Public service to be cut by $200m next year, but no forced redundancies

Queensland’s public service will be cut by $1.7 billion over four years as the Government tries to wrest control of its ballooning workforce - but the savings are accompanied by one key Government promise.

QUEENSLAND’S public service will be cut by $1.7 billion over four years as the Government tries to wrest control of its ballooning workforce.

A specialist office within Queensland Treasury will comb through departments from July, trimming fat as the Government looks to rein in burgeoning employee expenses set to hit $25.4 billion in 2019-20 — $1.3 billion more than this year.

The Service Priority Review Office has been told to find $200 million in savings next year, rising to $500 million annually every year after as the Government tries to cap wage growth in 2020-21 to just $332 million.

But Treasurer Jackie Trad has promised no forced redundancies in realising her ambitious targets and said it was “not the intention” to oversee job cuts.

Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad during a State Budget media briefing. Picture: Glenn Hunt/AAP

It’s understood the practice of outsourcing will be targeted and natural attrition will be used.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the Government was “100 per cent serious” about making the savings.

“We’re focused on it and we need everyone to play their part,” she said.

“So where we can make savings across Government, where we can do things better, that is what we will do.

“We expect that from the private sector and we expect that from Government.”

Since the Palaszczuk Government’s election in 2015, 22,726 extra workers have been hired and a further 4391 are expected to join the ranks in 2019-20 under its promise to “restore frontline services”.

The Government says 91.4 per cent of public servants are in “frontline and frontline support roles”.

But figures contained in the Budget show only 61 per cent of those new hires were in what the Government lists as key frontline positions.

They are the 16,917 teachers, teacher aides, nurses, health practitioners, doctors, paramedics and police officers hired from 2014-15 to March this year.

The Government will also scrap former treasurer Curtis Pitt’s fiscal principle to match public service growth to population growth on advice from former QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake, whose public service review was released last week.

It will instead separate out health and education growth, which are based on activity and demand rather than population growth, and report them separately.

It will also change how its counts public servants, reporting twice yearly instead of quarterly and will report on and monitor its large indirect workforce of contractors, which Professor Coaldrake found had cost taxpayers $1.5 billion in 2016-17.

The Coaldrake report also recommended a “reconfiguring, redistributing and rejuvenating” of the public service to make sure workers could meet future job requirements.