Proceed with care

It is always pleasing to see an active government, especially one that is new to the role. However, even in the excitement of early policy delivery, prudence must prevail.

The O'Farrell government is currently at loggerheads with Public Service Unions over massive staff cuts; for all the usual reasons. Public servants are a soft target. Sack a few thousand of them and we cheer from the sidelines because it saves public money and apparently increases efficiency. However if a bank or other major organisation announces similar measures we boo from the sidelines; how dare they.

Yet the cause and effect are the same. They government or the organisation created jobs they were unable to sustain and large numbers of family people find themselves out of work. This is never a good result.

In Parramatta, after constant lobbying, we have a number of government departments both State and federal and that employment is vital to our Parramatta economy. Any economy needs people employed for its growth and stability.

If the state government can't sustain its current level of employees then they need to do more than just make them redundant - they also need to be very strategic about the geography of those redundancies.

Trevor Oldfield AM JP

President