Greens slam Coalition plans to cut the public service
The Greens have hit out at plans to reduce the public service, warning that outsourcing work to the private sector will cost taxpayers substantially more.
The Liberal party has pledged to cut government waste and halt the growth of the Canberra-based public service, scrapping “pointless programs and activist-focused positions,” according to its website.
“When you look at where Labor’s wasted money, the Government’s priority, the Albanese Government, their priority has been to employ 36,000 more public servants in Canberra at a cost of over $6 billion a year. I don’t want to spend that money on public servants in Canberra,” opposition leader Peter Dutton said in a press conference on Sunday.
AAP FactCheck found that only 7,464 Canberra-based public servants were added between June 2022 and June 2024, according to the latest available APS figures.
In a Monday press release, the Greens warned that efforts to cut down the public service will end up costing taxpayers more, as public sector jobs are outsourced to the private sector.
“Our analysis shows the government could have hired 179,832 public servants with the $20.8 billion that was spent on external labour in the last year of the Morrison Government. That massive spend only created 54,000 jobs in the private sector,” Greens senator Barbara Pocock said.
“You don’t need an economics degree to work out where to get the best value for money. It’s clearly in the public sector.”
A 2023 finance department audit found that the Coalition’s use of a ‘shadow’ workforce of 53,900 full-time equivalent staff had cost the government $21 billion annually.
“The public service has been hollowed out over the Coalition years. What we need now is not further denigration of the APS by a Musk-like razor gang, but to rebuild capacity to allow all of that core work, outsourced at great expense under Morrison, to be done more cheaply, more reliably and with more accountability by a well-resourced public service,” Senator Pocock said.
Accountability has been a hot-button issue for external consultancies in the aftermath of the 2022 PwC scandal, where the consulting firm shared confidential government information with multinational clients, tipping them off to incoming tax laws.
According to reporting by The Australian Financial Review, when the Coalition came to power in 2013, annual public spending on big four consultancies was less than $400 million. By the time it left in 2022, spending had ballooned to $1.4 billion.
Under Labor, the Australian public service workforce has increased by roughly 26,000 personnel according to AAP FactCheck, citing APS data from June 2022 to June 2024.
Shadow minister for the public service Jane Hume criticised the expansion, alongside a pay increase of 11 per cent for federal workers. Citing analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office, she argued that the expansion has not been budgeted for accurately, leading to a $11.1 billion ‘black hole.’
“Labor has been adamant that they are not going to cut the public service, so how are they going to pay for this $11 billion black hole? Will they tax Australians even more to pay for this, or are they going to take money out of front line services to pay for these wages?” she said in a press release last week.
“Only the Coalition will stop the exponential growth in the public service which is costing taxpayers billions, and refocus it on delivering services that make a difference to everyday Australians.”
According to Senator Pocock, the public service has decreased over the past decade as a share of the total labour force.
“Peter Dutton is peddling a myth about a bloated public service. If you look at the APS headcount as a percentage of the labour force it has actually gone down over the past decade from 1.53% in 2012 to 1.36% in June last year,” Pocock said.
Minister for Public Service, Katy Gallagher, defended Labor’s choice to restore funding to public service.
“As an incoming Minister, I could see the results of a decade of underinvestment in the APS. And I don't use the term underinvestment in simple dollar terms – it was much more than that. Core capabilities outsourced, service standards in decline and Australians waiting too long for essential services they relied on,” Minister Gallagher said.
“Now, these outcomes weren't the fault of the APS. They were the direct result of choices made by a government that valued expensive outsourcing over internal expertise and artificial staffing caps over actual service delivery outcomes.”
The Greens criticised the lack of detail provided alongside the Coalition’s pledge to downsize the public service, which did not provide specifics on which parts of the workforce would be cut, or how many jobs would be scrapped.
“If the leader of the opposition is not willing to name which jobs will go under a Coalition government, which state capitals will lose their workforce, which regional centres will lose more staff, perhaps it’s because he hasn’t got a clue,” Senator Pocock said.
Voters appear to be split on the issue, according to a poll by The Guardian which found that 39 per cent oppose cutting 36,000 public service jobs, while 31 per cent support it and 30 per cent sit on the fence.