Opposition leader Peter Dutton wants to cut 36,000 jobs from the public sector, promising to do so if the Coalition wins government.
He wants to return the public sector to its pre-pandemic size of around 181,000 people.
Aside from hunting through departments for the so-called excess, issuing a mandate banning working from home for most public sector workers would also help. Dutton has previously targeted WFH options across departments, although he has moved to soften his language on this in recent weeks.
But a new report this week urges a Coalition to go even further and issue a hiring freeze and large-scale audit of departments that have expanded under the Labor Government.
The ‘Stop the Bloat’ report by the Menzies Research Centre, a Liberal-aligned think tank, calls for an audit of more than 200,000 people and recommends that department leaders meet new workplace-wide benchmark levels within 12 months.
The report also targets Commonwealth grants as “incentivising rent-seeking behaviour”. It highlights several “examples of recent government grant spending” in a section that could be forgiven for sounding like a Donald Trump address to Congress. It targets a program for “Decolonising breastfeeding” (aimed at supporting lactation care for First Nations women) costing just over $1 million, and another $1 million on a University of Queensland program aimed at promoting and supporting queer professional identity in primary healthcare and cultivating welcoming spaces for the LGBTQIA+ community. Most of the examples in the report are relatively small in dollar value, and primarily aimed at supporting First Nations people or marginalised groups. (Especially small when you consider the $2.8 billion calculated to have been ticked off by former Prime Mininster Scott Morrison and his ministers during the previous government, including $100 million on the now infamous ‘sports rorts’ program.)
This report is not Coalition policy, but it touches on what Dutton is already platforming in the lead-up to the next election: an end to so-called government waste, a cutback in the public sector, and language aimed at promoting the idea that public sector workers are wasting taxpayer dollars, especially those who don’t “show up to the office.”
The ultimate losers of positioning the public sector as the enemy of Australians? Women.
Dutton’s plan would be an attack on women’s workforce participation, given thousands of jobs would go in an industry that is almost gender balanced (at 43.5 per cent of women).
It would be an attack on many women’s ability to participate at all, given the majority of those working from home and part time in this sector are female and that women often do so due to taking on the bulk of the unpaid caring responsibilities at home.
It would be an attack on the proportion of women in management and leadership positions generally, given this is one industry that is near gender balanced when it comes to the proportion of women and men in leadership. Forty-eight per cent of managers in the sector are female, while 46 per cent of key management personnel are women.
The ultimate winners are the private sector consultants, destined to pick up the spillover work as the public sector is cut.
As for the expanded DOGE-inspired blueprint that the Menzies Research Centre has distributed, that would be an attack on all of us: aiming to reduce what we expect from our public sector, leave thousands of Australians out of work and further push a divisive “war on woke”, given the examples of what it considers grant “waste”.