Extract from ABC News
Analysis
The coronavirus pandemic has changed many aspects of Australian life — even, it seems, the Liberal Party's attitude to the public service.
This week's federal budget saw the Coalition turn about-face on an almost decade-long crusade: its quest to cut public sector jobs to attain the "right"-sized workforce.
Instead, the government is now planning to recruit thousands of extra civilian staff over the coming year, taking it well beyond its self-imposed cap on employees.
The Labor-aligned Community and Public Sector Union says the shift is highly significant — an admission that the government's "ideological staffing cap … is broken".
So why was there a staffing cap in the first place?
167,596: The arbitrary number that shaped government for years.
In recent decades, the Liberal Party has used the public service to send a signal of intent and beliefs.
Both John Howard and Tony Abbott began their prime ministerships by sacking several department heads and retrenching thousands of public servants.
Abbott also declared that the optimal size of government — regardless of what it was doing or how many people it was serving — was 167,596 full-time-equivalent (FTE) civilian staff.
That oddly specific number was the average size of the workforce in Howard's last year in office.
It has been the Coalition's official benchmark for "responsible management" since 2015; a target that prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison also pursued.
More than 15,000 government jobs were abolished as a result.
For
years, the Liberals said this was necessary to undo "waste and
duplication" in the bureaucracy that had flourished under the Rudd and
Gillard governments.
But a note in this year's budget from Finance Minister Simon Birmingham hints at a revision of that history.
The government's expansion under Labor, he says, was a "response to the global financial crisis, which produced a spike in [average staffing levels]".
As a result, there is no longer a magical number that represents the best size of government.
Instead, Birmingham says, the government will be "committed to effectively resourcing its policies".
The numbers game, it seems, is over.
But the game was always somewhat distorted.
On a per capita basis, the government workforce had exploded under Howard — and never really rose much above that.
Cap may be gone, but workforce will take years to recover
One problem, however, is that the cap has changed how the Australian Public Service (APS) works — and those changes can not be undone overnight.
Over the years, the government has deepened its reliance on consultants and labour-hire firms to carry out work that public servants once did.
Marty Bortz, of the Melbourne School of Government, says leaders including Turnbull, former top bureaucrats Terry Moran and Andrew Podger, and businessman David Thodey, who led a review of the APS, have all raised concerns about the "mass de-skilling of the public service".
"So you have people who are very good at managing processes, but their content knowledge is lacking."
Bortz says modern government work is highly complex and the APS cannot be expected to have expertise in all areas.
"You need to be able to bring in the right people for certain short-term engagements, where you can't really justifying having them permanently on staff."
But this has happened so much it has led to a "hollowing-out of the state", he says.
Work is under way to try to fix some of these problems.
For example, the government is launching an "APS Academy" in July, to help train staff in areas such as data analysis, digital skills and management.
Bortz warns it will take many years to repair the damage done.
Nonetheless, the Coalition's rhetoric has changed markedly — it seems to reflect that a new approach is needed.
Birmingham says that, as part of the pandemic recovery, he will "honour the resilience of the Australian people by investing in the talent and systems of the APS".
Maybe, just maybe, this old ideological battleground has been left behind with pre-COVID-19 Australia.
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