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Federal

Dutton’s epic fail authorises lasting APS reforms
ANALYSIS | Fluro tradies, fed-up families, and frontline staff just buried small-government fantasies under lived experience.
Julian Bajkowski
Julian Bajkowski
May 5, 2025
5 min read
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Former leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)
The Albanese government has been returned to power with the mother of all mandates to unleash a second wave of major federal public sector reforms and changes likely to embed the role of the bureaucracy and statutory authorities in policy development and infrastructure for decades.

After a campaign that the Coalition stupendously lost over obsessing about public service cuts for a supposedly alienated tradie class, small-government advocates are now nearly minor-party size.


Turns out fluro-wearing, ute-driving tropes actually want better public services rather than fewer of them.

For public servants and their families, that clearly matters a lot.

But the much bigger takeaway is that the broader electorate was simply not prepared to exchange recent improvements in service delivery across Centrelink, Medicare, health, and ageing (think My Aged Care) and the National Disability Insurance Scheme for a hard prune and a probable return to the high public cost in time and effort that deliberately under-resourced administration produces.

Anyone who gets sick, has children, or has elderly parents knows the up-front cost that a lack of bulk-billing primary healthcare produces, not to mention the huge time sink that dealing with Centrelink or other services used to produce.

There are still issues, there are still delays, but things on the frontline have improved and no numeral that a politician from either side waves in the air or parades in a press release really matters — because it’s the lived experience on the ground that ultimately persuaded voters.

When Albanese took office three years ago, he shrewdly, even ruthlessly, threw Bill Shorten at the government services portfolio, thanks to his forensic knowledge of the NDIS and because the welfare bureaucracy needed to be de-weaponised following the robodebt scandal.

To his credit, Shorten pretty promptly realised that the solutionist technology fantasy concocted by Scott Morrison and Stuart Robert, which was supposed to automate transactions in the way banks do, was as good as junk in terms of its build quality and was written off, along with several other notable government tech failures.

The only way to improve services within the government’s term was to deploy sheer human muscle in volume at contact centres, branches, claims processing, and online services.


Agencies like Services Australia undertook bulk recruiting drives as outsourcers like Serco were pushed off the payroll. The new permanent hires were for admin and customer service, IT, and other technical staff.

The same ‘insourcing’ occurred across a range of other agencies and was supercharged by the PwC scandal, which gave agencies the clear air they needed to roust many entrenched external service providers that had lobbied their pet playbooks onto the government’s procurement system for years.

This is where the so-called mass increases of public servants that the Coalition targeted occurred, partly driven by replacing labour hire and contracted roles with public servants and partly replenishing service delivery where online and automated services were badly undercooked.

Until the last day of the campaign, the Coalition was attempting to sell the culling of 41,000 public servants, supposedly in Canberra, as a positive.

It ended with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor butchering an interview on the ABC on Friday with the notion that public service roles in Canberra could be eliminated by sending those roles to regional areas, a choice between deletion and deportation.

What was clearly miscalculated is that so many electors would read ritualised public service bashing as an action that would tangibly diminish their quality of life by returning to the days of having to spend literally days transacting with service-delivery agencies.

Then there was the Coalition attack on flexible work and working from home for public servants, which the Coalition launched, then rescinded, then tiptoed around. Whatever bile was coming back in focus groups was clearly enough to scare campaign strategists into trying to reverse the undertaking. It now looks like few, if any, voters believed the shift.

With major corporates, like banks, exposed to commercial property losses and desperate to get staff to return to the office, a very rational fear in the electorate was that attacks on public service flexible work would spread like a contagion to the private sector. These fears have strong echoes of the Howard government’s term-ending Work Choices policy.


Tony Abbott can also probably take due credit for entrenched electoral cynicism given his government’s brazenly broken promises on cuts and the public service — he removed 15,000 — with some of the Coalition’s implosion in Queensland likely down to what happened during Campbell Newman’s single term as premier when 14,000 public servants were chopped.

