Media
|
Speeches
July 29, 2025
Good morning, and thank you for hosting me here at the AFR Government Services Summit.
This is my first formal speech in my capacity as the Shadow Minister for the Public Service and the Shadow Minister for Government Services.
I want to take this opportunity to set out the Coalition’s approach in this term to these portfolios, and also reflect on the broader economic debate in Australia today.
It is important to acknowledge that the Coalition did not get the tone right at the last election when it came to the public service.
It is not lost on me that promising significant cuts to the size of the APS or changing the way public servants work from home was poorly received, and not just here in Canberra.
As the Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has said, all our policies are up for review, including those on the public service.
We will take the time to consult, listen and get the balance right in this critical policy area before the next election.
Over my parliamentary career I have had the privilege of observing public servants up close, and in my experience, they are overwhelmingly patriotic, professional and hardworking.
As Deputy Chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19, I saw the public service at its best, performing exceptional work in extraordinary circumstances in which the actions of the Australian Government touched the lives of every single Australian.
And as the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, I saw our security agencies working tirelessly to protect their fellow Australians – often without public recognition and at great personal sacrifice due to the classified nature of their work.
I have great respect for public servants, and I recognise the significant contributions they make to our democracy.
The public service is the key enabler for governments to deliver on their agendas – politicians cannot deliver it alone.
The Coalition aspires to have a respectful, constructive relationship with the APS.
We want a motivated, high-performing public service that works in genuine partnership with government to deliver the services Australians rely on.
And we want it to do so as a trusted steward of taxpayer dollars – because this trust is foundational to a well-functioning democracy.
I also want to take this opportunity to outline the values and principles that will guide our approach moving forward.
The Liberal Party will always stand for limited government.
We believe that government should be no larger than it needs to be to deliver the services Australians expect.
Because everything government does must be paid for by citizens.
We think Australians work hard enough for their money already. They shouldn’t have to work any harder to support inefficiency or waste.
We expect the APS to be efficient and respectful of taxpayers’ money.
We want an APS which is capable of delivering more within existing resources by doing away with unnecessary bureaucratic processes, freeing up time for public servants to work on the issues that will make a real difference to the lives of Australians.
It means a more agile APS.
One that is unencumbered by redundant and duplicative functions so it can quickly pivot to emerging priorities in an increasingly uncertain strategic environment.
It means a more focused APS.
One that delivers core services well, rather than trying to be all things to all people, and which recognises that some areas are better handled by individuals, communities or the private sector.
The Liberal Party has always been the party of free enterprise, recognising that competition and innovation drive better outcomes for a lower cost.
For government, this means it’s not about who provides the service, it’s about delivering the best results for Australians in the most efficient way.
Labor thinks there's something inherently wrong with using contractors and consultants.
Labor believes a ‘public service first’ – and sometimes even a ‘public service only’ – approach is always the right one, regardless of whether it ultimately provides the best outcome for the lowest cost.
I probably don’t need to remind this room that Labor took a promise to the election to cut $6.4 billion in spending on consultants and contractors. They claim they can make these cuts without diminishing services.
What you might be surprised to learn – and I suspect all Australians would be too – is that Labor also took a commitment to the last election to cut the APS.
That’s according to the Parliamentary Budget Office, who found that the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO), released by Treasury and Finance on 7 April, implies a cut of 22,500 public servants over the forward estimates, including 16,000 alone in the 2026-27 financial year.
If these reductions don’t occur, or other offsetting savings are not found, that will have serious implications for the budget forecasts.
I will be watching with interest to see how the government squares this circle.
It comes after the government added 41,000 public servants in their first term.
It’s led the Economist magazine to conclude that Australia has one of the world’s largest public services per capita – even larger than some European democracies like the UK, France and Spain.
We should aspire to have the best public service in the world, not one of the largest.
Labor’s approach puts ideology over outcomes.
The Coalition will take a non-ideological approach.
My view is that if a job needs to be done, it should be done by the person best placed to do so.
