Coalition clueless on cuts to the public service

Peter Dutton’s determination to undo efforts to rebuild the Australian Public Service (APS) by slashing jobs will end up costing the nation more. New analysis by the Parliamentary Library for the Greens suggests that money spent on outsourcing work to the private sector costs more than three times as much as having the work done in-house.

These figures show 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 around 54,000 jobs in the private sector. 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.

These figures demonstrate that outsourcing public sector work has cost Australian taxpayers more than three times as much as doing that work in-house. If Dutton is on an efficiency drive, he should be hiring more public servants.

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.

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.

Dutton has gone out of his way to characterise commonwealth public servants as Canberra-based and also claimed all of the positions added in the past 3 years have been in Canberra. This defies reality as only a third of the current headcount are in the ACT. There are over 60,000 federal public servants in NSW and Victoria alone; 24,000 in Queensland; nearly 13,000 in South Australia and more than 22,000 in regional Australia.

The APS is far from Canberra centric. However, the Coalition strategy hinges on casting a well-staffed Canberra based bureaucracy as somehow being bad for the business of government. The opposite is actually true. All those dedicated APS workers in the state and territory capitals and out in the regions, rely on a strong and responsive back-of-house workforce in Canberra.

A pertinent example of this is the disastrous relocation of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to Armidale, instigated by Barnaby Joyce when he was Minister for Agriculture. A series of reviews have identified isolation from public service peers and governance structures as contributing factors to the well documented downward slide in the agency’s performance.

While the APVMA should be able to recruit locally, there is a wealth of experience and governance support located in Canberra that should have been available on tap to the fledgling agency while it was re-establishing in northern NSW. Those connections with Canberra provide critical knowledge of public service management and governance practices as well as expertise in things like government procurement and human resources management.

The demonisation of the Canberra bureaucrats by Dutton, shows a failure to understand how the public service actually works. This is dangerous stuff coming from an alternative Prime Minister. What’s at stake is the quality of service that all Australians rely on in their dealings with government. We need look no further than the damage to the operations and reputation of the APVMA that resulted from an ill-conceived and overly hasty relocation instigated by the former Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, for evidence of the consequences of badly planned changes to the public service.

I grew up on a mallee farm in South Australia and I know how government decisions can effect people on the land. The Coalition, including Nationals leader David Littleproud, are going at the public service like a bull in a China shop. They have threatened massive cuts but say they don’t know where or when they will happen. It’s a fact that many of the 36,000 ‘Canberra’ jobs they are targeting for are located outside the ACT.

If the leader of the opposition and his deputy, or either of the two spokespeople for the elimination of government waste, are not willing to name which jobs will go under a Coalition government, which state capitals will cut their workforce, which regional centres will lose more staff, perhaps it’s because they haven’t got a clue.