MEDIA RELEASE
The Morrison Government must come clean on sweeping job cuts to Centrelink / Services Australia workers across the nation.
The secret JobCutter plan has sacked -
- 420 Melbourne casual workers in Mill Park and Dandenong, many who worked at application processing centres helping clients for two years but won’t see a dollar in redundancy
- A reported further 180 workers based in Sydney
- Another 23 workers in Launceston who fear the axe will be swung on them next
This could not be a worse action at a worse time.
How many Australian workers does Government Services Minister Stuart Robert intend to sack during a pandemic recession?
With record social security uptake these workers are needed to staff the social safety net and offer professional service to Australians doing it tough due to the pandemic and recession.
We also need these people in work - not adding their own bodies to the Centrelink queues they have just been servicing.
Usually you can’t keep Liberal Ministers away from the microphone when they’ve joined a noun to a verb and attached it to a trillion dollar debt ceiling.
So we’ve had `JobKeeper’, `JobSeeker’, `JobMaker’, `HomeBuilder’.
But when it comes to this new `JobCutter’ scheme they are running for the hills.
Mr Robert should be willing to put his voice to his actions. Instead he is ducking it, flicking inquiries to the agency spinner, and refusing to detail the extent of his secret JobCutter scheme.
If he finds his actions too shameful to defend then perhaps he should not be taking them.
This Government is rightly happy to spend public money subsidising jobs in these exceptional times.
But the old Liberal muscle memory means the razor gangs are still out there still attacking the Departments they don’t like and putting decent Australians out of work.
This is a totally conflicted, dysfunctional approach - the economic equivalent of gunning the engine with the handbrake still on.
Australian workers deserve better than a mass pre-Christmas sacking amid a pandemic recession.
