The NT News is very excited by Liberal Plans to move public service departments to a new Australia in the far north.
Labor Senator Kate Lundy is asking the warring local liberal factions what they think of this plan?
Today Tony Abbott has let the cat out of the bag on his plan to force people to move to the most remote parts of the country to find work.
In recent days, Gary Humphries and Zed Seselja have been scrambling over each other to prove who will be the best ‘champion’ for Canberra residents under an Abbott-led government.
Well, this is their first test.
The test for Senator Humphries and Mr Seselja is simple: will they rule out supporting Tony Abbott’s plan for compulsory relocations of Canberra public servants to northern Australia?
No reply as yet.
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Straight from the NSW play book. How to get rid of public servants without having to pay redundancies, have their positions transferred to the least appealing locations possible. Nice.
The idea may have merit for departments relating to say indigenous affairs perhaps, but as it is centrelink and defence are already heavily in these regions. ATO has some biggish offices outside of Canberra also. but lets face it, there is only so much moving could do, especially when the coalition doesn’t think the NBN is a great idea….
Don’t they have heaps of tornados and floods up there?
For all its many, many failings, at least Canberra is pretty stable when it comes to things like that.
How will this affect risk concentration in the insurance industry? Becomes really hard to diversify assets when so many policies are written over houses and cars that are sitting in flood plains/cyclone country.
Ross Gittins is not a fan.
The plan is here: http://resources.news.com.au/files/2013/02/06/1226572/178934-tony-abbott-troppo-plan.pdf
Doesn’t say that public servants will be moved. Pity though.
Is Kate Lundy the same person that blackmailed ACT voters into voting Labor with health funding that was only available to the ACT if we re-elected Katy?
The cost involved in such a transition; infrastructure demands, housing, upgrades to services to accommodate the new migrants .. never going to happen.
From all accounts, it’s nowhere close to being a “plan”. But I’m sure the media will beat it up and labor will jump up and down in a poor attempt to clutch to power.
bd84 said :
So we should only judge Liberal policies which are sane and ignore the insane ones?
Speaking privately, I see nothing wrong with it as a public servant.
Remind me… it used to be that roughly two-thirds of the Commonwealth public servants weren’t actually in Canberra – is that still the case?
If one is to develop the north (or change focus to any region) for a sustainable period, public servants would obviously need to move to support the increased population (the shopfronts for the Department of Human Services, etc). Yet I can’t see how that would necessarily result in a shift of Canberra-based policy wonks.
Disclaimer: yes, former Lib candidate, but speaking as a private individual.
johnboy said :
Who said anything about policy? My reading of the document is it is a discussion paper – that is vastly different from a policy.
Yes, we’ll all be floated up on boats, using the epic system of canals that they are also planning.
johnboy said :
It’s a discussion paper, so people are discussing it.
And many are balancing the pros with cons. Nothing wrong with that. Especially when such a major social engineering proposal is being considered by a party that claims to champion small government and echos the calls of a particular mining magnate who is pushing very hard for a special economic zone to be established around her own interests. Call me cynical, but that proposal needs to be examined by a number of female asian doctors with very big hands.
If this came from Labor the hard Right would be squealing it’s Red October all over again.
poetix said :
VFB’s running parallel to the train lines ?
Actually Poetix, you are smarter than most because the idea of canals has merit. Plenty of water up there to fill them.
bd84 said :
Actually Tony Abbott was on the news saying it’s a plan and not a policy.
Either way, madness! More of this for the lols please
poetix said :
Go Team Blue – make the water run uphill. Legend!
Isn’t it a pity Canberra’s economy was structured to be so reliant on the public service? Perhaps if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t need to worry about Canberra becoming a ghost town without it. They may as well move Parliament while they’re at it. I guess the the rest of us can take up benefits and move to the coast.
Pork Hunt said :
Except it would all drain downhill and flood Victoria….
Matt_Watts said :
And this is why Canberrans don’t vote Liberal – you don’t care about Canberra. You don’t care about the jobs, about the sustainability of small business that relies on the public service, on infrastructure, or about replacing those jobs so that today’s kids will have a job to go to when they grow up.
johnboy said :
What a beat up. I have an inside source here, and will just say that this is a fairly ‘out there’ discussion paper, much like many other ‘out there’ discussion papers that get passed around and later filed away under ‘i’ for ‘ignore’.
Baggy said :
Maybe you should explain that to the fool who lost the ACT election, what’s his name. Umm yah Zed. His whole negativity campaign was based on a paper, none of which were ACT Labor policy.
Also you might want to explain that to Abbott and his mate pain in the arse and their not so fatty Jockey mate.
milkman said :
Either way, someone spent (wasted?) time putting it together….
