news, latest-news

The federal government may have to compensate dozens of young public service graduates, sacked from their AusAID jobs before they even began work. And months after AusAID was taken over by Foreign Affairs and Trade, top DFAT officials are unable to say how many job losses would follow the merger or what would happen to AusAID's Canberra office property. Do you know more? Send your confidential tips to A senior DFAT official revealed in the Senate estimates on Thursday that the process of dumping the AusAID class of 2014 is not yet complete, with correspondence between the department and the would-be graduates still open. But the public servants were unable to answer questions from ACT senator Kate Lundy about compensation payable to the ditched graduates, many of whom refused other job offers so they could work at the agency. The Canberra Times revealed this month successful applicants to the graduate program had been told that their offer of employment had been withdrawn with the abolition of AusAID. The officials agreed to provide the senator with more information about what redress was available to the dumped graduates. Senator Lundy's Labor colleague, Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek, weighed into the debate, accusing the Abbott government of a breach of faith with idealistic young Australians. ''The Abbott government's decision to cut the AusAID graduate intake means the public service is turning away some of Australia's best and brightest minds. It is terribly unfair to those applicants who had worked so hard to secure a place,'' Ms Plibersek said. ''As you'd expect, people had planned their lives around the jobs they had be offered, and many will expect to be fairly compensated for being seriously disadvantaged by the Abbott government's $4.5 billion in cuts to aid.'' As the fallout continues from the scrapping of the 40-year-old agency, AusAID staff could face a wait of another seven months before they know if they have a job, or even where they will be working. But DFAT official Paul Grigson told the committee that former AusAID staff and their DFAT colleagues had been approached for voluntary redundancies. The merged department has set up a complex structure to manage the takeover with a steering committee, a taskforce and 13 working groups formed to decide who will stay and who will go from its 6670-strong workforce. But Mr Grigson said the ''big decisions'' on staffing on the largest aid and diplomatic programs in south-east Asia and the Pacific would not even be taken this year. ''Over time, we'll need to look at our structure and how we staff it and there may well be reductions of staff numbers. … As always we'd hope to achieve that through natural attrition but we need to see where we get to over time,'' he told the committee.

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/994fd3e6-8370-4f1b-b10d-063b1ea4e86e.jpg/r2_0_728_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg