The ACT's long-serving Labor senator, Kate Lundy, says public servants and serving Defence personnel deserve a better deal.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
In her farewell speech to Parliament on Tuesday evening, she paid tribute to those workers and said their role was valued.
"However, for those in the service of the public, job security and employment conditions become enmeshed in the shallower end of our professions' deliberations and I am sorry to see this occur," she said.
"As public servants and serving defence personal you deserve better and there remains important work to do to honour the principles informing the original undertakings relating to maintaining the purchasing power of your respective retirement incomes."
She became Labor's youngest federal representative when she was first elected to the Senate in 1996 at the age of 28.
Her replacement for the safe Senate position will be former ACT chief minister Katy Gallagher.
Senator Lundy said being a senator for the ACT was the best-case scenario for a politician: having a smart, engaged, politically savvy electorate.
She served on the opposition frontbench before the 2007 election that swept Labor to power, but was subsequently overlooked for a ministry position by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Senator Lundy was later promoted to the ministry by Julia Gillard, taking on the sport and multicultural affairs portfolio.
As sports minister, she was criticised for her role in the press conference that described a doping scandal as the "darkest day in Australian sport".
"My passion for sport means that I am prepared to defend it at all costs and I was tested on this when the Australian Crime Commission report was released when I was minister," she told parliament.
"It gave me the opportunity to work with sports to harden their environments and protect their athletes and their game against new threats from new drugs and methodologies used for cheating as well as the infiltration of criminal elements.
"There was not a bone in my body that was willing to sweep that aside, or disassociate with the bad news.
"In unprecedented circumstances I acted in the best interests of Australian sport: the ACC described the problem and the government would work with the sports to fix the problem on behalf of all the clean athletes, the ethical clubs and the parents who were deciding if and where their child would be playing sport.
"For all the pain and discomfort, I am proud that Australian sport remains the cleanest, safest sporting environment in the world, and that other countries now look to Australia to improve their integrity regimes in the way we have done."
Senator Lundy used the occasion to criticise the "absurdly" under-representation of women's sport on television.
"It is both pathetic and disgraceful that the urgent need to develop a sustainable business model around the broadcast of women's sport has been so ignored by broadcasters," she said.
Senator Lundy recounted her passion for technology and said the National Broadband Network was a substantive achievement of the Labor government.
"It breaks my heart and offends my vision for this country to see the vision, and now the plan, so vandalised," she said.
"I can say this with authority because I did much of the work exposing the underinvestment in Telstra's copper network during the Howard government in excruciating estimates hearings, back in the day when it wasn't unusual to sit until 4am.
"I would race home for an hour's sleep, get up, get the children to school and do it again."
Senator Lundy has chosen her time for retirement, unlike former ACT Liberal senator Gary Humphries, who lost party preselection to Zed Seselja.
Senator Lundy will take up a position as a director of the NRMA and should be eligible for a parliamentary pension of about $138,000 per year, to reflect her service of almost two decades.
