SMH 9 Sept 2011
Opposition Leader, John Robertson, has derided the inaugural budget
of the O'Farrell government as ''the first grisly chapter in the story
of a new unfair NSW''.
Delivering his budget reply speech to Parliament yesterday, Mr Robertson
also announced a policy to redirect $280 million from a regional
relocation program to a policy to support regional businesses and staff.
As up to 40,000 public sector workers gathered in the Domain yesterday for a protest over the government's decision to cap wage rises,
Mr Robertson declared: ''That sound you will hear today is the cry of
betrayal from tens of thousands of nurses, police, firefighters and
other public sector workers.''
He said inflation was forecast to run at 3.6 per cent per year but the
workers were being forced to accept rises of only 2.5 per cent.
''When Tony Abbott called Work Choices dead, buried and cremated, Barry
O'Farrell was already stomping out into the graveyard to exhume the
body,'' he said.
Mr Robertson said there was ''epic disappointment'' about the budget in
western Sydney, the central coast, the Hunter and the Illawarra and he
repeatedly highlighted the move to restrict the stamp duty exemption for
first home buyers to new homes.
The government has argued the measure would stimulate the housing
construction market, but Mr Robertson said it was ''a gratuitous poke in
the eye'' for first home buyers.
He said the impact of the decision to shed 5000 public sector jobs
through voluntary redundancies would ''seep across NSW like slow-acting
poison'' and that ''laying off people in uncertain times is exactly the
wrong thing to do''.
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