The LNP’s proposed removal of 41,000 jobs is almost three times as many as either of those mass culls, and, in hindsight, it seems to have triggered pretty rational fears of a recession being induced as a result.

The semantics around the location of the APS cuts, specifically Canberra, were also clearly beyond electoral credibility. They essentially amounted to creating an administrative facsimile of Detroit, a city abandoned by its main industry and left to collapse in on itself.

The biggest challenge for Albanese will be pushing the pace of systemic, productivity-enhancing change, not least because of the extensive graveyard of failed tech uplifts that needs to be revisited but also because of languid APS timelines like the application of sanctions post-robodebt.

The size of the Dutton crater may be epic and almost guarantee Labor a third term, but that’s no reason for policymakers and senior public servants to slow or shut down change.

There’s also a pretty serious question over what the massive repudiation of Dutton’s back-to-office frog-march means for NSW Premier Chris Minns, and how he defuses that incendiary device. If Dutton heavily backed the wrong horse, Minns would still be cheering it on.

Let’s see how that goes this week.


READ MORE:

What public servants should look out for in a second Labor term

About the author
Julian Bajkowski
Julian Bajkowski
Senior journalist

Julian Bajkowski is a research and technical-driven reporter with over 20 years’ experience in technology and cybersecurity journalism. Julian has also been an adviser in public policy and corporate affairs for Mastercard and eftpos.

Similar topics
Albanese government
Angus Taylor
Anthony Albanese
Australian public service
Australian Public Service Commission
Bill Shorten
Campbell Newman
Centrelink
Chris Minns
flexivle work
Health and Ageing
Katy Gallagher
Medicare
NDIS
NSW Premier
Prime Minister
robodebt
Scott Morrison
Serco
Stuart Robert
Tony Abbott
work from home
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Northern Territory

Workplace

Three NT government CEO roles up for grabs
An executive shake-up signals a push for reform, integrity, and cultural capability across critical Northern Territory services.
Julian Bajkowski
Julian Bajkowski
May 5, 2025
1 min read
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Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro. (AAP Image/(A)manda Parkinson)
The Northern Territory government has advertised a trifecta of key public-facing service-delivery roles, as recently elected Lia Finocchiaro continues to make her mark on the jurisdiction’s bureaucracy.

Over the weekend, the Northern Territory’s Department of Children and Families, Department of Fisheries and Agriculture, and Department of Housing, Local Government, and Community Development announced vacancies for CEO positions seeking new talent.

The top public service vacancies follow the booting of the Northern Territory’s police commissioner, Michael Murphy, in March after a conflict-of-interest issue.

The new Country Liberal Party has vowed a crackdown on crime, but the territory’s huge size and distances continue to make life tough for all, and especially First Nations people.

The role of CEO of the Department of Housing, Local Government, and Community Development is advertised as a “unique opportunity for an experienced executive working in complex and ambiguous environments”, with “strong exposure to working with risk operating models and governance”.

For the role of head of the Department of Fisheries and Agriculture, “a strategic, engaging and decisive executive” with “high levels of business acumen, personal and professional integrity” is sought to navigate “rapidly changing or ambiguous” situations.

For the head of the Department of Children and Families, a candidate needs to have “strong business acumen, and a track record of exercising sound judgement through interpreting and applying legislation in a social family and community context” in addition to an “ability to inspire and communicate a sense of purpose and direction to staff and stakeholders”.

The kicker is “a focus on driving excellence and reform in a large, complex, multi-disciplined, multi-cultural organisation”.

Private recruiters have been retained for all positions.

READ MORE:

Governments reject calls for UN intervention in ‘youth justice crisis’

About the author
Julian Bajkowski
Julian Bajkowski
Senior journalist

Julian Bajkowski is a research and technical-driven reporter with over 20 years’ experience in technology and cybersecurity journalism. Julian has also been an adviser in public policy and corporate affairs for Mastercard and eftpos.

Similar topics
Chief Minister
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