Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll say at the outset that the government's ongoing cuts to and privatisation of the Australian Public Service is undermining the quality of services to Australians: to people who can't get a consistent NDIS plan in any kind of sensible time, because they are all labour hire contractors; to people waiting for their age pension claim month after month after month because Centrelink doesn't have any staff; to people who are wondering how the once competent Public Service could make a $60 billion stuff-up. It's because there are not enough sensible human beings left checking the work. My personal favourite under this government is the visa and citizenship processing. You tried to privatise the $1 billion system to your Liberal Party mates, but you abandoned the tender and wasted $92 million of taxpayer money! Ninety-two million dollars cash: gone on a failed tender trying to get rid of public servants. Australians are sick of privatisation and they're not buying it anymore! I want to put some facts into this debate and actually set out how the government is doing this. It's all being driven, fundamentally, by arbitrary caps on the Public Service, which forces privatisation by stealth—even where it's proven to be cheaper to do the work in-house or build capability in-house. It's no accident; it's a deliberate agenda to cap staff numbers and force the privatisation.

We heard from the previous speaker, the member for Goldstein, that it's 'reasonable and logical'—he used his 'reasonable' voice—that, since coming to office, the Liberals have cut the number of public servants by 18,000. That's a 10 per cent cut in raw numbers, which is bad enough, but in real terms Australia's population has grown. So with a growing and ageing population and a growing demand for public services, instead of meeting this demand, the Liberals cut and privatise. Why? There is no reason. The only reason the government has ever given for this number is that it was the number when John Howard left office. That's it. That is the reason for the number, a magical golden era. Thirteen years on, since 2007, Australia's population has grown by five million people, or 23 per cent. But if we look at the number of public servants per person in Australia, a per capita proxy measure, it's a cut of 22.1 per cent in real terms under the Liberals formula. It's deliberate.

There are two ways this is happening, this privatisation. The first way is that the staffing caps force outsourcing to temporary casual labour hire firms. The Auditor-General recently revealed more than $2 billion blown on casual workers because of the staffing caps. The explosion in the spending on labour hire firms raises serious value-for-money and probity questions. We proved this through the Public Accounts and Audit Committee last year. We had departments in here saying it costs us 40 per cent more to hire the IT contractors for years in the ABS, and they're only wasting those millions of dollars of money because this bloody government's ideology—

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