Peter Dutton keeping Australians in the dark on Public Service cuts   :(
Peter Dutton has once again refused to provide any real detail on his plan to cut 41,000 public service jobs – encouraging Australians to trust him to reveal the detail after the election.
This lack of honesty should concern every Australian. Peter Dutton is keeping people in the dark about the impact of these cuts because he knows the community won’t support them.
Community And Public Sector Union. 27 April 2025.
Australians cannot trust Peter Dutton with our public services.

He has now released multiple conflicting versions of this policy, but still won’t say which jobs will go, which agencies will be cut, or which vital services will cease to be delivered.   :(

The latest version of his plan to slash public services is to cut 41,000 jobs from Canberra. This would do enormous damage to national security, emergency response capabilities, and have a disastrous impact on the delivery of frontline services across Australia.

You cannot cut more than 60% of the APS workforce in our national capital without crippling the services they power across the entire country.

This also shows that Peter Dutton does not understand the critical work that is done in our nation’s capital or how our country’s public services work.

Peter Dutton wants Australians to believe these cuts can be made without consequence, but that’s simply not true.   :(

Quotes attributable to Melissa Donnelly, CPSU National Secretary.

24 April 2025

Australian election 2025: Albo rips into Coalition on plans to cut 41,000 Canberra public servants
Anthony Albanese has attacked the Coalition plan to cut 41,000 public servants in Canberra, saying it will affect roles in key areas like Defence and national security.


News.com.au
April 24, 2025

The Prime Minister says key government services would be cut in a ferocious attack on the Coalition’s promise to slash the Canberra-based public service by 41,000 workers.   :(

Peter Dutton has confirmed this would be done through voluntary redundancies and natural attrition, and only affect public servants in Canberra.

Anthony Albanese questioned whether the Coalition was aware their cuts would include senior defence leadership and crucial national security agencies.

“ASIO, the Australian Signals Directorate, all of our security and intelligence agencies, where does Peter Dutton think they are based,” Mr Albanese told reporters while campaigning in Perth on Thursday.

“They are based in Canberra, in our national capital,”

“Where does he think they are – the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that deal with the issues of which we’re talking about here, relationships with other countries.”

Anthony Albanese has unleashed on the Coalition policy to cut the public service by 41,000.

He added that two-thirds of the Commonwealth public servants in Canberra would be out of a job as a result of the policy.

This includes two-thirds of Services Australia are based in Canberra and “deliver payments to pensioners, that deliver payments to people who are out of work, that deliver emergency payments for people who’ve been through natural disasters”.

While Mr Dutton has said the cuts would not effect service-delivery or defence and national security roles, Mr Albanese listed a range of other government departments that are headquartered in Canberra.


They included the National Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

He said the Coalition and Peter Dutton had proved they are “not ready” to govern.

“I think it’s impossible to actually be too outrageous on the comments that they are making in this campaign,” he said.

“Peter Dutton is showing that they are just not ready for government.

“I think that Australians over the next nine days, have an important decision to make, because there is a real choice of this election. My government that is competent, is orderly, has a plan for Australia … or this mob that will cut and wreck.”

Peter Dutton is standing by the Coalition’s policy to cut only public servants in Canberra.

Mr Dutton, while campaigning in Hobart earlier on Thursday, defended the Coalition's plan, saying not all 41,000 positions were filled at the moment.

Nationals Leader David Littleproud also defended the plan, saying the Coalition wanted more frontline services and cited employment figures that showed public service was the only sector were jobs were increasing.

“We’re saying that we’ve got to have a public service that is nimble, that focuses on frontline services,” Mr Littleproud told the National Press Club.

“We want more beds in hospitals and less desks. That is what I think Australian taxpayers would expect of their government if delivering the public service that is fit to deliver that.”

“We’re not going to walk in and slash and burn day one. We’re going to be respectful. And we’re going to make sure that we get the outcomes that we’re looking for.”

The Coalition has already been forced on a plan to make federal public servants work from home after a backlash from women voters.

ACT senator David Pocock has also attacked the Coalition policy, saying it will decimate Canberra.   :o

Independent senator for the ACT, David Pocock, has also attacked the policy.

“That would devastate the ACT economy, it would plunge us into recession – 41,000 would knock 10 per cent off our gross territory product,” he told ABC Afternoon Briefing.

“This is reckless policy from the opposition, and its reckless politics trying to import this US DOGE-style Donald Trump, Elon Musk politics, where we vilify the public service, we vilify our capital city to try to get votes elsewhere.

“If you look at what Mr Dutton has said, if you don’t touch Home Affairs, if you don’t touch frontline services, if you don’t touch our security agencies, you are probably left with about 5000 public servants trying to run the whole thing.”

He knows Australians will not accept what he plans to do.

The objective is clear, to cut essential services, complain they are operating inefficiently, claim the private sector could manage them better, then privatise or hand them to consultants, resulting in higher costs to taxpayers and a dramatic decline in service quality while his mates get the new contracts and the $$ that comes along with it.

It's standard Liberal/Coalition playbook, but it's even worse with Dutton given his history on things like the Paladin Group during his time as Minister for Home Affairs.

Before the fallout from Trump and DOGE's reckless actions in the United States had fully hit, the Liberals and Dutton were eagerly cloning that pathway to electoral victory.

Vilify transgender people, attack anything remotely progressive, rant about Government inefficiency and overspending, blame the last lot, then coast into power on a wave of resentment while keeping their true agenda as dictated by their benefactors under wraps.

But Trump has spectacularly poo the bed, sinking the Liberal Party's scheme to disguise their tired agenda behind a home-grown "MAGA" movement.

Now Dutton is being pressed to explain what he actually intends to do, and he has no answers. Not on nuclear power, not on housing, not even on the cuts he promises.

Nothing. We are simply expected to trust him until after the election.

No thanks. That entire wing of the political spectrum has proven itself utterly untrustworthy, even by the abysmal standards of politicians.

The article was paywalled from the Economist.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/04/08/how-bloated-are-governments-really



Comment from another forum:

The Economist Magazine has just published this chart showing that
Australia has the most bloated government bureaucracy in the world -
and also the fastest growing (except for Argentina pre-Melei).

The government bureaucracy in Australia has grown so large and so politically powerful, that it continues to enrich itself and increase its power with no end in sight.

Any discussion of an Australian D.O.G.E is met with such political hostility (lead by the state media; the ABC) , that politicians are now too frightened to even discuss that the bureaucracy needs to be wound back even by the slightest amount.

And the Labor Party have gerrymandered the Australian Senate by employing tens of thousands of additional left-voting Canberra based bureaucrats, resulting in the ACT permanently electing two Senators from the left, making it near impossible for the non-left side of Australian politics to ever have the balance of power in the Senate.

And going forward, as the number of Australians creating wealth in the private sector continued to decline - it’s just a matter of time until the bureaucrats run out of other people’s money to reward themselves with.

It’s like when a parasite attaches itself to a host, and bleeds the host dry, until there is nothing left to feed on, and then they both die.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gqbh7SeXYAA4pyn.png