The Coalition cannot meet its target of downsizing government roles by 41,000 over the next five years without losing positions in departments it has pledged to protect, a Guardian Australia analysis shows.
Peter Dutton walked back his pledge to immediately reverse 41,000 jobs, if elected, from the public service on Monday, vowing instead to reduce numbers through “natural attrition” over a five-year period in his bid to wind back “wasteful spending”.
Under the new plan, there will be no redundancies and a hiring freeze will be put in place to prevent the public service growing to the 213,439 roles forecast over 2025-26 in the latest budget papers.
The opposition leader has ruled out reductions in frontline staff and critical agencies, including those that contribute to national security, but has not specified which of the tens of thousands of roles will not be replaced once they are vacant.
Figures from the Australian Public Service Commission show 11,782 staff left the federal bureaucracy in 2024, with 6,665, or 57%, coming from the home affairs and defence departments, the Australian Taxation Office and Services Australia.
The four agencies are among the largest in the public service, making up about 48% of all public service staff, according to APSC figures.
About 11,000 staff leave the public service each year on average but the majority of those come from frontline or essential jobs, meaning the Coalition would have to replace them or break its promise.
Services Australia, which operates call centres that assist the public with income support payments, employed more than 35,000 staff in 2024, with 66% of them classified as service delivery roles.
Just under 4,500 of its staff are based in Canberra while the remaining 30,000 work elsewhere in the country.
The key agency lost 3,577 staff in 2024, representing about 30% of all public service separations during the year.
In the Department of Defence, about 1,384 staff left their roles last year. The APSC data shows 20,048 people are employed to run the major department, with more than half of those holding accounting, administrative and project management jobs. No service delivery roles are held in the defence department.
A similar situation occurred in the home affairs department, which includes Australian Border Force. The 15,000-strong department lost about 700 staff, or 6%, last year and almost 900 in 2023.
About 16% of its workforce is employed in service delivery roles, while more than half work in administration, compliance and program and project management.
The ATO is another major public service employer with about 21,000 staff around the country, including just 8% of them in Canberra.
In 2024, more than 1,000 staff left their tax office roles, with more than half of those at junior levels without managerial responsibilities.
Across all those leaving the public service last year, about 72% were employed in junior roles between APS 3 and APS 6 with salaries ranging between $76,000 and $120,000.
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The opposition’s public service spokesperson, Jane Hume, said a Coalition government would undertake a methodical audit of the public service’s workforce and make sensible changes if elected.
Dutton said the policy’s costings would be released. In February, the opposition leader said “advice” given regarding his then promise to sack 36,000 public servants would save the budget $6bn a year and $24bn over the next four years.
In his budget reply in March, the figure was revised up to $7bn “once in place” with $10bn over the next four years.
The idea of trimming fat from the federal bureaucracy is not a new Coalition idea, with the former prime minister Tony Abbott vowing to do so before he was elected in 2013.
The Coalition’s attrition policy, teamed with a hiring freeze, resulted in the average staffing level decreasing by almost 11,600 roles in Abbott’s two years as prime minister.
In the 2015-16 budget, the Coalition government placed a ceiling on the number of public servants employed, tying the workforce’s size to at around or below 167,596 – equivalent to staffing levels in 2006-07. It was later removed when Labor came into power in 2022.
In May 2023, the Albanese government released an audit into the Morrison government’s final year, which found 54,000 full-time staff were employed as consultants or service providers during the 2021-22 financial year – the equivalent of 37% of the 144,300-employee public service.
The audit also found outsourced service providers made up nearly 70% of the $20.8bn total spending on external labour, while more than a quarter of it went to contractors and consultants.
The public service minister, Katy Gallagher, accused the Morrison government of creating a “shadow workforce” by placing an “arbitrary cap on the number of government employees” in the name of efficiency.