SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER
MINISTER FOR FINANCE
MINISTER FOR WOMEN
MINISTER FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
BUILDING AUSTRALIA'S FUTURE – THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE
THE MANDARIN'S BUIDLING A BETTER PUBLIC SERVICE CONFERENCE CANBERRA
I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather this morning, the Ngunnawal people and I pay my respects to Elders past and present. I thank Aunty Violet for her Welcome to Country, and I can promise you I did not put her up to that.
Thank you also to the Mandarin for organising this conference. I must say, when I'm doing a press gallery door stop and I've got the whole pack in front of me, I'm always pleased to see the Mandarin in there, to see Melissa there and others, asking me questions about the public service. So, keep on doing what you're doing, and it's a really important job, part of holding the government to account, asking the tough questions, pushing us to explain what we're doing, and providing some transparency to that through the work that you do.
So thank you very much for the organizing conference. I know you have a very busy day ahead with an excellent range of speakers and topics to cover.
This conference, Building A Better Public Service, has never been timelier or more urgent, and I think Melissa acknowledged that in her opening remarks. Did the organiser at the Mandarin know something that we didn't know all those months ago when this program was settled?
Perhaps it’s just the moment we are in right now but it certainly seems to me that that the role and function of the public service have never been as front and centre of political discourse and an election campaign as you will all be over the next couple of months.
On one level this is a shame as it puts the public service and public servants in the middle of a tussle that they are unable to participate in, as they and their work are pulled apart through the daily news cycle for political purposes.
On another level, like in so many other policy areas - it demonstrates the very different approaches between the two parties of government. And this speech probably is a little bit more political than I would normally give at a conference like this but considering the time that we're in on the eve of an election, and the different approaches, I thought there probably wasn't a better platform to talk it through in long form.
As Minister for the Public Service, I would argue that there has never been a more important time to campaign for a strong, impartial and enduring public service as an institution.
A public service that is focused on its responsibilities to serve the people of Australia, whether it be by advocating our national interest in international fora, delivering the Government’s investments in our economic future through skills and training, working with State and Territory Governments where we can, funding the social safety net, delivering payments and vital essential services like Medicare, the NDIS and aged care, keeping us and our borders safe, improving our biosecurity, protecting the environment, dealing with the housing shortage, working with First Nations communities to close the gap and increase economic opportunities, emergency management – very timely – disaster management and mitigation and community recovery.
Clearly this isn't a complete list of the complexity or range of work that you do or that the Australian Public Service is engaged in, but it gives you a sense of responsibilities that Australians have entrusted in the public service, often with legislative guidance and protections.
Now, the APS is a truly national institution operating from 583 locations nationwide. Sixty-three percent of that workforce is located outside of the nation’s capital, including nearly 23,000 employees in regional areas.
These aren't just numbers or statistics – they represent public servants living in and understanding the communities they serve.
As I am speaking to a room full of public servants today, I thought I would give you a frank, first-hand perspective of my almost three years as the Minister for the APS, of which it’s been an incredible honour to serve.
We went into the last election campaign in 2022 knowing what we wanted to do to strengthen the APS should we form government. Remembering back to those years in opposition, we had been critical about the under-resourcing of the public service and the over reliance on contractors and consultants.
We saw the APS as timid and hollowed out after 10 years of Liberal Government. Robodebt had quite rightly shaken the public's trust in the APS and morale across the service was at an all-time low.
We learned later that the then-Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, had somehow sworn himself into multiple ministries including the other two central portfolios of Treasury and Finance as well as Home Affairs, Health, and Industry, Science and Resources.
This remarkable set of circumstances had seemingly occurred without anyone who should have known knowing.
As an employer, the Liberal Government had decentralised bargaining, with wage outcomes in the APS averaging only 1.2 per cent per annum and wage disparity across departments and agencies increasing all the time.
We knew it was going to be difficult coming into government with an APS that was heaving under the pressures – including post COVID – but what we found when we got there, and I’m speaking from my experience, was much worse.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not in any way criticising individual public servants or agencies. Daily, I meet public servants who inspire me, who blow me away with the work they are doing, the solutions they’re seeking, or how they are actively dedicating themselves to assisting people across the country.
What I mean is the systemic hollowing out that we faced. The loss of knowledge, the reliance on external labour as a way of pretending to keep the staffing levels low, the backlogs of support claims, the unfinished work, the lack of policy development to deal with critical and emerging challenges.
This was the same across every department as Ministers got across their briefs, and it’s a big job to begin to correct that.
And we didn't just prioritise rebuilding the public service because we wanted to implement our agenda. We prioritised rebuilding the public service because we, as a political party and as a government, believe deeply in the APS as an institution and the unwritten contract that exists between the community and the public service, which we saw fraying off the back of Robodebt and poor service outcomes.
Now, maintaining the strength and health of that contract is essential for the mutual benefit of both the community and the APS.
The community is prepared to invest public dollars into the APS, but the quid pro quo is that the APS delivers services and programs for the benefit of the community in the most efficient and effective way possible.
In government, we started the work. We began by saving $4 billion from external labour. We began the work of APS reform. We put the APSC back at the centre with a prominent role in supporting the APS. We reduced expenditure on consultants and labour hire and, where appropriate, they were turned into permanent public service jobs and we filled them with public servants – which in many cases was cheaper than the other arrangements, but also recognises the value and role of the public service in delivering that work.
We bargained genuinely with our staff, and whilst there was turbulence at times, we settled on an agreed outcome, improved conditions including greater flexibility and working from home arrangements and ensured that we began to deal with the massive wage discrepancy that had erupted across the service over the previous decades.
