Shannon Deery: Victorians will be the ones to hurt under latest job cuts ‘bloodbath’
Victorians could be forgiven for demanding a little less conversation and a lot more action in tackling an ever-growing public service. But Jacinta Allan faces a tough balancing act in cutting fat, managing a government-worker backlash and maintaining services.
Opinion
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Victoria’s super-sized public service has long been the most bloated in the nation.
Over the past decade the government has failed to keep a lid on both wage growth and the number of employees.
The public service has outpaced population growth with a wages bill almost doubling from $18.8bn when Labor came to office to $37.52bn today.
In that time the government has paid public servants about $20bn more than it expected, continually revising budgets to reflect wage blowouts.
Despite repeated warnings from economists that it was hampering efforts to address ballooning debt, waste and overlap has reigned supreme.
This year the government’s wages bill, its largest expense, blew out by almost $3bm.
Victoria is now headed toward what government insiders describe as a “budget bloodbath” -the latest annual instalment of fiscal misery for the state.
Each year we are promised the budget bottom line is improving, and each year the budget delivers an increasingly brutal reality.
The launch of a review into the public service will be welcome.
But will anything actually change?
We’ve had review after review with zero to little real impact.
In 2023 then treasurer Tim Pallas promised the biggest public servant job cull in more than a decade.
Since that time, the public service has actually grown.
The government has spent millions of dollars in external consultants to carry out base and efficiency reviews to find savings and cut jobs.
They’ve done little to cap the ballooning public sector.
Victorians could be forgiven for demanding a little less conversation, a lot more action.
With the latest promised cuts, the government faces the tough balancing act of finding efficiencies without compromising service delivery.
It will already face an angry backlash against public servants facing the axe.
If it jeopardises service delivery and fails to meet community expectations of its core responsibilities, that backlash could be a whole lot more damaging.
Originally published as Shannon Deery: Victorians will be the ones to hurt under latest job cuts ‘bloodbath’
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