Dutton’s plan to cull public servants isn’t just risky, it’s misguided

There are a lot of nervous public servants whose future will go on the line when Anthony Albanese finally sets the election date.

They’re nervous because Peter Dutton has said that tens of thousands of them will have to find a new job if the Coalition is elected. But voters who aren’t public servants should be nervous, too.

Dutton is clear about what the public service faces if there is a change in government. In the Coalition’s “Let’s Get Australia Back on Track” policy document, which sets out its election priorities, it says that “the size of the public service has exploded under Labor, with 36,000 extra Canberra-based bureaucrats employed since the last election”.

When Albanese committed to sinking an extra $8.5 billion into Medicare, Dutton matched the promise and said axing public servants would be instrumental to covering the cost, reasoning that those extra 36,000 public servants come “at a cost of $6 billion a year, or $24 billion over the forward estimates. This program totals $9 billion over that period. So, we’ve well and truly identified the savings.”

To their credit, the Coalition’s claim about growth in the public service under Labor is absolutely correct. There’s now close to 200,000 federal government employees across Australia. But there are not an extra 36,000 public servants in Canberra. In fact, not even a majority of the 200,000 are in the nation’s capital (it’s around 37 per cent).

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The Australian Tax Office, for instance, is home to the second-largest number of public servants with more than 21,600 employees on the payroll (Services Australia is the largest with almost 34,000). Of this, around a quarter are located in NSW, including the regional centre of Albury, where almost 900 federal public servants work and live. Then there’s another 430 or so in Gosford, more than 300 in Townsville, 220 in Traralgon, and 60 in Burnie. All up, less than 10 per cent of all ATO employees are in Canberra.

During the last election, Labor came to office promising to reverse the Coalition’s freeze on public servants, which was introduced by Tony Abbott and lasted all the way through Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison’s respective tenures.

Under Abbott, public servant numbers quickly fell, but a shadow army of 50,000 consultants and labour hire workers was created just as fast, as departments found they needed people to carry out the government’s wishes – which quickly created problems that are still being felt today.