As the Coalition pledges to find budget savings across the commonwealth public service, Finance Minister Simon Birmingham states that this won’t require compulsory redundancies within the public sector such as forced job losses.
The Liberal-National coalition has announced that it will find savings for its election commitments through a boosted “efficiency dividend”, which will require public service chiefs to trim their spending by $2.7 billion over four years.
This announcement has led public sector unions to say that this will mean thousands of jobs will be shed and services reduced.
While Finance Minister Birmingham said it was a “modest change” to the existing effiency dividend, he did not go as far as cabinet colleague David Littleproud did in saying no jobs would be lost.
“I’m confident that the APS (Australian Public Service) can indeed deliver this in an environment certainly where there will be no need and no pursuit of compulsory redundancies or any of those sorts of measures,” the Finance Minister told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday.
He said areas of efficiency included office space, working from home, technological changes, the use of contractors and the “senior executive structure”.
“The idea of keeping some pressure across the APS to ensure that big agencies and departments were at the most efficient standard possible – that’s a commonsense thing to do,” he stated.
However, Labor leader Anthony Albanese said cutting the public service would end up costing the government money and impacting the public, as had occurred under the controversial “robodebt” scheme.
“It costs money because you take humans out of human services and it has devastating consequences,” he told reporters in Canberra.
Labor spokesman Tony Burke said the public service had faced “extraordinary pressure” under the coalition government.
He said a Labor government would use the spending power of government procurement to promote secure jobs and would be a “model employer”.
With AAP