Taylor says natural attrition key to ambitious public service cuts plan

The shadow treasurer has revealed more about the opposition’s plans to remove 41,000 “back room” public service roles that were added to the books as part of Labor’s APS reform agenda.

Fronting the National Press Club this week, Angus Taylor shared further details about the Coalition’s $7 billion savings to be met by shrinking the APS workforce back to pre-COVID levels. 

“The focus [of the cuts] will be on attrition … for Canberra-based public servant jobs, and in non-frontline services,” Taylor said. “The costings [that explain how we make $7 billion in savings from this plan] will come out before the election, and people will be able to peruse those and evaluate them.” 

Taylor did not clarify if APS redundancies were part of reaching the target cuts of 41,000 jobs but further reiterated that the plan mostly relied on natural attrition. 

“That’s the emphasis that we’ll make — on natural attribution,” Taylor said. “The important thing about this is that the public service has gotten so big under Labor that the attrition numbers are high now. 

“You naturally have more attrition because you’ve got more people because people leave to go and do other things.”

A government led by Peter Dutton would deflate the public service headcount growth that happened in the past three years under Labor, Taylor said, stressing frontline service roles were not on the chopping block.

As someone with a long business career, the shadow treasurer shared his belief that better teams were not necessarily about the number of people staffing them. 

The APS would not necessarily be hampered by a decision to thin its ranks, he said.

“I want to see a strong, effective public service in this country. I’ve lived around Canberra for much of my life and I think it’s very important that we have a very strong and effective Canberra-based public service,” Taylor assured the audience. 

“I want to empower the very best public servants in this country to be their absolute best, take away some of the bureaucracy, and help them to be part of the mission to make this country a better country.

“And I think that’s what every public servant wants to do, but right now I don’t think that’s how the public service is working in many cases.”

The shadow treasurer described Canberra as a capital city detached from Australia’s commercial centres, which hindered the private sector from absorbing more unnecessary public servants. 

Championing Australia’s private sector was a strong message in Taylor’s budget reply speech, and he took that theme further by arguing that movement in and out of the public sector into the private market was desirable.

Taylor suggested that having talent mobility from the APS to the private sector and back again would deliver better results for Australia, in particular stimulating more investment into the domestic economy that would lead to better productivity and higher real wages.

“[That movement] is what we want to see more of, too,” Taylor said. 

“One of the very best people I worked with in my career was a former public servant, Rod Sims, I worked with him for many years. He came in from the public sector, went into the private sector, he’s gone back to the public sector and went back to the ACCC. 

“We want more of this [career movement]. We shouldn’t be frightened of having a public service that moves between, in and out of the public and private sectors.”

In a wide-ranging speech about the APS two years ago, PM&C secretary Glyn Davis discussed the new era of hybrid government, which saw public service work in partnership with alliances, networks of government agencies, NFPs, and sometimes private companies as the way of the future. 

Davis acknowledged that “a broader mix” of public and private provision funded by government was already happening and more of this would be the likely way forward for contemporary Australia.

“There will be services, as now, for which government does rely on competitive markets and external advice. And I think, too, that the use of consultants will rebalance,” Davis said. 

“The key is the decision about when to go to market — evidence over decades shows that outsourcing can be a valid choice, but it’s not intrinsically a better choice.”

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Galvanising private sector central to Angus Taylor’s vision as treasurer