As I wrote recently, hysterical claims by the public servant’s unions that the Albanese government is about to ‘slash’ the public service are about as convincing as Bruce Pascoe’s claims to be ‘Aboriginal’. Even if anyone really believes they’ll cut their loyal army of troughers by a ‘whopping’, get this, five per cent, that’s barely a fraction of the 30 per cent public sector growth since Albanese came to power.
The federal government could sack 70,000 publicly-funded layabouts and there’d still be nearly two million of the leeches sucking at the taxpayer teat.
It’s even more hilarious when the Victorian government makes the same claim.
Victoria’s bloated public sector has avoided the deepest cuts recommended by Helen Silver’s review, with just 29 of 500 public entities and boards to be axed.
The Allan government will strip 332 executive and senior technical jobs out of the Victorian Public Service and 1000 jobs in total across the public sector, about half the number recommended by the state’s former top bureaucrat.
Woo-hoo! 1000 public servants less!
That leaves just… 381,823.
The government claims these measures, combined with reducing its use of consultants and office space freed up by public servants working from home, will save the budget more than $4 billion over the next four years.
Which still leaves the budget $30 billion in the red from public servants’ wages alone. This is the state where after all, over the past 15 years of Labor government, the public service has bloated at twice the rate of population growth.
To be fair, some of it almost sounds like a good start.
Among the most significant changes, Victoria’s independent health promotions agency VicHealth will cease to exist as a standalone entity and be absorbed into the Department of Health […]
Sustainability Victoria, Cladding Safety Victoria, the Trade and Investment Board, the Latrobe Health Assembly, the Victorian Public Sector Commission Advisory Board, the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council and the Road Safety Camera Commissioner and Reference Group will all be wound up.
Some existing entities will be merged, with Recycling Victoria folding into the Environment Protection Authority and multiple registration boards consolidated into a new Business and Processions Regulator.
Still, they’ll claw the clipboards out of the troughers’ cold, dead hands.
Infrastructure Victoria will be “refocused” with a reduced budget after the government did not accept the review’s recommendation to abolish it […]
The government rejected a recommendation to cease the rollout of government-funded Early Learning and Childcare Centres and shift them into the hands of private providers, a reform which would have booked savings of more than $350 million.
After all, they can’t train Victorian children to be obedient little communists if they can’t brainwash them from birth.
