Shadow tourism minister Scott Leary slams Labor over outsourced work for Walking On A Dream tourism campaign
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How Labor's bloated public sector 'Blob' that sealed Peter Dutton's fate is spreading its tentacles even deeper into taxpayers' wallets
Peter Dutton's plan to axe 36,000 public servants and force the rest of them back into the office was never going to be a vote-winner in Canberra. The Liberals' primary vote fell to a historic low of 21 per cent across the three lower house seats in the ACT. Labor voters outnumbered Coalition voters by more than two to one for the first time. The size of the public service workforce has never been larger, nor its preference for Labor governments stronger. The Coalition's limit on headcount was relaxed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Labor's election in 2022 ensured that the ranks of bureaucrats would continue to swell. The expansion of government bureaucracy is a global phenomenon that appears to be unstoppable. Michael Gove, the former British Conservative cabinet minister, famously described it as the Blob, after a cult 1958 science fiction movie in which a meteor crashes to Earth near a small Pennsylvania town, releasing a malevolent red jelly that quickly expands, consuming everything in its path. "It's indescribable, indestructible, and nothing can stop it," read the cinema posters. Under Anthony Albanese, the federal government blob has grown by 30 per cent, from 136,330 at the end of 2021 to 178,230 in December 2024. Budget forecasts predict the number will continue to rise to more than 213,000 by the end of next year. It means 87,000 public servants will have been added to the payroll since the pre-pandemic low in 2019. The public service unions have a powerful influence over Labor, providing donations, a steady supply of willing volunteers at election time and parliamentary candidates. Between them, they have connived to portray every government bureaucrat as an essential front-line worker, and every Coalition leader who threatens their jobs as a heartless brute intent on making the lives of vulnerable Australians unbearable. This presents a distorted picture of the federal public service, which is predominantly administrative in nature. Most government employees who could reasonably be portrayed as front-line workers, such as nurses, firefighters, teachers, and police are on the payroll of state governments. No sane person would turn up at the Department of Health's headquarters in the Sirius Building in Woden seeking treatment for a sore back, for example. The 7,000-plus workforce staff are primarily comprised of policy, regulatory, administrative and program management personnel, rather than clinical practitioners. The 20,000-plus Defence Department employees are not taught to load a rifle. The soldiers, sailors and air crews who put their lives on the line for the country are accounted for elsewhere. Department of Education employees aren't paid to teach, and Transport Department workers don't drive trucks. The singular exception to this rule is the National Disability Insurance Agency. The introduction of the NDIS under the Gillard government transferred much of the responsibility for caring for people with disabilities from the states to the federal government in Canberra. The largest employer of public servants is the Department of Social Services and its associated agencies, where the number of employees has increased from just under 38,000 five years ago to around 48,000 today. Even if we assume everyone who works there is on the front line, which is doubtful, it represents a mere fraction of the extra workers on the books. Analysis in The Australian this week by Geoff Chambers paints a depressing picture of how the extra workers fill in their working hours. Service delivery jobs have increased by a modest 28 per cent since 2019. Administration jobs are up by 74 per cent, portfolio, program, and project management positions have increased by 153 per cent, strategic policy jobs by 154 per cent and communications and marketing jobs by 89 per cent. Human resources positions have risen by 48 per cent, confirming our worst fears that more public servants are employed to manage themselves essentially. HR professionals are skilled at creating work for themselves, devising an endless number of programmes, education courses, and compliance and reporting obligations that reduce the productivity of everyone else in the building. The latest thing they have called upon themselves to manage is neurodivergency, a term used to describe individuals whose brain functions differ from what is considered "neurotypical". It embraces conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Tourette syndrome, and encourages inclusion and acceptance of different ways of thinking. Neurodivergent is not a diagnostic term, and critics argue it conflates a wide range of conditions without distinguishing differences in cause, severity, or support needs. Last year, an Australian Public Service survey found that '8.8 per cent of respondents considered themselves to be neurodivergent, another 9.3 per cent of respondents considered that they may be neurodivergent, and 9.5 per cent of respondents said they were unsure what neurodivergent means'. Home Affairs and Services Australia have established neurodiversity units to manage this perceived problem. All of which suggests that there is no limit to the work that Canberra public servants will appoint themselves to do, given the licence to do so by a willing government. Any suggestion of greater efficiency or making public servants more accountable to the voting public they theoretically serve is instantly dismissed as a cold-hearted and reactionary gesture by politicians too mean or too stupid to appreciate the value of the work they do. The teenage heroes in The Blob, played by Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut, discover the protoplasm's weakness and manage to stop it. Yet there was no such happy ending for Mr Dutton, whose fate will doubtless deter future conservative leaders from pursuing similar policies. Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a regular contributor to Sky News Australia
