Coalition talks more about APS job cuts as election announcement gets closer

@realist, your comment is inane.

Civil servants were invented to improve fairness, reduce corruption, provide continuity. A consultancy position is, or should be, niche in function and occasional in use. Contractors are mostly just average labour for hire, so price and availability win.

As for “woke”, do you think the Romans trotted about muttering “experrectus” or similar at their civil servants about two thousand years ago, or over a thousand earlier the Egyptians were defacing the “sr” hieroglyph when those civil servants brought mediation and justice?

@Realist – Your bias is showing in your overgeneralisations. There are some brilliant public servants, just as there are many ill-informed and poorly performing consultants. The main difference is that the consultants are generally better at marketing and selling themselves and their achievements.

Having worked an expert consultant for most of my life, but also within the public service, I have seen both sides. I have worked alongside completely unskilled consultants who have MBAs but little knowledge or experience of what works in the real world, offering off the shelf solutions not tailored to the organisation. They are preferred by senior public servants, because they never argue with or challenge the SES, just doing whatever is asked at a cost of thousands of dollars a day, so they’re easy & expensive but often without a lasting solution. I have also worked alongside both terrible and fantastic public servants.

More junior consultants or contractors have few if any skills beyond those of the public servant (assuming appropriate training) and they often have a conflict of interest, as they’re working for a consulting or labour hire company who pays them to do what they want. That is not necessarily the same as what the public service wants or needs, but the contractor

Boohoo – if you’re so talented, give some of that clever advice to a few public servants (noting I said public servants not civil servants and talked about consultants not contractors)… assuming you can find one or two actually in an office not on flexi-time, wfh or in a coffee shop having another ‘meeting’. Put your big boy pants on and have a chat with a contractor while you’re there. Tell one how average they are to their face and see how they regard that talent of yours.

A self-declared expert consultant… you probably know the talented one commenting above then? I believe it is public servants that select all the terrible consultants you complain of. They provide the scope, accept the daily rates and sign off on the deliverables every month. Maybe they need consultants like you to select the consultants? Either way, a few bad consultants dumped relatively quickly are still a lot cheaper that the decades we pay our very average public servant pretenders.

Reducing the size of the APS is a cost saving in itself. But out of curiosity, what are these “fossil fuel subsidies” to which you refer ? Are you telling us that the Labor government pays budget funds towards coal or gas ?

Penfold.

They do.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

Penfold, The Government subsidises the cost of Diesel to farmers and Mining companies. It helps keeps Inflation down at supermarkets as farming in very feul intensive. They also subsidise mining companies because most are not near the Grid and a lot of there electricity comes from Diesel generators.

You do realize that fossil fuel subsidies applies to the agricultural sector too.
And even the contractors with their giant excavators who are desecrating pristine wilderness to allow subsidized bird blenders to be built get the fossil fuel subsidy.

Last year $14.5 billion was provided by the Australian government (that is taxpayers funds) to coal mines, oil & gas operations and major fossil fuel users. See the Australia Institute website, go to fact sheets & look up fossil fuel subsidies. The link is – https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/fossil-fuel-subsidies/

No scrapping Medicare support is not the solution, nor is making the public service more mean and lean as that just leads to robodebt and expensive contractors. Scrapping AUKUS is a more viable solution and would give us much more money to properly equip our Navy and Air Force to look after Australia, instead of supporting the US in their crazy wars and other actions.

Nuclear submarines are not the solution as they don’t work for what we need. They’re too big for patrolling our coastline, putting aside the ridiculous cost for something that may never be delivered and certainly not in the time frame required to defend ourselves even if they were up to the task.

We’ve never been able to fully staff our Collins or Oberon class submarines over the past few decades, with them mostly inactive and they’re smaller, needing fewer staff. Life on submarines is not nice, but even worse with bigger subs that stay underwater for a month and go away for many months at a time. People don’t want to do this job on subs for long, as it destroys relationships and normal life.

This ridiculous purchase is not suitable for our needs as the top experts in Defence & Security have repeatedly made clear. However, there are rich benefits for those who get involved in this gig as we can see from the former coalition politicians who’ve latched onto it and set up lucrative businesses to capitalise on the opportunity for themselves.