Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin. Will the minister inform the Senate of today’s figures concerning public sector employment in Australia? What do these figures indicate about the size of government at the federal and state levels? Is the minister aware of any proposals to create several new bureaucracies across the federal government?

Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Troeth for that good question. Today the ABS did release figures on public sector wage and salary earners and they indicate that at May this year there were 231,100 people employed by the federal government across all public sector agencies. That compares with 352,800 employees in February 1996, before our election to government. So in the 11 years since our election, a period in which two million new jobs have been created across the Australian economy, we have managed to reduce the cost to taxpayers posed by the Commonwealth public sector. That is in keeping with a strongly held philosophical commitment of the Liberal and National parties to ensuring that the public sector is efficient, effective and no larger than is necessary to implement good policy.

Of course, in contrast, the state level is very different. While the federal public sector has shrunk by 121,700 in the last 11 years, the state public sector has gone up by no less than 202,000 people. The biggest increases of course have been in the three large states—New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland—since the election of Labor governments in those states. Since the election of the Carr government originally in March 1995, New South Wales public sector employment has grown by 52,000 or 15 per cent. Public sector employment in Victoria since Labor was elected has grown by 69,700 or 28 per cent. In Queensland since Labor came to office, public sector employment has gone up by 27 per cent.

Given that clear contrast between the record of state Labor governments and our federal government, it would hardly come as any surprise to learn that the federal Labor Party is promising an explosion in new government departments, agencies, quangos and committees. So far, Mr Rudd and the Labor Party have promised to create 30 new government bodies and undertake around 58 reviews and inquiries.

This great expansion in bureaucracy and red tape will prove very expensive. It highlights that the Labor Party in fact has absolutely no plan for the future of this country. In the absence of proper and well-considered policies, the ALP promises nothing more than to create task forces and look into things. This is the ultimate triumph of Kevin Rudd, the career bureaucrat, whose long-term plan for Australia amounts to a grab bag of quangos and reviews.

Most oppositions, of course, run around claiming to be against duplication and waste. The federal Labor Party is determined to embrace both. The Labor Party has promised to create a Commissioner for Children, as well as an Office of Children and Young People—not to be confused with the Office of Early Childhood Education or indeed the Australian Early Development Index National Support Centre. Labor senators might enlighten us as to the respective roles of the National Health Reform Commission as opposed to the Health and Hospitals Advisory Group or the Expert Task Force on Preventative Health—which is different, I suppose, from the National Preventative Health Care Partnership. There is an absolute swamp of red tape that the Labor Party propose to create because they have not done the hard work to plan how to keep Australia’s economy strong and our future secure.

State Labor governments have elevated idleness and procrastination to an art form. The state bureaucracies are growing out of control, while the quality of service at state level is actually going backwards. Ask anybody in Sydney who has caught a train lately what government services are like at the state level. The Rudd Labor opposition will be no different. They want to spend vast sums of money on duplication, waste, quangos and the rest of it, because they have no plan for the future and cannot deliver.