David Crisafulli’s PR, communications team now 1260 strong

Premier David Crisafulli faces mounting pressure over his government’s 1260 PR staff and growing bureaucracy, despite previously criticising Labor for excessive communications spending.

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli. Picture Lachie Millard

David Crisafulli’s Liberal ­National Party government ­employs 1260 public relations and communications staff, more than the total number of frontline ­disability or youth workers.

Queensland Public Service Commission data shows that in March this year, the state government employed 270,884 full-time-equivalent workers, an increase of 12,872 public servants, or 5 per cent, since March last year when former Labor premier Steven Miles was in power.

The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks Queensland politics column revealed a breakdown of the bureaucracy, showing there were 1260 communication, media and marketing FTEs employed by the Crisafulli government, compared to 919 disability support workers and 1177 youth and case workers.

In a response to a question on notice from the Labor opposition, Mr Crisafulli – a former regional TV journalist – said that between 2014 and 2025 the proportion of employees working in communication, media and marketing roles had remained stable.

This year’s figure was “in line with the previous year’s figure” when Labor was in government, the Premier said, and counted public servants whose jobs ­involved “media management, online and digital communication, graphic design, event management, communication governance and (communication) policy”. In March last year, the Miles Labor government ­employed 1250 media staff.

A recent Australia Institute ­report used census data to determine 1145 journalists live in Queensland.

Budget papers show the public service wage bill is the Queensland government’s largest ­expense; employee expenses are projected to be $37.9bn in 2025-26, or 38 per cent of the government’s operating costs. The wage bill is forecast be $1.77bn, or 4.9 per cent, more than what was recorded in 2024-25.

By the middle of next year, the Queensland public service is forecast to increase to 277,352 FTE workers, up from 271,279 on June 30 this year.

The size of the public service is a political and budget challenge for Mr Crisafulli, who was elected promising he would not cut the size of the bureaucracy.

He was a minister in Campbell Newman’s LNP government between 2012 and 2015, which was ousted after just one term when it slashed 14,000 jobs from the public service.

Mr Crisafulli in July. Picture: Richard Walker

But ratings agency S&P has warned Queensland needs to cap its public service wages bill or risk a credit rating downgrade.

There will also be pressure on the budget as public sector unions press the government for better deals for their members.

The LNP is estimated to have blown out the spending estimates in its first budget by $1bn due to sweeteners negotiated in enterprise bargaining for police, firefighters and nurses.

Then opposition leader Mr Crisafulli was critical of Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2022 for spending on external media consultancies and in-house communications staff.

“People will accept advertising with a message. What they won’t accept is advertising telling them how great the government is and increasingly the line is being blurred,” he told Nine News in August 2022.

Revelations about the size of Mr Crisafulli’s PR team came a day after the Australian Bureau of Statistics annual snapshot of the public sector workforce showed Queensland at state level had the largest growth of any arm of government in 2024-25. Queensland’s state public service grew by 19,200 from June 2024 to a year later, eclipsing the divisions of every other state, the territories and the commonwealth.

Queensland’s overall public service growth, including commonwealth and local government workers, of 22,700 represented more than a quarter of the national total of 82,000. On a per-capita basis, the Queensland public service is larger than those in NSW, Victoria and WA, with 93 public servants for every 1000 people.