We've employed more public servants to do the jobs we need to deliver the services Australians rely upon, and we have done this carefully and methodically as we worked through the backlogs of areas that required further investment.
We've amended legislation to strengthen the independence of the APS and put in place capability reviews to ensure departments are independently assessed on how prepared they were to deliver what is needed.
We have legislated for long term insights briefings, so the public service is looking over the horizon, beyond our short electoral terms, at issues that are complex and require deep thinking on the range of scenarios and possible policy responses.
We legislated a new value of stewardship recognising public servants as guardians of the public interest, responsible for leaving the service stronger than they found, something that is more important than ever as we see continued attempts to undermine the public service with some of the imported ideas from the United States.
The investments we’ve made to right the course of a lost decade are already delivering, and I'll run you through just a few examples.
In 2022 there were 42,000 unallocated claims for veterans’ assistance, making veterans wait months, sometimes years, just to have their claims allocated.
When we came to government we made clearing these claims a priority. We invested in the resources the department needed, and we’re seeing that difference – with all the backlog of 42,000 unallocated claims that we inherited now allocated, with 97 per cent of claims now completed and most claims being allocated within two weeks.
We have doubled the average on-time environmental approval rate from 47 per cent to 84 per cent.
In social security, we have reduced paid parental processing times from 31 days to three.
Youth allowance processing times are down from 28 days down to nine.
And the Credential Protection Register has blocked more than 500,000 attempts by cyber criminals to use Australians’ stolen identity documents.
In 2022, the NDIS was growing exponentially and unsustainably. We now have it back on track with a much lower growth trajectory and with a steely focus on the integrity of the scheme so that it remains a scheme that can support Australians with a disability, not organised crime. With our investment we are taking stronger action against dodgy providers, issuing more banning orders and more compliance notices than ever before.
Our program, Future Made in Australia, is guiding the shift to renewables in our energy system, digitisation and the shift to AI.
This is all happening across the public service in real time and much of the hard work, operationally and policy development wise, falls to the Australian Public Service, which is exactly why the Albanese Government values, respects, and invests in it. It’s why we will fight to protect the investments and reforms that we have made and will be front and centre of the election campaign.
I spoke earlier about the public service being more front and centre than it probably likes to be right now.
I think if the public service was able to choose, I feel like it might just slip out of the spotlight and reemerge the day after the election, ready to deal with what the Australian electorate has determined – just minus the pain in getting there.
For the Government, the second term agenda will focus on driving the changes we need to join up government services to make them seamless and safe for Australians and businesses.
We want to continue to build on the capability of the APS to understand the challenges ahead and develop solutions.
We want the APS to be a place where people want to work because of the interesting jobs and because the APS is a model employer.
We want to ensure that integrity and trust in government services improves year on year.
We want taxpayers to know that public funds are used efficiently and effectively, and that savings are sought and reinvested in programs that support the community.
We will continue to examine external labour costs, productivity gains from new technologies including AI, improving procurement panels to work across government, building on the APS professions’ networks to improve centralised capabilities and examine opportunities to streamline systems and processes across government.
This work is an important but ongoing responsibility to be constantly looking at how the APS provides services, how we improve what we do and make every dollar stretch, how we improve the service outcomes that people rely upon and expect.
Now the Albanese Governments approach to the APS that I've outlined to you this morning stands in stark contrast to the approach being taken by Mr Dutton and the Opposition.
The investments we have made to correct the failures of the previous decade have been labelled by the Opposition as wasteful.
They have promised to sack 36,000 public servants – depending on the interview sometimes they all come from Canberra, sometimes they don’t – roughly 20 per cent of the entire APS. And, in doing so, they would make $6 billion of cuts per annum, but without outlining how much they will spend in outsourcing and paying others to do the work of public servants again.
For the public servants that don’t lose their jobs, working from home arrangements will be banned and the right to disconnect removed.
They have foreshadowed broader cuts to programs across government but haven’t explained any of the detail and won’t do so until after the election.
Putting those broader cuts aside for a moment, a 20 per cut to the APS would definitely result in poorer service outcomes, there’s just no other way of explaining it.
Australians waiting months instead of days for essential payments.
There would be longer call wait times at our key frontline agencies like Centrelink and Services Australia.
There would have to be cuts to national security, including defence.
Reduced capability to deal with some of the issues with NDIS and protecting that scheme.
And without a doubt, a return to the secret shadow workforce which stood at 54,000 under the last Coalition Government, with expensive consultants doing core public service work – just off the books, so it wasn’t reported in official documents.
Now I will argue, as I have been and will do every day, that we cannot afford to go backwards.
When the Opposition talk about cutting "Canberra bureaucrats," what they’re choosing to ignore is that almost two-thirds of those positions are outside the ACT.
The cuts being proposed would affect services in communities right across Australia, in cities and in regional areas where the public service is a significant employer and service provider.
For me, the choice ahead is clear.
We can continue strengthening the public service's ability to deliver for all Australians – building the capabilities needed for the next generation of nation-building reforms.
Or we can return to what we inherited. To that public service that was struggling to deliver basic functions, let alone tackle complex future challenges.
The APS of the future must reflect the diversity of modern Australia.
It must harness new technologies while maintaining human connection.
It must balance immediate service delivery with long-term strategic thinking.
These aren't aspirations – these are essential if we are to build the Australia we want for future generations.
As we navigate the challenges ahead, we'll need public servants with the expertise, skill, dedication, and the vision to implement transformative policies.
Because from Medicare to the NDIS, from AUKUS to transitioning to a net zero economy, it’s public servants who are going to deliver that and build Australia’s future.
Thank you.
ENDS
