Coalition to pay public servants to leave in redundancy scheme

A Coalition government would offer voluntary redundancies to public servants to speed up its plan for reducing headcount in the bureaucracy, party spokesman James Paterson revealed for the first time on Friday morning.

The latest tweak to the opposition’s public service policy comes days after it walked away from its plan to cut 41,000 jobs and instead said the Coalition would rely on natural attrition and a hiring freeze to achieve an eventual $7 billion a year in savings.

Those savings are core to the Coalition’s plan for managing the federal budget and paying for spending promised during the election campaign, such as more than $9 billion for Medicare, but the opposition has been pressured over detail.

Introducing voluntary redundancies would allow the Coalition to target areas of waste and bring down numbers faster, but will also saddle the government with the cost of payouts from payouts to public servants. Paterson did not specify how many redundancies would be offered or to what parts of the public service.

”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,” Paterson said on ABC Radio National.

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 what we’ve sought advice from the PBO [parliamentary budget office] on, and that’s why we will achieve the savings, once it’s mature, of $7 billion a year.

“What we very clearly said is that frontline service roles will be exempt, as well defence and national security.”

But Nationals leader David Littleproud, in a Triple M radio interview last August, said: “The first thing we’ll do is sack those 36,000 public servants in Canberra, that’s $24 billion worth.”