So bloated’: Jim’s Mowing boss wants to sack 1.7 million Aussies   
The businessman behind a $1 billion empire says Aussie workers have become “unsackable ... no matter how badly they do” in a blistering attack.


News.com.au
January 17, 2026

Worrying signs with Australia's bloated public service sector
The millionaire Jim’s Mowing boss Jim Penman has launched a blistering attack on Australia’s government bureaucracy, urging it be cut...

Millionaire businessman Jim Penman has launched a blistering attack on Australia’s government bureacracy, calling for it to be cut down by two-thirds.

“I cannot comprehend how the public service works. It’s so, so bloated,” Mr Penman told news.com.au this week.

“People are un-sackable. It doesn’t matter how badly they do. There is no concern about efficiency whatsoever.

“My best estimate is you could probably cut bureaucracy by two-thirds and you’d have a much better functioning government.”

Mr Penman built the Jim’s Mowing franchise network that turns over $1 billion a year and has expanded into more than 50 services including cleaning and dog washing.

He was a vocal critic of the Covid lockdowns in Victoria and hundreds of his franchisees joined an unsuccessful class action against the state government.

Mr Penman built the Jim’s Mowing Australian and New Zealand franchise network that turns over $1 billion a year.

Mr Penman believed zoning laws were the primary cause of the country’s housing affordability crisis.


The businessman announced his support for the Libertarian Party in October, and is considering running as a candidate in Victoria’s state election later this year.   

Though he singled out the Victorian government as “particularly appalling,” he believed public sector bloat was a federal issue, weighing down the country’s productivity and adding to a strict regulatory atmosphere in business and construction.


“We are really killing ourselves as a nation. The cost is unimaginable.”

He believed zoning laws were the primary cause of the country’s housing affordability crisis.

“In Houston, Texas, where they’ve got limited regulations on zoning, houses cost half what they do here,” he said.

“If you go to San Francisco with high levels of zoning, they cost double or triple what they do here. But then people blame immigration. It’s not immigration - it’s government that’s making it.”

Mr Penman warned Australia would become “poorer” if the public sector was not cut down and it “won’t affect the multimillionaires, it’ll affect ordinary people”.

Jim's Mowing boss unleashes on Aus govt

Public sector shores up job market

There were just under 2.6 million public sector employee jobs in the month of June 2025, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Penman would cut that number to less than one million.   

Roy Morgan gave total employment for that month at 14.2 million, which would mean 18.3 per cent or roughly one in six Aussie workers were public servants.

That would place Australia slightly below the OECD average of public sector workers, which was 18.6 per cent of total employment.

Nordic countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark reported very high levels of public sector employment - close to 30 per cent of total employment in 2021.

In China, nearly 50 per cent of workers were somehow in the government sector, including state-owned-enterprises, which formed a large chunk of the Chinese economy.

So Australia’s public sector isn’t particularly large by global standards. But in the years after the pandemic, it created far more jobs than the private sector.

According to an analysis from Australian Industry Group, more than 80 per cent of all jobs created in 2023 and 2024 were in the non-market sector.


Australian Industry Group Chief Executive Innes Wilcox said government-supported jobs had seen a “welcome decline” in 2025.
.
Usually, the private sector accounts for about two-thirds of job creation in Australia.

When its job creation rate collapsed, the government compensated with new jobs in the public sector, where workers are directly employed by the government, and the non-market sector.

Then they wonder why people join unions.  Go figure.   

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 8:44am:


I have worked in both Public and private positions. Overall I would say that public service employees work harder. There are problems with both and people who will not work no matter where they are employed.

In the public sector nepotism and corruption are much lower. HR misconduct is lower, Over corpratisation is less an issue, Training is likely better and this results in higher skills on average and a greater likelyhood of promotions being based on skill than favouritism / nepotism.

There are private sector advantages as well but it seldom works in a broad sense, there are also areas of public work where all these advantages fail.

Dnarever wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 9:00am:



I've worked in both Public and private industry too.

In private industry they retrench or sack 10% of their workers every year
to get rid of the dead wood.
They then rehire new people if they need them but
often they don't and whoever is left has to do their work as well.

In my last job I was partly doing the jobs of 5 people  - in the end -
it was very stressful and I had to pick it up on the fly.

It was very rare to see retrenchments and sackings in the public service -
you had to be really bad to lose your job.

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 9:08am:


Quote:


Most companied have no idea who the dead wood is. They mostly keep all their dead wood. They often turn over their best people.

Quote:


This also leads to the position where there are a lot of experienced people who do their job well and are very capable when promoted. In public I sacked about 6 people who really deserved it but because it was difficult to remove people the solution I found was to identify postions where people were better suited. I turned around a number of people who were percieved as poor performers by moving them to work they were better suited to.

