Queensland’s Labor government: paying to justify overspending

It could happen only in a Labor state dominated by public sector trade unions. As the Queensland election approaches, the Palaszczuk government, eager to justify its ballooning bureaucracy, hired professional services firm KPMG to do the job for it. In March, the government asked the firm to prove an increase in equivalent full-time positions of more than 15,000 since the government was elected in 2015 was good “value for money”. The $165,000 commission, of dubious value to taxpayers, is probably good value for KPMG, where former Labor MP and senior staffer Mike Kaiser is a director. Documents released under right-to-information laws show the government asked the firm to establish “causal links between investment in inputs, and delivery and achievement of outcomes”. Its final report will need close scrutiny.

The blowout in public service numbers, and Queensland’s growing debt, which is set to exceed $80 billion by 2020-21, ­provide an opportunity for the Liberal National Party opposition to take a comprehensive economic reform plan to the election. The state needs smaller government and a strategy to make its economy more competitive to encourage private sector investment and jobs growth. Labor’s so-called “debt action plan’’, which has seen state-owned corporations loaded up with more debt and public service superannuation and long-service leave holdings raided is no real plan at all.

From 2012 to 2015, the Newman government took the brave decision to cut 14,000 full-time equivalent public service positions — which Premier Annastacia Palas­zczuk and her team have since restored and added to in the name of improving frontline ­services.

As a result of increased hiring and pay rises, growth in public service wage costs in Queensland have been far ahead of inflation. When the budget was released in June, the 6.7 per cent hike in wage costs for the March quarter compared with a year earlier, was more than double the increase in public wage costs across the rest of Australia. Spending even more in the expectation KPMG will rubber-stamp such largesse is no justification for it.