Steve Price: Worrying about a Labor win this weekend? There’s a solution
If the election results in an Albanese Labor government, even in minority with the Teals and the Greens, fear not — just join the public service!
Opinion
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As Australians line up this weekend for a democracy sausage and the chance to vote for who runs us for the next three years, ponder this statistic.
As of the end of November last year, more than two and a half million Aussies were on the public payroll. They are public servants working for the federal, state or local governments. A staggering number.
Most have job security, flexible working hours and aside from the frontline workers, a pretty cushy existence.
If, by comparison, you are a salaried employee working for a private company, or a small-business owner, you are one of Australia’s overtaxed mugs and if Labor wins this weekend, it will quite literally be taxing you to death.
A valid question to ask after three years of a federal Labor government is: do you struggle to cope with the cost-of-living crisis?
Is your family now forced to work two or three jobs to maintain the standard of living you had pre-Covid? I know this has been a favourite line from the Coalition during this dreary election campaign, but it is a valid question.
Victorians forced to survive Dan Andrews’ Labor government lockdowns were entitled to have hope that after Covid, things would get better. Not many I know feel that way.
Federal Labor won in May 2022, so almost exactly three years ago this weekend, in a result largely driven by a dislike of former PM Scott Morrison. Anthony Albanese and his team promised cheaper power bills that never arrived and the price of everything has skyrocketed.
In 2025, things like holidays interstate or overseas are now just a memory confined to photos in your phone. Your cars and your house are either underinsured or not insured at all because of crippling premium increases year on year.
Maybe you are behind in paying those ever-increasing utility bills like electricity, gas, water and council rates. And if you run or own a small or medium sized business you’ve probably had to sack staff, unable to pay penalty rates and work cover insurance.
What about Jacinta Allan’s punishing land tax bills on the little factory you operate, or how’s that bill for the payroll-tax of those staff you want to hang on to.
If you work for a private company paying you a salary, how’s the financial stress you carry around wondering if next week you might be made redundant. Sure, there might be an interest-rate cut by the Reserve Bank next week but that still leaves you and your mortgage 10 cuts away from where you were.
Financial stress and job insecurity and the lack of a clear permanent employment pathway is a hell of a way to live.
I do, however, have a solution if the election result returns an Albanese Labor government even in minority with the Teals and the Greens. Join the public service!
Preferably a job in the Federal public service but state or local government would be just fine. Job security, cushy hours and lots of working from home plus zero examination of your productivity, or lack thereof.
Too cynical? Well hold onto your government-issued mobile phone before you flood me with how tough life can be as a servant of the public – us, the poor old taxpayers.
Now let me be very clear here, I am not talking about nurses, police, military personnel, border force officials or any other frontline workers, male or female.
What I am talking about is those federal public servants dotted around Australia with a large number of them based in the Canberra bubble earning inflated, guaranteed long-term stable wages. What a life living in a sheltered workshop like Canberra with its perfect roads, plentiful schools and richly-funded hospitals.
Department secretaries are on seven figure salaries while deputy secretaries are pulling high six figure renumeration.
This whole debate over public servants is not new, but was thrust into the middle of this campaign when the Coalition pledged to cut numbers if elected.
Peter Dutton was taking aim at Canberra public servants and kept using a figure of 36,000 new Canberra-based public servants added to the payroll in the three years of Labor. The figure was inflated, but not by much, and in fact the bulk of new hires were in the first two years of the new Labor regime.
The language by Dutton and other Coalition frontbenchers was loose – just like Labor’s lie that Dutton’s nuclear policy would cost $600 billion, which is false – and Labor turned it into an election issue by claiming Dutton was hunting down women working from home Australia wide.
The Liberal leader was portrayed as some misogynistic evil lifestyle killer determined to end the post-Covid work from home habits of stressed mums working in the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.
The policy was always only about a cohort of what we suspect are under worked and overpaid Canberra civil servants sitting around in leisure wear and walking their dogs instead of working for you. But the scare worked and could be responsible for this weekend’s result.
A news wire agency decided to test the Coalition’s 36,000 public servants in Canberra number and found Labor had added 7464 Canberra-based public servants in a two-year period.
That’s seventy-two people signed up to be paid by you every week over two years, including the weeks of the summer break, and who kids themselves anyone in the public service, aside from frontline workers, clocks on over summer.
So, it wasn’t 36,000 in Canberra – phew – but hang on it was, according to this wire service check and the Australian Public Service itself, an extra 26,153 public servants hired nationally, not in three years but just two years. Melbourne – lucky us – topped the table with 5000 new hires over that two-year period, Sydney found space for 3000 and another 900 scored desk jobs in regional Queensland.
Even the Northern Territory got 362 new positions and regional NSW 484.
I am sure there are hardworking public servants that make our country a better and safer place to live. Problem is, I’ve never met one. Again, I am not talking about frontline government employees, but the types so brilliantly portrayed by the Sir Humphrey Appelby character in the TV series Yes Minister.
If, as it seems likely, Labor wins the election this weekend you wonder how many more of these government jobs for life will be dished out. I guess that’s one way to get yourself re-elected.
Dislikes
Blackouts across Spain and Portugal a pointer for what’s headed our way in the rush to renewables.
Melbourne roads crowded with dangerous Uber and food delivery scooters ignoring road rules.
North Melbourne football club banning media personality Kane Cornes accusing him of bullying.
Likes
Crackdown in Victoria of foreign residents using overseas driver’s licences.
Jeremy Clarkson’s hosting of the British version of the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Former British PM Tony Blair bells the cat on net-zero calling the ambition “irrational.”
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