Often, that will be a public servant.
But sometimes it will be a consultant or a contractor.
There are some capabilities that are more efficiently and effectively delivered by private sector partners.
Under the Coalition, the job will go to whoever can deliver the capability best in the most cost-effective way for taxpayers.
Embracing free enterprise also means leveraging innovation and new technology to improve efficiency and uplift productivity.
Much has been said about the perils and risks of artificial intelligence.
I am observing with interest the debate within the Albanese government about Australia’s adoption of artificial intelligence.
On the one hand you have Andrew Leigh, a former economist and assistant minister, who recognises the enormous potential upside of AI for his portfolio responsibility of productivity.
At a speech to the McKell Institute last month, he extolled the “significant benefits” to productivity from AI adoption, downplayed fears about job losses and urged caution against unnecessary regulation which would stall its deployment.
On the other, you have Industry Minister Tim Ayers, a former unionist, who seems to think AI adoption is yet another opportunity for unions to wield power in the workplace.
At the AFR AI summit in June, he promised to give unions a seat at the table and a say over the AI rollout.
Ayers was no doubt responding to pressure from the ACTU, who demanded that month that workers “should have the right to reject [AI’s] use completely.”
The ACTU has also insisted AI should be a feature of collective bargaining, alongside a slew of new regulations which would only slow down adoption of the technology.
As Innes Willox of the Australian Industry Group pointed out, if we had adopted this approach to the deployment of the personal computer, “we would still be using typewriters and telex machines in workplaces and would be fighting industrial battles over the possible use of fax machines.”
The ATCU’s position is reminiscent of Fredric Bastiat’s satirical 1845 Candlemakers petition against the sun for unfair competition.
Ayers’ predecessor, Ed Husic, spent a great deal of time contemplating how to best regulate AI, including through the introduction of mandatory AI guardrails.
And while I support sensible regulation to address specific harms of AI – such as the Deepfake Sexual Material Bill that passed with Coalition support last year – and there are risks to security and privacy to be managed, I fear that some in government are more concerned with how to constrain AI rather than how to leverage it.
Without wanting to make his task any harder, I confess I am unashamedly on the side of the Andrew Leighs in this debate.
Inserting unions between business and technologies like AI will only serve as a handbrake on its adoption in Australia, and, as my colleague Dave Sharma has rightly pointed out, it sets up an unhelpful dynamic by suggesting that business will gain but workers will lose from artificial intelligence.
AI has the potential to boost private sector productivity – especially in the services sector - and help lift our economy out of the slump we find ourselves in.
It also has the potential to revolutionise the delivery of government services, in a way that not just improves efficiency, but also enhances the user experience.
As a middle power without a sovereign foundational AI capability, Australia is not best served by a government fixated on AI regulation.
We can’t write the rules that govern Silicon Valley, nor should we try to.
As a country with a highly educated workforce, and large service sector, and fast technology adoption, we are well-placed to reap outsized productivity gains from AI — but only if we stop treating it primarily as a threat to be managed and start treating it as a tool to be mastered.
A 2019 OECD report noted AI could potentially free up nearly one-third of public servants’ time, allowing them to shift from mundane tasks to high-value work.
A 2023 report released by Microsoft and the Tech Council of Australia estimated that generative AI could contribute as much as $155 billion annually to Australia’s economy by 2030 by improving existing industries and enabling the creation of new products and services.
Governments at all levels have an important role to play in realising these gains, both by ensuring our regulatory settings are conducive to innovation and uptake, and leading by example by adopting AI in the public sector.
There are already some promising early data points.
The results of a UK Government trial published last month found that public servants using generative AI saved an average of 26 minutes per day, which adds to nearly two working weeks of time saved per year per person when scaled across the public workforce.
And, while noting some issues with its adoption, the 2024 evaluation of the six-month trial of Microsoft Copilot in the Australian Government found that participants estimated they saved up to an hour on drafting and information-gathering tasks, and 40% of participants reported being able to spend more time on higher-value activities like staff engagement and strategic planning as a result.
