The front page on this day in 1991 reported there had been a short supply of lunches at Parliament House the previous day, after a strike by catering staff left those on the Hill hungry.
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The government had confirmed catering staff would be made redundant, with about 130 permanent and 300 casual employees to be stood down in the following months.
It was a plan by the government referred to by one as a scheme "to privatise everything on the Hill".
Unless the issue was resolved to their satisfaction, the catering staff warned they would continue with rolling strikes at Parliament House and further disrupt the catering services.
Three years prior, there had been a disturbance in catering services caused by the caterers refusing to accept payment for food for a day, resulting in $10,000 worth of food and drink being consumed by politicians, journalists and staffers in a free-for-all frenzy.
The caterers warned this was not something they ruled out doing again.
A spokeswoman for the strikers said the government had "left workers out in the cold" with "poor offers of redundancy" which "would not keep them going till Christmas".
The secretary of the Joint House Department, Mike Bolton, said the privatisation of the catering service was not primarily motivated by the desire for increased profits, but because a private contractor would be more efficient.