There were problems with removing people from public service decades ago but work arounds also existed.

I could tell some horific stories but the worst even in this area was in the private sector. One guy I worked with had been with the company 18 years, One of the common question people whould ask about him was what does he do. This was a manager. If you seen him in action it seemed that his job was to move around the building talking to all the young girls. (all day every day) for almost 2 decades.
He is likely still there.

The worst guy I had in Public was this fellow who would do nothing, dissapear for hours and staged at least one false work place injury resulting in extended light duties. He was assigned to record updates where he completed about 2 lines of hand writted text in 3 months (maybe 15 words). Yes we did eventually get rid of him and it was far from easy. Back then it was a problem but it is much easier today. This area of public service have down sized by well over 100,000 people in recent decades.

Today it is probably easier to remove people from the public sector than private.

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 9:32am:


Why aren't public servants allowed to stare out the window in the morning?

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 9:32am:


In a significant outage caused by sabotage I once worked 48 hrs as a public servant. Peoples opinion of public service is at least 3 decades out of date. Much of the efficiencies attributer to private business is just fantasy. Both areas of work are not that dissimilar.

I have found at least as many bludgers in private employment as public, in fact typically more.

Dnarever wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 3:34pm:



Like automatic sacking of the worst performing 10% of their workers every year?   

Google AI:


The automatic firing of the bottom 10% of workers, often referred to as "rank and yank" or a "vitality curve," is a performance management system famously championed by Jack Welch during his tenure as CEO of General Electric (GE) in the 1980s and 1990s. The approach aims to ensure continuous workforce improvement by ranking employees and removing the lowest performers, regardless of overall team performance.


Key Aspects of the 10% Firing Rule:
The "20-70-10" System: Welch categorized the workforce into three groups: the top 20% (A players, rewarded with bonuses/promotions), the middle 70% (B players, developed), and the bottom 10% (C players, "yanked" or fired).



Goal: The strategy aimed to constantly raise the bar, replacing underperformers with new hires to foster a high-performance culture.


"Neutron Jack": Welch earned this nickname for his scorched-earth approach to reducing the workforce through this system.


Companies Associated with the Practice:
General Electric (GE): The most famous user of this system under Jack Welch, though it was largely phased out after he departed.


Amazon: Reports indicate that some managers at Amazon use "unregretted attrition" (URA) targets, or a similar "rank-and-yank" approach, to push out a percentage of underperforming staff annually.


Other Companies: Historically, companies such as Microsoft, Ford, Conoco, and others used forced ranking, though many, including Microsoft, abandoned it due to toxic effects on culture.


Intuit: In 2024, the company was noted for cutting ~10% of its workforce, intending to replace underperformers with new talent focused on AI.


Controversies and Drawbacks:
Kills Collaboration: It creates a cut-throat, Darwinian environment where employees avoid helping teammates because helping someone might hurt their own ranking.


Arbitrary Firing: It forces managers to fire people even if the entire team is performing well.


High Turnover/Morale Damage: It creates a culture of fear, leading to high anxiety and disengagement among staff.
Ineffective Long-Term: Studies suggest that this system often does not lead to long-term success and discourages innovation.

While the practice fell out of favor, some reports suggest it is seeing a "quiet comeback," particularly in tech companies that use advanced data analytics to justify the rankings.

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 4:05pm:


Never seen or heard of it.

The one I am aware of is the corrup re structure every three years which invariably contains a downsizing component. However this downsize isn't related to performance it relates to managment bonuses based on cost savings..

Companies switch between 3 structures and it is a useful method of justifying managment bonuses. The three year rotation is to maintain balance, the employee numbers are restored by the end of the first year and then maintained the next to avoid the damage from being understaffed. The third year they start agin.

“Arbitrary Firing: It forces managers to fire people even if the entire team is performing well.”

I would suggest that the focus should be on the 60% of public servants in  senior management positions should be culled effectively every 3 months.

Just like uni isn’t the real world nor is sending emails to each other valuable work!?!

Just get rid of them.

It will be like sticking your arm in a bucket of water and pulling it out.


The hole that is left behind is exactly how much they contribute and exactly how much they will be missed!

The work will still be done on the front line.

Just the manager who does nothing but paid six figures will be very sad that they have to find a job where they actually have to be responsible and held accountable.

Bobby. wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 4:33pm:


Quote:


It wans't meant as a particularly bad example - it is just the typical standard operating process of most mid size or above businesses.

Dnarever wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 5:55pm:



Tax payers money is paying for it -

the RBA is printing money to do it.

The Public service is now bloated and the largest in our history
and so is our Federal and State Debt.

Frank wrote on Jan 17^th, 2026 at 7:07pm:


So you believe that public service numbers are an unemployment statistics ploy ?  Really ???

Sometimes things seem to be dumb just because they are.

Do you need to change feet.