Staff from abolished development agency AusAID could have to wait another seven months before they know if they have a job, or even where they will be working.
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Two months after AusAID was taken over by Foreign Affairs and Trade, top DFAT officials were unable to tell a Senate Estimates committee how many job losses would follow the merger or what would happen to AusAID’s Canberra office property.
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But senior DFAT official Paul Grigson told the committee that former AusAID staff and their new 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 among the 6670 workers in the merged department.
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 in 2013.
“Over time, we’ll need to look at our structure and how we staff it and there well may be reductions of staff numbers and 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.
“We’ve made some decisions already around IT, corporate services.
“We’ve made a start on some policy areas, but we expect to make the biggest decisions in the first few months of next year.”