Peter Dutton’s promise to axe 41,000 public service jobs in Canberra if elected had promised fears of a local recession. With the softening of that stance, an immediate hit to the ACT’s economy now appears unlikely. While Canberra itself may no longer be in the Coalition’s direct firing line, the policy change is unlikely to take the heat out of a fiery debate.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Nobody forced out. That's the Federal Opposition's commitment to public servants, some of whom
00:08may have been sweating hearing this line less than a fortnight ago.
00:12We'll reverse Labor's increase of 41,000 Canberra public servants.
00:17The now-confirmed hiring freeze had already been flagged as an option.
00:21There's a natural attrition rate now in the public service, which is high because it's
00:25big, and so we can rely on that.
00:29Yesterday's clarification suggests the cuts will come from across the country, not just
00:34Canberra. But ACT Labor remains unconvinced.
00:38I think Australians can fully expect that if Peter Dutton was to become Prime Minister,
00:43that the public service would be massively cut.
00:46And it's raising doubts about the pledge to safeguard frontline services.
00:51Where we see turnover in public service, they're in frontline public service agencies. So it's
00:56simply not believable.
00:58Somebody who's processing payments for veterans sitting at a desk in Canberra, are they providing
01:03a frontline service, or is it only somebody who's at a Centrelink office actually talking
01:07literally face-to-face with someone?
01:10University of Canberra economics lecturer John Hawkins, himself a former public servant,
01:15thinks pledges to cut bureaucratic fat aren't as popular as they once were.
01:20Whilst they might, as a generalisation, like the idea of reducing inefficiencies, if you
01:26talk about a specific area that you're taking public servants out of, then people are worried
01:30about that.
01:31The worst two years for the ACT economy in the last three decades were during the first
01:37years of the Howard and Abbott governments, both of whom cut public service jobs.
01:42Peter Dutton's proposed hiring freeze may not lead to the same economic shock, but in
01:48a city which wouldn't exist without the government, even that might prove to be a hard sell.