The question is: why won’t any party back a plan that the people are actually keen to support? I mean as an example, a lot of people seem to like the idea of a fast East coast train system (eventually from Bris to Melb), yet the pollies – both sides – continually ignore things like this. Instead they come up with bizarre plans!
Personally, I like the canals idea better!
I am a public servant and I work for a department (FaHCSIA) that works in the indigenous space (that’s what the I stands for people).
I wouldn’t be happy to be moved to Karratha -but any department should be near the people it’s serves surely.
The document on the News site is stamped “Draft” and is described as “A 2030 Vision” – there is every chance that the person who will be PM in 2030 is not yet in the Parliament. In the meantime, while there may, to use the language of the draft, be scope to relocate some “relevant” components of departments and agencies, the relocation of “substantial” components would surely be ruled out on financial and other practical grounds – particularly in the very fiscally constrained years which lie ahead.
HiddenDragon said :
We could all be working from home by then – http://www.nbn.gov.au/nbn-benefits/telework/
OK, Tony. Move your Libs HQ to Karratha to get the ball moving.
I’d like to move to Tasmania.
A small incentive, say, $500K and I’ll be off.
Besides, FNQ is a shithole. Lived there, been there since, hot, humid, seas you can’t swim in because you’ll die, floods, cyclones, large hairy spiders, snakes that eat children, Bob Katter, people that think the ‘huck huck’ is perfectly fine to be used in normal conversation.
Surely posting to Wadeye would be preferential to parking in Woden or Civic.
I’m wondering if they’ve costed the district/locality/remote location allowances for these people. The total cost of employment for people in those areas is pretty damn high.
Once upon a time it made sense to have a bureaucracy which was centralised to the place where parliament was located. These days, in the age of electronic communications, there really is no need to have so much of the public service located in one place.
Yes, moving large parts of the public service out of Canberra may have detrimental short-term effects on Canberra’s economy, but the public service does not exist to keep Canberra economy ticking over, rather it exists to serve the interest of all Australians and, as such, should be willing to serve Australia’s interests in whatever location is of most benefit. That said, given that the federal government is largely responsible for Canberra’s economy having such reliance on the public service, the federal government should give due consideration to Canberra when planning changes which would impact on Canberra’s economy. Canberra’s interests should not be the only consideration, but they should at least be considered.
I do firmly believe that the nation’s interests are best served by a distributed public service. We have large populations in coastal areas which are, in some cases, overpopulated and under-served by infrastructure, while we also have massive sections of the country which are either underpopulated or uninhabited, but could very easily cater to the needs of part of our population, and should probably be built-up now if we are to expand in to them as the population grows so as to avoid further stretching the resources of existing overpopulated areas.
It would be silly to expect the private sector to build these areas up on their own. Economic incentives will help to attract the private sector, but the whole process will be much faster and much smoother if some public servants move in to these areas as well, and increase the market demand in the areas in the process. I would see no problem with granting public servants in these areas the same economic incentives (tax cuts etc) as private sector people/businesses who set up in these areas.
Some parts of the public service probably should keep a presence in Canberra, but hypothetically speaking (and without figuring out which acronym the various departments use as names this week) it does seem silly to base Immigration and Customs so far from a coastline; Indigenous Affairs so far away from the majority of their clients; Air Services Australia and CASA so far away from major airports (with apologies to Stephen Byron whose airport serves a purpose but is not as big as our major coastal airports) etc.
Apart from the idea of basing some departments in locations which are closer to the people with which they work the most, it seems logical to me to not have a centralised public service simply for cultural reasons. It happens in every industry that if the majority of your time is spent dealing with people in your industry, your mindset becomes based around your industry. A centralised public service lends itself to this in that, by having so many public servants and departments in one place, it is easy to think more about government than about the people whom the government is supposed to serve. Having a less centralised public service would, in my view, make it easier for the public service to work in a more efficient manner for the benefit of the general population.
It also strikes me as ironic that by decentralising the public service, the NBN would be an even less necessary proposition than it already is, as the extra population in regional areas combined with departmental data needs would result in a demand for high-speed internet services in regional areas which would be very attractive to the private sector.
Admittedly the whole idea would inconvenience some public servants, and the costs of moving people may be difficult in the short-term given the government’s current financial state, but the long-term benefits would far outweigh the short-term costs, and surely the long-term benefit of the nation is what our public servants should embrace.
Disclosure: I’m a Liberal Party member, but I have no hand in the discussion paper which was reported on by the media, nor am I talking as anything other than a private citizen with an opinion.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart said :
Still a hell of a lot easier (and vastly more effective) to pop around to another section’s desk to have a quick informal chat than to rely on email SGS