Election 2022: Coalition public service push ‘will cost lives and money’, says Anthony Albanese

Anthony Albanese has claimed that Coalition plans to drive $2.7bn in efficiencies across the Australian Public Service will lead to deaths and won’t save money.

‘What you won’t see from us is the waste and the rorts’: Anthony Albanese addresses the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Anthony Albanese has claimed that Coalition plans to drive $2.7bn in efficiencies across the Australian Public Service will lead to deaths and won’t save money, as Labor prepares to unveil higher deficits when it releases its costings on Thursday.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Opposition Leader revealed that Labor would recoup $750m by slashing the government’s community ­development grants program and regionalisation fund.

With the unions railing against the Coalition’s ambition to reduce APS spending by $2.7bn, Mr Albanese launched an attack on the government’s proposed 2 per cent efficiency dividend.

“They stood up and said we’re going to cut the public service even more. You know what that leads to? Robodebt. It doesn’t save money. It costs money because you take humans out of human services and it has devastating consequences for real people … it costs lives as well as over $1bn to taxpayers,” he said.

With millions of Australians having already voted, Mr Albanese described criticism of Labor for failing to release its costings sooner as “nonsense” and claimed the ALP had already released price tags on its policies.

“What you won’t see from us is the waste and the rorts. It’s got to end, and we’ve got to prioritise growing the economy and productivity,” he said.

Finance Minister Simon Birmingham said Mr Albanese’s ­“hyperbolic claims once again ­reflect that he does not understand how to run a government”.

“What we are proposing is a very modest change to the (public service) efficiency dividend, taking it from 1.5 per cent back to 2 per cent,” Senator Birmingham told The Australian.

“We are confident that the commonwealth public sector can find reasonable efficiencies in the way in which they go about their business that will in no way impact on the quality of service delivery.

“Under the previous Labor government, efficiency dividends were as high as 4 per cent. Now that he’s under pressure to reveal his own costings, which are no doubt full of blackholes and blowouts, he’s trying to use unfounded scare tactics as distraction.”

In his speech, Mr Albanese said Labor would “reduce the uncommitted funding in the community development grants program by $350m and return the $400m ­regionalisation fund back to the budget”.

“These two decisions alone will repair the budget by three-­quarters of a billion dollars,” he said. “If I have the honour of serving as prime minister, it will be my mission – and my responsibility – to ensure every dollar spent in the budget is used to drive the productivity growth we need to pay down Liberal debt, and to deliver meaningful quality of life ­improvements for all Australians.”

Deputy Prime Minister ­Barnaby Joyce said Mr Albanese’s promise to cut the community develop­ment grants program and regional­isation fund proved that “meanness permeates through the Labor Party”.

He said Labor would need to explain to autistic children, Indigenous communities and regional residents what programs would be scrapped.

“This is a sign of parochialism taking over from logic. The regionalisation fund is there to grow ­regional jobs. I thought they were for jobs? It’s just because it says the word region that they don’t like it. This is why people in the Hunter Valley and central Queensland have given up on the Labor Party,” Mr Joyce told The Australian.