Big ‘freeze’ continues for Queensland’s public service hiring

The move has been extended for another year as the state tries to get on top of its ballooning spending bill.

Queensland’s public service hiring freeze has been extended for another year as the state tries to get on top of its ballooning spending bill.

The state’s expenses will surge to $67.148bn in 2021-22, an extra spend of $2.95bn on last year, to cover pandemic costs including fever and vaccination clinics, contact tracing efforts and industry rescue packages.

Queensland Treasury does not expect the state’s revenue to keep up with its spending until 2024-25, when a slim surplus is projected.

Handed down on Tuesday the “traditional Labor budget”, as described by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, is the second since she was returned to power seven months ago on the back of a tough border policy.

“We put the health of Queenslanders first, and because of that we’re in the best possible position to create more jobs for those same Queenslanders,” she said.

“Queensland is a big state, it is a growing state and we need to pay for that,” she said.

The hiring freeze, implemented in the height of the pandemic, still allows the state to hire people to frontline jobs and appoint bureaucrats within the public service to corporate roles.

Queensland’s public service continues to grow faster than the general population and has ballooned by 17 per cent since the Labor government came to power in 2015.

The 14,000 public service jobs axed under the LNP Newman government have been replaced more than twice over.

There are now 242,470 full-time public servants in Queensland, about half of whom live outside of Brisbane.

The wage bill was expected to come in at $26.284bn on June 30 – $624m more than last year - with employee expenses sucking out 44 per cent of the revenue the government is pulling in.

In 2011-12, the final year of the Bligh government, wage spend was $18.25bn, which ate up 40 per cent of revenue.

In 2014-15, the last budget under the Newman government, employee expenses totalled $18.94bn or 38 per cent of revenue.

The Queensland government is expected to hire another 3797 full-time workers in the next year, mostly in frontline health and education roles.

Mr Dick’s second budget abandoned a key fiscal principle to keep bureaucracy growth in line with population growth.

He said the hiring freeze would be run “on a year to year basis”.

Mr Dick also said the state would now measure fiscal success by its ability to keep expenditure below revenue growth rather than sticking to a “headcount” that could encourage departments to outsource work.