The National Party is targeting more public service departments from Canberra and other capital in its push to move federal agencies to electorates held by Nationals MPs.
Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce wants the giant Department of Human Services and the Australian Taxation Office to reverse years of policy and move its workers back to country towns around Australia.
!['Now is the time to have your voice heard.' Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce.](/web/20170313002939im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/o/y/l/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guophr.png/1488796982832.jpg)
But the main public service union says thousands of public service jobs in the regions have been slashed since the Coalition came to power and the Nationals were doing nothing that would seriously address the economic decline of the regions.
Mr Joyce made his call while on the defensive over his decentralisation policy after it was revealed that top bosses at the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority were "camping out" in an Armidale McDonalds restaurant as they are forced to move their agency to the northern NSW town.
The APVMA relocation is part of a broader policy that is seeing several hundred public servants, employed in agencies in Mr Joyce's agriculture portfolio, pushed out of Canberra and to regional centres, mostly in Nationals-held electorates.
Mr Joyce and his colleagues were silent in 2015 when the ATO shut offices in Port Macquarie, Sale, Mackay, Bendigo, Rockhampton, Launceston, Cairns, Orange, Toowoomba and Grafton.
The controversial opening of an ATO office in Gosford on the NSW central coast is a separate effort to the Nationals' moving of the agricultural agencies, designed to help Liberal MP Lucy Wickes secure her central coast seat of Robertson at the 2013 election.
The Department of Human Services has been following a policy of closing its Medicare and Centrelink shopfronts in both regional Australia and the cities and replacing them with "digital hubs" despite bitter local criticism in some places.
But Mr Joyce is undeterred, putting out the call on his website for rural and regional communities to lobby the Parliamentary inquiry, that will examine the controversial APVMA move, for their very own Centrelink or Tax office.
"Every town that has ever wanted Centrelink or a tax office, every town that has ever wanted a centre of excellence, every town that has wanted an agency such as the Grains Research and Development Corporation or the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, now is the time to make your voice heard," Mr Joyce's getoutof thecity.com.au website says.
But the Community and Public Sector Union accuses the Deputy Prime Minister of ignoring the thousands of regional jobs public sector jobs slashed since the Coalition took office.
"It's astounding for Minister Barnaby Joyce to claim to be the champion of regional employment when thousands of Commonwealth workers have been sacked by the Turnbull government outside the capital cities, a sizeable portion of the 18,000 jobs they've cut overall," CPSU National Secretary Nadine Flood said.
"The majority of Commonwealth public sector jobs are already based outside of Canberra but there's a real opportunity to restore thousands of jobs lost in regional centres.
"That's in contrast to the communities that have been hurt on Minister Joyce's watch by substantial job cuts across essential areas like biosecurity, Centrelink, Medicare, the Tax Office, Defence and the CSIRO.
"Each and every one of these cuts hits the workers in those communities hard, with just one example being the 200 Tax Office staff who've been sacked in Townsville."
The Nationals' push for decentralisation drew criticism within the Coalition from ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja, who said they were making a parochial point.
"Canberra was designed to be the nation's capital and this is the best place for our departments to be located. I will continue to be vocal on this issue both in the party room and in the public sphere," he said.
He urged Canberrans to counter the Nationals' position with submissions to the Senate inquiry looking at the consequences of moving jobs to regional Australia, and said previous attempts to move even small agencies out of Canberra proved to be problematic.
- with Doug Dingwall
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