WHERE the hell are you, Zed? Is it a case of Zed fiddles around while Canberra burns?

At least your predecessor, Gary Humphries, admitted that Canberra would suffer a devastating onslaught from an incoming Abbott Government and that he would do what he could to protect Canberra. The promise was natural attrition. The reality is attacking those least able to defend themselves.

Newly elected Senator Zed Seselja should be fighting the good fight for the most vulnerable in Canberra. Whatever happened to his sense of a “fair go”?

The Abbott Government is not just slashing the public service, it is attacking the most vulnerable – the junior staff, the lowest paid public servants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and new graduates. Instead, opening the Canberra Liberals’ web page under “Latest News”, the statement under Senator Zed Seselja on November 9 said: “Sorry, there are currently no items to display”. The same was true on November 10, 11, 12 and right up to press time on November 19. While his Canberra constituency was under attack.

There was a lesson he could have learnt from the outgoing speech of Senator Humphries who talked about his first weeks in the job. After advice from a colleague about how to stop the Film and Sound Archive moving from Canberra he stated: “I put the phone down and thought, ‘Well, that’s how you get things done; you throw a tantrum’.” We do not even hear a murmur from his successor, let alone a tantrum – apart from a fleeting reference in his maiden speech.

The Public Service Commission has identified that temporary workers account for 14,237 of the public servants. These are the really vulnerable ones. Their jobs are relatively easy to cut. But this is not by attrition. They target the women, the young and those on lower earnings. The Commission identifies that three quarters of the temporary workforce is earning less than $42,000 per year.

The policy of the Abbott Government was to cut 12,000 positions. The driver is simply savings from expenditure in the public service. However, if positions at the ASO 6 level were tackled, similar savings could be made with the loss of around 9000 public servants. Tackling the management structure at even higher pay levels instead would mean even fewer positions lost. Making the slashes across the scale of public servants would mean fewer people devastated, leaner management and support systems and a much more level playing field.

These are the sorts of arguments we should be hearing from our representative. The Labor member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, is publicly drawing attention to the issues that will have such a devastating impact on Canberrans.

On November 7 he said he is “alarmed by the skewed priorities of the Abbott Government that slug the poor and favour the rich” and named Assistant Treasurer, Arthur Sinodinos, as “abandoning a tax break for low-income superannuants, cutting the schoolkids’ bonus, reducing income support and slashing jobs in the public service… cuts across the board exempt mining billionaires, millionaire parents and tax breaks for those with more than $2 million in their superannuation accounts”.

He was joined by the other ACT Labor members, Gai Brodtmann and Senator Kate Lundy, in calling on Zed to use his influence as he had promised before the election.

In a press release, they used the following quote from a radio interview during the election campaign in which Seselja said: “[The Coalition has] been good enough to put their policies on the table and that policy is to, across Australia, reduce the size of the public service by 12,000 through natural attrition. Now, my job should I be elected to the Senate will, of course, be to hold the Coalition to that promise that it will occur through natural attrition.”

The knock-on effect for Canberra is going to be felt throughout our economy. For example, it will be keenly felt in the housing industry. A reduction in public service workers will mean less demand for new housing. It will also be felt in the service and retail industries that employ some of the lowest wage earners in Canberra.

Remember the 1200 jobs that went from Geelong with the announcement that Ford would be shutting down? The impact on Geelong was to be so devastating that the Victorian and Federal Governments jumped into action. Julia Gillard announced $50 million of taxpayers’ money for retraining and to assist Geelong to reinvent itself. After six years of a constant three per cent cut to the public service under Labor, Canberra now faces losing the lion’s share of 14,000 more jobs. And there is no point in Canberrans holding their breath for any type of support package.

Michael Moore was an independent member of the ACT Legislative Assembly (1989 to 2001) and was minister for health