Department of Climate Change in Canberra
No climate staff to be axed despite the department having been scrapped. Taxpayers will pay $90 million a year to keep 408 public servants employed in the Federal Climate Change Department - despite most of them now having nothing to do until 2013.
Yin ton, yin ton, yin ton, yin ton ... No, this is not the Goon Show - these are REAL people who pretend to be running our country!
More than 60 of them are classified as senior executive staff on salaries between $168,000 and $298,000 a year. Their salary bill alone will cost an estimated $12 million every year. A further $8 million will also be paid in rent for plush offices at Canberra's Constitution Place until 2012, where it is believed 500 new computers will be delivered this week. Despite Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's decision on Tuesday to suspend the failed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until at least 2013, the department has ruled out plans to cut back staff.
A formal response by department secretary Martin Parkinson to a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday - the same day as the scheme's suspension - claimed the department would not offer redundancies.
The formal response, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, said there were no plans for "the immediate future" of any scaling back of staff.
According to official figures, the number of top-paid bureaucrats being paid up to $298,000 a year has almost doubled since January this year from 39 to 61. That was to gear up for establishment of the Australian Climate Change Regulatory Authority, which will also now have no function.
Since last year with climate change employees having risen from an initial 246 to 408. Of the 61 senior agency officials, only nine have been inherited from the scrapped home insulation scheme. The majority, 38, were employed on the CPRS and a further 19 were employed on the renewable energy scheme which has also been axed.
But none of the 408 staff within the department will be shed even though the department's key function, the CPRS, has been axed.
Its own tender documents reveal a lease contract of $16 million for its offices which expires in 2012.
The Ministry of Air? How are you off for air? They're just full of it.
If this has left you choking, be cheered up by this reply from a public servant to the Daily Telegraph, "You should be thankful that you have something to do. To be employed and not have anything to do is not enjoyable. I should know as I have been a public servant for twenty years." I guess we ought to pay them an extra hardship allowance for having nothing to do!
The lucky country? Yin ton, yin ton, yin ton, yin ton ... Well, for some!
P.S. Perhaps the Ministry of Hot Air could sublet part of its premises to the Ministry of Silly Walks. Birds of a feather and all that!
