Labor Waste

Kelly O’Dwyer MP

For all of Labor’s talk of cutting back, we have seen yet another one of Julia Gillard’s promises shattered in this year’s budget. Buried in the budget papers are figures showing that the number of public servants has increased by an unprecedented 24,000 since Labor took power in 2007. That’s the equivalent of 1,090 AFL teams.

This increase comes despite Labor’s insistence that it is making tough decisions to reduce waste and save money. Finance Minister Penny Wong said before this month’s budget that the government’s efficiency dividend “should leave an impression that the Government is serious about returning to surplus, about driving efficiencies in the public service, and tightening our own belts.”

Unfortunately, the government needs to do more than simply “leave an impression”. It needs to actually deliver on its promises.

On the one hand Labor is saying that greater efficiencies need to be found in the way government departments and agencies conduct their business. But on the other hand Labor is growing the size of government at a time when it should be, at a minimum, freezing it.

While families are bracing themselves for further increases in prices and interest rates, the government is showing no signs of making any similar effort to cut back. Quite the opposite – since 2007 the government has expanded the public service by, on average, 6,000 a year, including 200 in Julia Gillard’s own department over the next financial year.

According to the latest annual report, there are 1027 public servants working for the Department of Climate Change alone. You need a significant workforce when you impose a failed pink batts scheme on Australian households and then have to try and clean it up.  You also need a big workforce when you are preparing to tax Australians even more through a carbon tax.  And how could I forget the government’s $13.7 million carbon tax ad campaign that is sure to keep all of those people busy.

Wayne Swan’s own rhetoric about allowing the private sector to lead Australia out of the economic downturn makes little sense when the government is making such an unprecedented expansion in the size of the public service. Wayne Swan has said that the government needs to make tough decisions to return the budget to surplus, but so far we are seeing the opposite.

Earlier in the year, during the government’s rolling crisis in border protection it advertised for six new spin doctors for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, including a ‘director of media’, at a combined cost to taxpayers of over $609,000 every year.  This is your taxpayer dollars at work.

Labor has already attempted to deny the increases in the public sector under its watch. But this month’s budget says something very different. It lists Average Staff Levels of the Australian Government for 2010-11 as being at 261,891 employees. In the last full year of the Coalition Government there were 238,623 public servants.

The Coalition is committed to reducing the size of the public service by 12,000 employees over two years through natural attrition. This plan will not affect frontline services that Australians rely on, but will cut the waste that has built up in the public sector over four years of Labor mismanagement.

The Gillard government needs more than an increase in public servants to help it – it needs a plan. So far all it has is a plan to waste more money. Based on that benchmark, it has certainly been a success.

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