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April 12, 2025
Saturday 12 April 2025
Natassia Chrysanthos
The Age
A Coalition government would offer voluntary redundancies to public servants to speed up its plan for reducing headcount in the bureaucracy, with long-serving senior staff in line for payouts above $100,000 under federal pay rules.
Liberal campaign spokesman James Paterson revealed the latest tweak to the opposition’s public service policy days after the Coalition said it would rely on natural attrition and a hiring freeze, not forced sackings, to take 41,000 jobs out of the federal public service and achieve an eventual $7 billion a year in savings.
Voluntary redundancies would allow the Coalition to target areas of waste and bring down numbers faster than waiting for people to leave, but will also saddle the government with the cost of payouts.
Federal public servants are entitled to two weeks’ pay for each year of service, capped at 48 weeks. The median public servant salary is $95,000, and $235,000 for senior executives.
That means a junior public servant who earns about $77,000 would receive a payout of a few thousand dollars, while mid-level managers earning between $125,000 and $155,000 would be paid up to $35,700 for six years service and top out at about $142,600.
Senior executives at the top end of the pay scale earn a median salary of $394,784, which would result in a maximum $364,416 payout for the longest serving bureaucrats.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton did not say how much payouts would cost or how many of the 41,000 public servants would be offered them, as he skipped over questions about the Coalition’s plans for voluntary redundancies at a press conference in Perth on Friday.
“The point I would make in relation to the issue is that Australians are working harder than ever … Australians want their taxpayer dollars to be spent efficiently,” Dutton said.
Paterson told Radio National earlier on Friday that “we will cap the size of the Australian public service and we will reduce the numbers back to the levels they were three years ago through natural attrition and voluntary redundancies.”
Radio host Sally Sara interjected to say the policy had changed along the way, to which Paterson responded: “No, it hasn’t. Our policy is always based on natural attrition and voluntary redundancies.”
“That’s what our costings are based on ... That’s why we will achieve the savings, once it’s mature, of $7 billion a year,” he said. “What we very clearly said is that frontline service roles will be exempt, as well defence and national security.”
There have been several iterations of the Coalition policy. Nationals leader David Littleproud told a Triple M radio interview in August last year: “The first thing we’ll do is sack those 36,000 public servants in Canberra, that’s $24 billion worth.”
Dutton committed to those figures as recently as February. when he said the Coalition would target 36,000 workers Labor had added to the public service to deliver $6 billion in instant annual savings, which amounted to $24 billion over the forward estimates.
This number was upped to 41,000 after last month’s budget showed the Albanese government would have boosted headcount in the public service by 41,411 by 2025-26. But Dutton lowered planned savings to $10 billion over four years, suggesting mass sackings were no longer planned.
On Monday, the Coalition said there would be no forced redundancies as it announced a major policy U-turn reversing its work-from-home policy for public servants following voter backlash.
Instead, the opposition’s policy document said “a hiring freeze and natural attrition” would be used to reach the 41,000 target, making no mention of the voluntary redundancies Paterson referred to on Friday.
However, natural attrition alone was unlikely to deliver the Coalition its 41,000 reduction, given 67 per cent of voluntary departures last year came from frontline roles it would likely need to replace.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher on Friday morning pointed to Paterson’s comments and claimed it meant public servants would be sacked after all.
“This rubbish that it’s all going to be found by attrition, has been put to bed today,” she said.
“It is actually redundancies, which means sacking of public servants. Now, Senator [Jacinta] Nampijinpa Price ... She’s refusing to say where those come from.”
The Coalition has previously singled out the federal health and education departments as examples of areas that should be cut.
The public service savings are core to the Coalition’s pitch for managing the federal budget and paying for spending promised during the election campaign, such as more than $9 billion for Medicare.