Susan Tonks
What we know so far is that late February we were advised that there would be a restructure across what is called CSIRO’s Enterprise Services section, which is all, they do all the support. They’re all the support services for all the research programs. So, you know, everything from legal, governance, you know, all sorts of things to support all those research programs.
Leon Compton
So if we’ve got 400 staff here, I’d imagine we’ve got Enterprise Services reps as well. Susan, how many of them do we have here?
Susan Tonks
We have, there’d be Enterprise Services support staff like everywhere because they are essentially, they’re not just admin because they have very highly technical roles, quite a lot of them, but they are, there’s exposure of Enterprise Services staff across every section, everywhere CSIRO is there are Enterprise Services support staff.
Leon Compton
And often these are the people that actually keep the place running in terms of managing the comings and goings and the everyday business of an organisation. Susan, so how concerned should we be? How concerned are you at this mooted, you know, efficiencies in inverted commas and its impact on the Tasmanian workforce?
Susan Tonks
Well, we just want more, we want more information. It is going through a process at the moment, but it is a slow process. And in that, in how that’s rolling out, we don’t know exactly in Enterprise Services where all these changes are going to come and how these efficiencies are going to be identified accurately to make sure, you know, that you don’t do this in a way or that it’s not done in a way that means further down the track, you know, then you’ve got to, you know, try and try and provide that service through either hiring people again, or, you know, making sure that you’re not taking one away from somewhere that should have gone somewhere else.
Leon Compton
Yeah. So you’ve known about this since February of, you know, that something was in the wind. We learned more about it in estimates yesterday. How are staff feeling about these mooted, you know, efficiencies?
Susan Tonks
Because it is such a big, big section of CSIRO, people are, people are nervous, people are stressed, they’re anxious about it, they want more information, they’re waiting. We have had some cuts come across a number of the research programs already, because obviously there’s a connection, there’s a bit of a knock-on effect, and that’s what people are concerned about. In research programs, people are concerned that if support services are reduced, then I guess there’s a knock-on effect to research programs saying it’s connected.