Stephen Jones also included a defence of the public service in his final speech, ahead of what the Coalition wants to make an election issue, as they continue to travel the Temu Trump path of politics:

Today, there are government workers on the ground in Townsville providing post-flood support, and it’ll be those frontline service agencies, whether it’s the disaster relief agencies, Centrelink or the other services, providing those first-in emergency services and that information to thousands of Australians when we need it.

They’re coordinating disaster relief, they’re patrolling the oceans to our north, they’re going out in boats for weeks at a time—they’re public servants. They’re patrolling our borders. They’re doing the detailed work and design to procure submarines or the equipment that keeps our troops in the field safe and secure.

They’re processing veterans’ entitlements, access to essential mental health supports or payments to keep them sustained. They’re providing cybersecurity, they’re preparing budgets, they’re mapping our oceans or they’re ensuring that we have a detailed knowledge of all the minerals that this great nation has as a part of its bounty. It’s a really important reminder to me that our government,
our national parliament and the people who work for it really matter.

And I’ve got to say, you can get a headline for saying, ‘We’re going to slash 35,000’—or 45,000—’workers from our government,’ but these are the people we’re talking about. You can do it. We’ve seen the movie. You can slash those workers. We’ve seen the movie; we know what’ll happen. There’ll be winners and there’ll be losers. The losers will be the Australian people; the winners will be the labour hire companies and the consultants. We can go back there, it is available to us, but I would suggest that it’s a really bad call.

We have said it before and we will say it again – the only people who benefit from cuts to the public service is the private sector.