Has it really come down to this – rich, talented, diverse Australia is having an election where the choice is between a few dollars off petrol and a pie-in-the sky nuclear-power plan, on one hand, and a few dollars off tax and medical bills, on the other?
Not quite. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese still has one major electoral asset – he is not Peter Dutton and does not have a Trump-Musk-Vance-like plan to run a chainsaw through the Federal Public Service and end efficient women-friendly working-from-home policies.
Even so, relying on a negative is not very uplifting. If Albanese is still Prime Minister after the election he should ask himself what would he like his legacy to be – because if he is no longer Prime Minister then, the answer would be nothing. He has just tinkered not created.
The reason is plain. At least since 2019, Australia has become a trepidocracy. The major parties refuse to venture any worthwhile reform out of fear. They fear easily generated, relatively cheap-to-run scare campaigns against any change that might reduce corporate profits or make any group of voters worse off.
Asymmetrical electoral warfare and trepidocracy has led Australia into a policy paralysis that makes us all worse off.
We might have trepidocracy and corporatocracy, but we do not have idiocracy. The main figures in the Albanese Government are intelligent and well-educated. They know what they should be doing. But do not do it.
Returning to the Public Service, Dutton’s promise to cut 41,000 jobs is quintessentially Trump-like. It is based on emotion-triggering demonisation and exaggeration.
Just as Trump brands all undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals, Dutton conjures up an emotion-appealing image of thousands of lazy, overpaid, useless Canberra public servants wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned cash.
That imagery is dangerously powerful because it can turn voters against their own interests and because it is so hard to counter it.
But let’s try by applying some hard-based facts to the assertion – facts that most Australians would get wrong if asked. Try yourself.
What percentage of the Australian workforce are Federal public servants? What percentage of them work in Canberra? How many of them do we have? What percentage of them will Dutton cut?
Answers: A very tiny 1.36 percent, of whom just 38 per cent work in the ACT. The total number of Australian public servants is just 185,343 people, so Dutton’s 41,000 cut would be 22 per cent – between a fifth and a quarter.
But if you exclude the more-or-less untouchable – civilian support of the armed services (16,000), the National-Party protected Agriculture (7000), and border protection – Dutton’s cuts would come to 26 per cent.
Guess where that will come from – the old Coalition scapegoats: public health, public education, welfare, the environment and regulation to make corporate cowboys behave themselves. You know, the things that make Australia one of the best places in the world to live.
The so-called “savings” will be translated into tax cuts for the already well-off.
It is no exaggeration to say this is Trump-like. The New York Times reports: “Based on the latest available information, [the Trump] reductions could affect at least 12 percentof the 2.4 million civilian federal workers.”
So, Dutton’s public-sector chain-sawing promises are about double that of Trump.
It would do terrible damage to Australian society, but it is couched in factually incorrect terms that stir voter emotions to think it is a good idea.
Look at the propaganda method. Opposition Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor said, “We know they’re [Labor] spending a lot more money, and the result of that is we’ve got the biggest government we’ve ever seen in our history. We’ve seen Labor adding 36,000 new Canberra-based bureaucrats.”
However, latest official figures show a net increase of 26,153 Australian Public Service employees from June 2022 (one month after Labor came to power) to June 2024, of which only about 7500 are based in Canberra.
A pamphlet entitled “Priorities of a Dutton Coalition Government” says: “The size of the public service has exploded under Labor, with 36,000 extra Canberra-based bureaucrats employed since the last election.”
You can only conclude that Dutton and Taylor are either dishonest, lazy, ignorant, or stupid to peddle this stuff in such a Trumpian way. The method is not a basis for good government.
Dutton even has his own Elon Musk equivalent in Australia’s richest person – Gina Rhinehardt.
She said: “We need to cut government tape, regulations, governments’ wastage and tax burdens across Australia. We need a USA-style Doge [Department of Government Efficiency] that delivers action, one that helps to return dollars to our pockets and investment back to Australia.”
The other dishonest element about Dutton’s assertion is that it brands the growth of public service numbers under Labor as a waste, whereas in fact it is an economy measure because it came with a sharp reduction in the wasteful out-sourcing of public-sector functions to the private sector.
Since coming to power Labor has cut $891 million from contracts let to the big five consulting firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC and Accenture – with another $500 million on the way.
