The public service is not bloated, and cuts will hurt Australians

The talk around Canberra at the moment is about the reports of the Government asking departments to find 5% cuts or a “re-prioritisation” to use Finance Minister Katy Gallagher’s words.

The word usage is quite pertinent given the CSIRO’s announcement of its cuts last week contained the line that the cuts were a “sharpened focus” which “means other research activities will need to be deprioritised”

That re-prioritisation has ended up meaning the following job cuts by research area:

• Environment: approximately 130-150 FTE
• Health and Biosecurity: approximately 100-110 FTE
• Agriculture and Food: approximately 45-55 FTE
• Mineral Resources: approximately 25-35 FTE.

It is perhaps telling that the week the Government is trying to push through a weakened EBPC Act with the support of climate change denying members of the LNP that it is also announcing the biggest cuts in the CSIRO are on environmental research. Governing is about choices and right now the Albanese Government is making some rather bizarre ones about the environment.

But just how “bloated” is the APS? Does it need to be cut?

According to the APS Commission, in June this year there were 184,442 ongoing employees and 14,087 non-ongoing employees in the APS. That total of 198,529 was a nearly 25% increase on June 2022.

So bloated?

Nope.

What should not be forgotten is that the Abbot-Turnbull-Morrison Governments gutted the APS and as a result service delivery – such as call wait times and processing times for health claims rose.

 

And while the total number of public servants is now much higher than in the past, Australia’s population has also grown.

As a result, the number of APS per 1,000 residents is currently lower than it was in the final years of the Howard Government: In June 2007 there were 7.45 APS employees per 1,000 residents; in June this year, there were 7.21.

We need to not only have some context about the size of the public service, but we also need to realise that these cuts are not without cost – whether it be to service delivery, or, in the case of the CSIRO, to vital research on matter than directly affect all Australians.