2013, there have been more than 14,000 jobs cut from the public sector—and Parramatta has copped it badly. Over that time, the public sector has halved from 3,216 to 1,567. That's more than half of the public sector jobs in Parramatta gone during the term of this government.

The result of this kind of sabotage should have been pretty obvious to anybody who thought about it, and we're seeing the result of this short-sighted government's attempts to save a few bucks at the expense of our proud public sector and the people they support. The real people who voted us all into this place—mums, dads, students, pensioners, the unemployed, people with disability and anyone who has fallen or might fall on hard times in the future—know the effect that job cuts to Centrelink have had.

I'm sure everyone on the government benches also knows—this government is probably sick of hearing it—that the cut of 1,200 Centrelink jobs has led to 55 million calls to Centrelink going unanswered. That was the figure for one year alone, for 2017-18. Who knows what it will be this year as those cuts continue. There are people in my electorate who've told me they've waited up to three hours to speak to someone at Centrelink, and many more call my office in frustration because they couldn't get through to anyone at all. And yet the cuts continue. Now older Australians are waiting for months to get on the age pension, and I know this because my office takes calls from constituents who have been waiting and waiting and waiting. I know two couples who are homeless are waiting to get their applications processed when it's really clear they're eligible.

These cuts are hurting my community. Two days ago, a woman called. She'd been waiting for nine months for her pension to be processed—nine months!—and she's not the only one. Meanwhile, this government has the audacity to gloat about outsourcing these jobs. Last month Minister Keenan put out a media release stating that Centrelink staff numbers had been boosted by an additional 2,750 jobs. What he failed to mention was that these weren't new positions with Centrelink, but privatised labour brought in to fix the government's mess. And they're not fixing it. How can the private sector do that without the training and experience that all of those people who have lost their jobs have had?

Centrelink and Medicare staff have told me that wait claim processing times have stretched out to catastrophic levels because of staff cuts, privatisation and poorly implemented technology changes. They complain about losing a number of full-time, experienced staff who have not been replaced. And the training provided to the new staff members has not filled the corporate knowledge and experience gaps left by these cuts. The staff just want to be able to do their job and help the people from my community who rely on them. Instead, their days consist of apologising to people for processing delays that are out of control. No need to wonder why there was a 40 per cent increase in Centrelink complaints this year alone.

ATO workers visited my office earlier in the year because they were worried about losing their jobs to outsourced workers. And sure enough, shortly after I met with them, 50 positions in Parramatta, Box Hill and Dandenong were made redundant. They were replaced by a mix of labour hire, non-ongoing staff and ongoing staff stationed in Brisbane and Perth. When we lose our public sector, we lose in three ways. We lose the ballast that those good, secure, full-time jobs provide in our local economy, holding the economy stable through the winds that buffet less secure workers. We lose the quality of service of people who join the public sector because they want to serve; we lose the quality of people who join the public sector on lower wages than they can get elsewhere because that's what they want to do with their life.

Perhaps most importantly for the future decision-making of this country, we lose the corporate memory. We lose the by-product that people get from serving the community of knowing what worked and what didn't and what impact policies had. All that corporate knowledge that sits within the full-time workforce of the public sector, which we draw on when we need to think as a government, will be gone and replaced with labour hire and short-term contracts, which will never be able to replace the level of care, the corporate knowledge or the security of the workforce that supports our local economy. I want the government to consider what they're doing here. This is sabotage of the public sector writ large and they really should rethink it.