If you want to know who are the lazy, overpaid, useless Canberra-based people wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned cash, look to the big over-charging consulting firms. And the Coalition wants to take us back there.
Right now, Federal Public Service numbers as a percentage of the workforce are almost exactly the same as at the end of the Abbott Government – 1.36 per cent.
The notion that Albanese Labor has been bloating the bureaucracy is hogwash. Rather it has been intelligently bringing back in-house work that was wastefully outsourced to line the pockets of the Coalition’s private-sector mates.
However, if Albanese wins (albeit in minority) he should not just rely on an unpalatable Opposition. Rather he should return to what Labor Governments are supposed to deliver: policies that transform people’s lives in a way that cannot be easily undone.
Whitlam – land rights, family law, universal health insurance, and more.
Hawke – cementing universal health insurance.
Keating – superannuation and opening the economy and more.
Gillard – the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Even some conservative Prime Ministers have better legacies.
Holt – going metric and the Indigenous referendum.
Gorton – asserting national control of the coastal seas.
Fraser – whales and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
Howard: guns and the GST.
Albanese risks going down as a “nothing” Prime Minister along with McMahon, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison.
The reason is that trepidocracy has had its way on things like gambling, salmon farming, species protection, sugar in drinks, tax, population, housing, integrity, and other first-term retreats. He will need to do better in a second term.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 1 April 2025.
Duttons fuel excise cut will save motorists $8b in taxes over a year. It will also certainly lead to more traffic fatalities and loss of transport routes caused by floods, broken bridges and landslides. That fuel excise was meant to pay to fix that stuff and do road upgrades like duplication of Bruce highway.
As for Albanese he once again left the homeless and pensioners in caravan parks without the energy supplement, yes homeless use energy, buying ice, gas canisters and fuel for their car to go get it.
For the first time I will be voting by writing NFG on the reps ballot and pick a party in Senate that makes sense, if I was still in Canberra I would have voted Pocock.
Crispin I really appreciated this article. Your clear statistical rebuttal of Dutton’s overstated claims, on which he bases populist policy, is urgently needed in the press. We need to educate voters about the danger this misinformation poses.
However, I am concerned that those who need to read the article most wouldn’t have, as in our local newspaper “The Advocate” in Northwestern Tasmania your article came with a large photo of Peter Dutton, the headline suggesting his statements were “hogwash”. Thus I believe that none of my right wing leaning friends would’ve bothered reading the article. Do you have any control over the headlines that the Newspapers apply to your opinion pieces?
When the Australian Publlic Service has weedkiller poured on it by a Coalition Government every few years it kills off the green shoots and blights young careers. the indiscriminate deracination also terminates prematurely those more senior APS with the experience to successfully mentor the next generation. This makes the Public Service far less attractive to the brightest and the most talented who look for an exit into the private sector. Such root and branch cutting also makes the APS simultaneously amnesiac and anorexic – it can’t remember how to do its core business because its institutional memory has gone and it no longer has the strength to do it. That lamentable state means that an incoming coalition government can complain that the APS cannot perform its traditional function and must be superseded by highly paid consultants and unaccountable ministerial advisers. Neither of these groups of ‘suits’ will ever give a minister what the APS exists to provide – frank and fearless, apolitical advice based on wisdom and experience.
Oh yes, the tired old rant against the Public Service. We’ve heard it all before – under Howard and Gillard. At least they aren’t calling them ‘fat cats’ – not yet anyway. ‘Do more with less’, the ‘efficiency dividend’ resulting in the examples of the scandalous lack of support to veterans by the understaffed Department of Veterans’ Affairs and obscenities like Robodebt, overseen by departmental Secretaries too frightened to give ‘frank and fearless advice’ and contrary to their Public Service Values which they were duty-bound to uphold.
We get the politicians we deserve; the only way to counter the current morass is to support intelligent and visionary Independents.
It all reminds of Jean-Claude Junker’s words: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
“We might have trepidocracy and corporatocracy, but we do not have idiocracy. The main figures in the Albanese Government are intelligent and well-educated. They know what they should be doing. But do not do it.”
Perhaps the trepidocracy will disappear if Labor forms a minority government with the Teals and Greens? We may actually see the transformational government so many of us desire, led by intelligent people genuinely committed to the national good.