Alan Moran, one of those cheery folk from the Institute of Public Affairs, has have been hard at work devising an action plan to assist the now inevitable Abbott administration to achieve some of their fiscal objectives. His efforts are up on the Catallaxy Files.
You will be happy to know that the IPA’s identified savings:
amount to an annual $22.5 billion in program costs plus $2.4 billion in staffing costs.
But:
Except where duplication with state spending is concerned and where funds are spent on social research, the savings identified exclude the major Health, Education and Welfare programs which account for some 60 per cent of government spending. Nor do they include “off budget” expenditures like the grants being made by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
The Commonwealth Bureaucracy
Public sector resources are normally far less productive than those of the private sector for a number of reasons. These include an absence of profit driven discipline on their growth, difficulties in terminating unnecessary staff, costs entailed in raising revenues for their remuneration.
Some 23,500 public servant positions have been identified as being in these classes. They cover 14 portfolio areas. The positions classified as surplus to need include the following:Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry
Abolish the R&D corporations covering sugar, fishing, wine etc and three divisions covering sustainable Development, climate change and trade and market access, which are either counterproductive or duplicate other bureaucracies.Attorney-Generals
Abolish Australian Commission for Law enforcement Integrity, the Human Rights Commission the law reform commission and one of the divisions (“Social Inclusion”). These bodies have a track record of excessive and counterproductive meddlingBroadband, Communications and Digital
Privatise the ABC and SBS which should be able to finance themselves alongside other media businesses. Abolish the unnecessary universal service management and the NBNClimate Change and Energy Efficiency
AbolishEducation Employment and Workplace
Abolish the Curriculum Assessment Authority, the Institute for Teaching and Leadership, Fair Work Australia, Safe Work Australia. All of these add nothing and in the case of the “Fair Work” agencies clearly contribute to lower productivity.Families Housing Community Affairs and Indigenous
The Aboriginal Land Councils are a clear “make work activity that distracts some of the better minds from productive work. The Institute of Family Studies is one of the many failed agencies and the Equal Opportunities for Women in the Workplace if it ever had a function is now redundant. Housing policy is little to do with the Commonwealth and gambling and parts of indigenous program support should be downsized.
…
House prices and all that…
Loading ...
