Reducing the public sector
Will Abbott’s cuts be costly?
The claim that 12,000 jobs in the public service would go under an Abbott government was widely debated during the election. Greg Jericho at ABC’s The Drum crunches the numbers to see if cuts could be made solely through attrition. Depending on the numbers the Government decides to use figures can quite easily be distorted, however eventually there will reach a point where natural attrition dries up and the cuts start saving less than expected as redundancy is the only option. Recent report, Death by a thousand cuts, by Christopher Stone also argues that cuts can harm productivity:
“across the board cuts have little impact on productivity, and can even harm it through stifling innovation from the misguided belief that innovation is driven by financial constraints. What more often happens is services are cut back – such as the ABS stopping counting job vacancies.”
Find the article at ABC’s The Drum
