The Liberal Government has a long-term Plan for Tasmania which includes fixing the Budget mess, so we can afford to deliver essential services into the future.
Our Budget, which has already been passed by Houses of Parliament, is not negotiable.
Our pay freeze legislation would have saved 500 jobs and provided $50 million in savings over a full year, totalling around $177 million over the Forward Estimates.
Treasury has calculated that the Unions' pay freeze proposal delivers just $17 million in total savings, leaving a $160 million shortfall in the Budget over four years.
We are not prepared to compromise the Budget bottom line by accepting their straw man proposal.
Unions know this and yet they chose to play politics and present an offer they knew we could not accept instead of trying to save their members' jobs.
We have been clear and consistent all along. We said that a failure to support our pay freeze plan would mean we would need to implement an extra 500 of the 1000 FTE job cuts Labor and the Greens left embedded in the budget.
We also said in that situation we could no longer guarantee to quarantine the frontline.
Unfortunately because of Labor, the Greens' and the unions' opposition, we are now in that position.
It is important to note because of the police association's agreement to a pay freeze, frontline police will be quarantined and the total number of FTE reductions required is now around 460.
We were elected to fix the Budget mess left by Labor and the Greens and the simple fact is we cannot keep spending more than we earn.
On Monday, Cabinet will consider where the additional savings will be made. These additional job losses will be on the heads of the unions, Labor and the Greens.
We have a long-term Plan for Tasmania and we won't be deterred or held ransom by anybody from delivering it.