Public service jobs ‘front and centre’ in Australian election contest, says minister
Investment in the government workforce is critical to delivering high-quality public services and proposed job cuts by the opposition Coalition would “devastate communities nationwide” and “cripple essential services”, Australia’s minister for the public service Katy Gallagher said this week.
Public service jobs and services are “shaping up to be front and centre of the upcoming election contest”, she said.
The incumbent Albanese government must hold an election by May 2025.
The government’s 2024-25 Budget showed an increase of 17,289 public servants on the previous year. The opposition Liberal-National Coalition said this brought the total for “Labor’s bureaucrat binge to 36,000 since the election” at a cost of AUS$24bn (US$15.8bn).
“The Coalition sees areas like defence as much more of a priority than office staff in Canberra given the precarious times in which we live and threats in our region,” the opposition Coalition leader Peter Dutton said in his Budget response in May.
“We will reprioritise Canberra-centric funding and make an additional investment in defence to rapidly enhance the capability of our men and women in uniform.”
In March, he also appointed a shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction.
Read more: Australian government to charge departments for outsourcing
Investment
Gallagher claimed that when the government came to power, the Australian Public Service (APS) was “under-resourced and under pressure” and that “standards of service delivery were slipping badly”.
“While the Albanese government has spent the last two years repairing and rebuilding the APS after a decade of damage and disrespect, the Coalition have already said they will cut 36,000 jobs – almost 20% of the entire public service – if they win government again,” she said.
She said that as well as employing more public servants, the government has made AUS$4bn (US$2.6bn) in savings from reducing spending on external labour and delivered “marked improvements” in public services. She cited examples such as clearing the 42,000-case backlog at Veterans’ Affairs, reducing visa processing times, and doubling the on-time approval rate for environmental approvals.
Gallagher argued that sidelining public services led to issues such as the PwC scandal, where confidential government tax information was used for commercial gain, and the Robodebt scandal, an automated government scheme that incorrectly demanded welfare recipients pay back benefits and was ruled illegal.
“We need to continue investing in a strong, capable and independent public service – because the results speak for themselves,” she said. “Better services, faster payments, stronger protections, and billions of dollars saved.”
Read more: Australian public servants granted ‘right to disconnect’ but with exceptions, says minister
Government ‘bringing work back in-house from outsourcers’
A key issue at the heart of the debate is the use of contractors.
Gallagher said the previous Coalition government had been “fixated on artificially constraining public servant numbers by outsourcing work to the private sector”, with contractors being paid much more to do the same job a public servant did and costing taxpayers AUS$20bn (US$13bn) in just one year.
To bring more core work back into the APS, in 2023, the Albanese government released the Strategic Commissioning Framework. Under the Framework, more than 100 agencies were required to identify the core work that should be done by APS employees, not outsourced, and set targets to begin bringing it in-house in 2024-25.
Gallagher said that the first annual update on implementation, published this week, “shows agencies are committed to bringing over half a billion dollars of outsourced core work back in-house”.
Governments around the world to review use of consultants
Reducing reliance on consultants by building internal capabilities is something that governments around the world are examining.
Global Government Forum’s Making Government Work: Five pillars of a modern, effective civil service report, which was based on interviews with 12 senior civil service leaders from around the world, highlighted that a number of leaders were concerned about how to use consultants in the right way.
One leader said they found the use of consultants “a little bit surprising” when they took on the job, while another said their government had “lost a lot of the people we need to the consulting firms”. This is causing them to worry about “how we rebuild our workforce” after people who had been trained by the civil service left to earn more elsewhere.
They added: “How do we get people who, in many cases, already have the values and expertise we need, back into the public sector?”
Another chief, whose government has expanded the use of consultants in the last five years, was worried about a lack of cohesion between permanent civil servants and those on temporary terms.
More than one administration has examined the development of in-house consultancy hubs to ease the reliance on external consultants as part of government cost-cutting plans.
Read in full: Making Government Work: Five pillars of a modern, effective civil service
About Sarah Wray
Sarah has over 15 years’ experience as a journalist with a specialism in the public sector and topics such as digitalisation and climate action. Sarah was formerly the editor of Cities Today and Smart Cities World, as well as a specialist video-based publication in the aerospace sector. She has also written for publications including Smart Cities Dive, Mobile Europe, Mobile World Live and Computer Weekly.
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