Showing just how much the Coalition despises the public sector, $3.3 billion is to be cut from the Australian Public Service.
That means about 5,000 people will go and their work will either not be done or picked up by private sector consultancies whose profits rely on giving the government the dubious answers they want. Contractors are hired on inflated wages as the number of secure APS jobs go down.
For decades the ALP and the Coalition have bled the public service dry with so-called efficiency dividends – cuts of 1 to 2.5% every year since 1987 when Bob Hawke introduced them.
Covid, bushfires, and floods gave us a glimpse of what this hollowing out of public sector capacity would mean. The national stockpile had no PPE, the government was slow to organise vaccines having privatised CSL. Even now, hospitals cannot cope with the surge in Covid cases and more deaths than ever, now that all precautions like masks have gone.
Mismanagement of aged care, no solutions to ongoing staff shortages, the VET sector undermined and underfunded. Firefighting equipment was inadequate for what was anticipated to be a shocking fire season.
The Federal Government wants to get out of providing actual services. It hires expensive consultants at $5 billion/year, brings in fossil fuel big wigs to take over the so-called recovery process that delivered billions to gas.
The PM’s, ‘I don’t hold the hose, mate’ said it all.