Now let's get to candos cuts
bloated public service not healthy
JUDITH SLOAN, CONTRIBUTING ECONOMICS EDITOR
October 01, 2012 12:00AM
17 comments
Illustration: Sturt Krygsman Source: The Australian
IN order to avoid the winter chills of Melbourne, I hang out in Queensland quite a bit these days. A few weeks ago, I was tuned in to the evening news to be told that the LNP government was planning to cut 1500 jobs in health.
Gosh, I thought, 1500 jobs sounds quite a lot. So I decided to find out how many people are employed in Queensland Health. The answer is more than 80,000. Annual natural attrition would account for more than double the proposed job cuts of 1500, which represent a mere 1.9 per cent of total employment.
But here's the rub. A decade ago, employment in Queensland Health stood at 49,000. So in 10 years there has been an increase of more than 32,000 employees - an increase of two-thirds.
But here's a further rub. Whereas the number of nurses in effective full-time terms increased by 65 per cent over the decade, the number of managerial and clerical staff rose by 103 per cent during the same period. There are now nearly 15,000 managers and clerical staff in Queensland Health, a fair proportion of whom hang out in the head office in Brisbane.
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The observant reader might make the point that Queensland's population has grown over that time; indeed, population growth has been higher in Queensland than in Australia as a whole. However, the average annual growth in the number of Queensland Health staff has been well over two times higher than the growth in the population.
The media, particularly in Queensland, has been making much of the supposedly "savage" job cuts being implemented by the LNP government, in part picking up the campaign being waged by the trade union movement in the state. What is less often reported is the fact the Queensland public service had been growing at a ridiculous rate under the Bligh Labor government, which had in part led to a 10-fold increase in the state's debt and the downgrading of its credit rating.
As Ken Wiltshire, an expert in public administration, and a Queenslander, pointed out on this page last week, there "was a blowout in the amount spent on public servants across the past decade, at 8.7 per cent a year. Of that, 3.5 per cent was attributed to the number of employees and 5.2 per cent to growth of wages.
"All this is far higher public expenditure growth than the national average."
A very dubious arrangement also emerged in the Queensland public service in which a category of "permanent temporary" staff was created. Many of these permanent temporaries are - quite legitimately - being targeted by the LNP government.
Into this politically toxic atmosphere, made worse by lazy journalism, the federal government has now weighed in with its unbelievable epithet: "We make hard decisions, but we focus on finding efficiencies. The Coalition slashes jobs." But is Penny Wong really telling the truth?
The first point to note is that if there are all these inefficient practices in the federal arena, why has it taken the Labor government five years to do something about them? The second point is that shifting the budget from a $44 billion deficit last financial year to a $1.5bn surplus will not be achieved by shaving a few dollars off printing costs or making senior public servants travel cattle class. (I wonder whether the politicians will also be made to travel down the back of the plane - I don't think so.)
But the most important point is this year's budget explicitly plans for a cut of 3073 in the average staffing level of agencies in the Australian government general government sector - a cut of 1.3 per cent (not much lower than the planned cut to Queensland Health).
And with the super-efficiency dividend of 4 per cent being imposed on government agencies, the number of job cuts will be higher again. Indeed, it is entirely plausible the number could be double the planned reduction of 3000. So, yes, the federal Labor government also slashes jobs; it should just be more explicit about it. Having been told by Kevin Rudd that the "reckless spending" must stop and that a "meat axe" would be taken to the "bloated" public service, in government, Labor went weak at the knees.
The Australian public service has grown by an average of just under 1 per cent a year since the Labor government has been in office.
Evidently, the meat axe was very blunt. It is only now that job cuts are being made.
Returning to the Queensland situation, the LNP government has no alternative but to push on with its planned reduction to the size of the public sector. But in order to sustain a smaller public sector, more thinking needs to be done about the future of particular activities and programs. The experience of the Howard government was that initial cuts to public sector jobs are only temporary, unless constant attention is paid to limiting new spending and new programs.
Ever keen to play politics rather than prosecute good public policy, federal Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten has also decided to become involved in Queensland politics by proposing an amendment to the Fair Work Act to limit the ability of the Queensland government to contract out work.
Shorten's idea is that there will be a new transmission of business provision in the act that will mean any public servant who shifts to work for an outside provider of government services must retain all employment conditions.
He really should know better. He obviously hasn't been paying any attention to the successful outsourcing of employment services, which is undertaken by the federal government through his own department.
Just because there is a case for governments to fund, in full or in part, particular services for eligible persons does not mean that those services have to be provided by permanent public servants. Indeed, present thinking - and this applies to how the National Disability Insurance Scheme will operate - is that competitive outsourcing of many government services leads to both superior offerings and cost savings.
It would not be a surprise if the Queensland government were to give serious consideration to withdrawing the referral of its IR power to the commonwealth government. If Shorten is intent on interfering with the ability of the LNP government to rationalise and reform the public service on its own terms, such a move by the Queensland government makes sense.
The bottom line is the public service, both federally and in a number of states, has become too large and needs to be trimmed. In making the job cuts, it is also important for governments to analyse the rationale behind spending and to concentrate on those areas where there are very high net public benefits.
Experimentation with different means of delivering taxpayer-funded services should also be part of the mix.
http://m.theaustralian.com.au/opini...vice-not-healthy/story-fnbkvnk7-1226484900906
Hmmm
