The Premier has confirmed that 2,500 public service jobs will be cut to try and balance the budget. 2,500 Tasmanians will be sent to the unemployment line as the state plummets into decades of debt to pay for the stadium.
With the stadium price tag now well over a billion dollars there will be ever more job cuts. But the Liberal government asserts none of those cuts will be to “frontline” services.
We’ve heard all this before but never receive a satisfactory definition of what is and what is not a frontline job.
This has serious implications for the electorate of Bass, where services are already struggling to meet the need.
The ANMF have repeatedly drawn attention to long term staff shortages, unsafe skill mixes, patient flow issues and critical overwhelming of capacity in the LGH Emergency Department and more recently the Acute Medical Unit.
These are long-term problems that have not been addressed. All of these areas require full staffing levels, from administration to service delivery as well as doctors and nurses – each and every job is essential. But does the Government consider all of them “frontline”?
Further cuts will only make things worse. How many jobs will be lost in health and other services in Bass to pay for a stadium in Hobart?
