Tax office closures, redundancies

By Chris Slee

MELBOURNE — The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has announced plans to close all but two of its regional offices. Regional offices are smaller offices located mainly in rural areas. Staff in these offices have been given the choice of accepting redundancy or relocating to a city office.

In many cases, these workers had volunteered to move out of the city to establish the regional offices. The reward for their dedication is that now their lives are being severely disrupted.

The Community and Public Sector Union has launched a campaign to gain local community, business and media support in the areas affected by the closures, and to put pressure on local members of parliament. CPSU members in the regional offices have imposed work bans.

Plans for 600 redundancies in the ATO as a whole have also been announced. Management has said that further redundancies are likely to occur later when the scale of the Liberal government's funding cuts becomes clear.

From GLW issue 228