00:00Nobody forced out. That's the Federal Opposition's commitment to public servants, some of whom
00:08may have been sweating hearing this line less than a fortnight ago.
00:12We'll reverse Labor's increase of 41,000 Canberra public servants.
00:17The now-confirmed hiring freeze had already been flagged as an option.
00:21There's a natural attrition rate now in the public service, which is high because it's
00:25big, and so we can rely on that.
00:29Yesterday's clarification suggests the cuts will come from across the country, not just
00:34Canberra. But ACT Labor remains unconvinced.
00:38I think Australians can fully expect that if Peter Dutton was to become Prime Minister,
00:43that the public service would be massively cut.
00:46And it's raising doubts about the pledge to safeguard frontline services.
00:51Where we see turnover in public service, they're in frontline public service agencies. So it's
00:56simply not believable.
00:58Somebody who's processing payments for veterans sitting at a desk in Canberra, are they providing
01:03a frontline service, or is it only somebody who's at a Centrelink office actually talking
01:07literally face-to-face with someone?
01:10University of Canberra economics lecturer John Hawkins, himself a former public servant,
01:15thinks pledges to cut bureaucratic fat aren't as popular as they once were.
01:20Whilst they might, as a generalisation, like the idea of reducing inefficiencies, if you
01:26talk about a specific area that you're taking public servants out of, then people are worried
01:30about that.
01:31The worst two years for the ACT economy in the last three decades were during the first
01:37years of the Howard and Abbott governments, both of whom cut public service jobs.
01:42Peter Dutton's proposed hiring freeze may not lead to the same economic shock, but in
01:48a city which wouldn't exist without the government, even that might prove to be a hard sell.
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