Skip to content

Plenty of Government Fat to Trim

There’s a whole lot of pigs with their snouts in the government trough.

This is what we need. The Good Oil. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.
He’s got ’em on the list – he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed – they’ll none of ’em be missed – Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado.

If only Australia could have a Milei-esque figure ready to take the chainsaw to our bloated public service! Javier Milei has sacked nearly 35,000 public servants and slashed 200 government bodies in just over a year. They’ll none of ’em be missed.

In the USA, Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency plans to similarly shrink America’s gargantuan public service. Vivek Ramaswamy states that DOGE may eliminate entire federal agencies and reduce the number of federal employees by as much as 75 per cent. Elon Musk has also proposed slashing the number of federal agencies from more than 400 to fewer than 100. Potentially, the US could save trillions.

So, what about Australia?

We are one of the most over-governed countries in the world. An astonishing one in three workers is on the public payroll. A series of Labor governments at state and federal level have exploded their number of public servants (public servants just happen to tend to vote left). As of December 2023, there are 1,334 government entities reportable to the Australian Government Organisations Register.

The appointment of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to establish a new ‘government efficiency’ platform to crack down on wasteful spending could be brilliant for the nation — if the coalition wins the next election.

But, Australian political history is littered with the garbage of opposition shadow ministers taking on such a role and being failures in office. Unless Price is very disciplined, she will end up in the same garbage bin as her predecessors.

Not just disciplined, but indefatigable. Hacking through the jungle with a machete would be a doddle compared to trimming the bloated fat of Australia’s government sector. Where to start?

My advice to Price is to pick three or four areas where the proliferation of government bodies is extreme and is greatly harming overall activity.

The first and most obvious is closest to Jacinta Price’s area of expertise – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activities – where huge sums are being siphoned off by the agenda-setting bodies and not reaching places like Alice Springs where people desperately need it.

Australia spends over $30 billion every year on Aboriginal Australians, more than twice as much per head as the rest of us. As even the briefest experience of a remote town camp shows, very little of that money is reaching those who most need it. The abolition of the egregiously nepotistic ATSIC has done little to remedy the situation.

The howls of outrage will be deafening, of course. Consider the chorus of screeching when former PM Tony Abbott meekly suggested it was pointless to use government money to keep open communities in the middle of nowhere with no jobs or the remotest possibility of economic development. Somebody’s making a fortune out of Aboriginal welfare, and they’re determined to keep it that way.

My second obvious area is, of course, the NDIS but this involves having a chief executive who is set the task of designing a completely new system. It can’t be done in opposition and so for the moment let us put it aside.

The NDIS was an obvious money pit from the get-go. Which is why then-PM Julia Gillard craftily pushed most of its funding well past the reporting requirements of forward estimates. It’s only with Gillard mercifully long gone from the scene that the true scale of the monster she created has become undeniable. The NDIS is now one of the biggest sinkholes on the government books and growing at an exponential rate. Very shortly, if it continues to grow, it will outstrip the entire Medicare budget.

Here, too, there’s vast scope for trimming fat. The Australian healthcare system is bloated with clipboard carriers.

Australia-wide for an average of about 2.5 nurses there is one administrator, in most states.

Given the world standard is about 10 nurses/paramedics to one administrator, there is an opportunity to shift some administrators into real work, increasing the number of people on the ground and perhaps increasing their remuneration at no cost to the community.

Try getting that past the powerful healthcare unions – some of Labor’s most militant and wealthiest footsoldiers.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is clearly a formidable woman, but whether even she can take on Australia’s gargantuan trougher class remains to be seen.

In the meantime, invest in earplugs.


💡
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.

Latest