Public servants under threat if LNP government
Edited from the New England Times
Barnaby legacy vs Dutton ideology: Regional public servants under threat
Edited from New England Times by RK Crosby 15th April 2025
Peter Dutton is not having a good time on the campaign trail.
From Trump tariffs to his dad having a ‘medical episode’ on the day of the debate, not much is going to plan, and it is clear that the Opposition Leader is starting to panic as the confidence wanes. The most concrete example of this is the backflip and equivocation on the policies around public servants. As part of their ideological push to have a ‘better not bigger’ public service, the Coalition originally announced they would cut 36,000 jobs to bring the size of the public service back to where it was the last time they were in office. After the recent budget announced an increase in public servants, the number of job cuts was raised to 41,000.
The ‘how’ has shifted almost on a daily basis, beginning with claims they will sack the required number. That then became a reduction through voluntary redundancies and natural attrition by not replacing staff as they resign. That then became a ‘cap’ that will be achieved over five years through natural attrition.
Then Dutton ruled out reductions in frontline staff and critical agencies, including those that contribute to national security, but has not specified which of the tens of thousands of roles will not be replaced once they are vacant, nor if any of those jobs are in regional areas.
Public service cuts will hit the New England hard
In the New England, cuts to the public service are a real threat to many local communities. As at 31 December 2024, there were 401 public servants within the New England North West. Almost half of those are at the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) in Armidale, which Barnaby Joyce fought very hard to forcibly move here when he was the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources in 2016.
Most of the other public servant jobs based in the New England are in service delivery roles, such as Services Australia staff, or working on specific projects, like the five ongoing roles at the Inland Rail office in Moree.
However, while they have made clear that front line jobs will be quarantined from the cuts, it is not clear if the Coalition’s proposal includes project or temporary roles, which are the vast number of jobs associated with the Inland Rail project, which hit around 2000 workers in phase 1 of construction.
It’s also not clear if the cuts to the public service will extend to other roles in the public sector, that are not public servants per se, such as the 21 full time equivalent roles at the Cotton Research and Development Corporation in Narrabri. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at the time of the 2021 Census, 2297 New Englanders were employed in the public sector by the Commonwealth Government.