Public Service Minister is stealing Canberra's Christmas

I can’t see what the issue is.

Contractors are engaged on a short-term basis at a high hourly rate and as such receive higher rates than an ordinary employer would receive to do the same job.

I expect there are quite a few “pimping companies” who are now longer creaming a margin off the top, for supplying contracting staff to Government.

There are plenty of people elsewhere just having contracts cancelled or losing their jobs when companies fold. Contractors should thankful that they are being offered permanent roles by the Government.

This is just the beginning, wouldn’t expect anything less from an x Union hack with no real life experience.

Contractors are a waste of taxpayer money.

“As Region first reported last week, one thousand of them are leaving Services Australia; their projects are ending and their services are no longer required.”
Ummm where is the story here? As a former contractor (often in PS departments), I knew I was being engaged for a specific period of time to work on a specific project or program – that’s the whole idea of a fixed term contract. If the role is long term, then why wouldn’t a department engage a permanent or non-ongoing employee?
Where a current contractor is offered a permanent or non-ongoing role Uunless therir contract specifically prohibits for them from accepting such a role in a specifed time frame) then the contracting firm gets paid a “recruitment fee” – that’s always been the case.
It seems the author has a beef that contracting companies are not going to be able to skim the exhorbitant fees they usually do for providing run of the mill services, to a public service trying to show it’s staffing numbers are going down.
As for that restaurant’s lunchtime patronage. WTF has that got to do with contractors?

The timing of this does seem gratuitous, or at the very least callously indifferent, but what is happening here should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with how Canberra fared under the Hawke/Keating governments – supposedly the model for the Albanese government.

Under Hawke and Keating, there were tight controls on APS staff numbers, particularly at senior levels, with very limited scope for contractors and consultants, and the official policy of “wage restraint” meant that sub-CPI outcomes were not unusual – including across-the-board flat dollar increases (rather than a percentage increase) for mid and upper level staff, which resulted in compression across the pay scales. All of this was done to deal with difficult economic conditions and still find funds for increased Commonwealth support for areas including health, education, and child, aged and disability care.

The parallels with the present time are obvious – so the cull of contractors is probably just the first dose of sobering news for a Canberra which is still far more reliant on federal spending than it often likes to admit.

Not the biggest fan of lil ms mansplainer but she’s doing a good job here, contractors are out of control, some charging up to $1,600/hour for basic work.
There are plenty of good jobs out there, no one on the contract circuit is going hungry or homeless.
Stolen Christmas, my ***.