Demonstrating the benefits of AI will help to build public trust in these systems and promote uptake across the broader economy – and the Coalition wants to see the Commonwealth Government leading the charge.
Embracing new technologies is fundamental to another core tenet of the Coalition’s approach to government: putting the customer first.
Frontline services are where the rubber hits the road for the vast majority of Australians interacting with government.
But the user experience is often poor – which unfortunately frames their perception of government more broadly.
Anyone who has had to navigate the labyrinth of webforms, call centres, and identification systems to do something as simple as renew a passport or make a Centrelink claim has asked themselves why it can’t be simpler.
While there are reasons for this – dozens of systems developed by different agencies over decades can’t be consolidated overnight – they are deeply unsatisfying to the end user who is confronted by an unintuitive system paid for by their taxes.
Parliamentarians have first-hand experience of this.
Electorate offices around the country spend a great deal of time performing what is essentially a concierge service for constituents who are unable to navigate the bureaucracy on their own.
You shouldn’t need a political science degree to access basic services in Australia.
More people use myGov each day than public transport, yet only a fraction of digital government services are linked to myGov.
Users wanting to renew their passport or update their details on the electoral roll, for example, must navigate entirely separate systems.
The Estonian Government has long been considered an exemplar for digital infrastructure and service delivery.
The backbone of this infrastructure is ‘X-Road’: a distributed, interoperable system that allows hundreds of independent systems to exchange data while eliminating the need for data duplication.
According to the Estonian Government, X-Road helps save over 1,300 years of working time annually, letting public servants focus on more meaningful tasks that require human judgement.
This is the kind of impact Australia should aspire to.
And all of it is very hard to do without private sector partners, who are indispensable to the deployment of these new technologies.
We cannot allow the government’s ideological war on consultants and contractors to stifle the improvements in service quality and efficiency that citizens expect.
I’d like to take the opportunity of speaking today to make some broader observations about the state of the Australian economy and share with you the approach the Coalition will take to economic policy in this term of parliament.
The Albanese government will tell you the economy is in good health.
This is only superficially true.
The economy is growing – but very slowly – at just 0.2 per cent in the March quarter. Annual growth is stuck at 1.3 per cent – less than half the long-run average of 2.7 per cent.
It is true, inflation has finally started to recede, although it has taken longer than in peer economies.
Interest rates are beginning to decline, although much later than many of our competitors.
Unemployment remains historically low, although it has started to rise.
Commonwealth revenues are high, but budget forecasts show a rising deficit and increasing debt.
And even these indicators mask a deeper malaise.
Many recent trends in the Australian economy are unsustainable and, if left unchecked, will lead to permanently lower living standards.
Productivity went backwards almost a decade, to 2016 levels, during the last parliament.
Real per capita household disposable income - in simple terms, living standards - crashed by 8% between mid-2022 and mid-2024.
The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook released last month revealed that Australia has dropped from 20th to 60th place in real GDP growth per capita.
Business investment is down nearly 6 points as a per cent of GDP, from its height during the mining boom.
Total tax per capita has risen by around $3,000 for every individual.
Government spending as a proportion of the economy is at record highs outside wars and pandemics at 38.8%.
Employment growth since the first quarter of 2023 has been overwhelmingly dominated by the non-market sector at 83%.
Belatedly, the Albanese government appears to have recognised these problems, many of which they significantly exacerbated in their first term.
They added tens of billions of new recurrent spending, worsening the structural budget balance, without any plan to pay for it.
They piled on more than 5,000 new regulations and red tape.
They significantly re-regulated the labour market to favour their union allies, even winding back Gillard-era reforms.
But now Jim Chalmers says he’s going to fix it.
He admitted at the National Press Club last month that on Labor’s watch, the budget is unsustainable, our economy is not productive, and we are not resilient enough.
And he’s convening a productivity and tax summit in search of a policy agenda to address these problems.
A cynic might say this candour is much easier the other side of a big election win.
Apart from a post-election bout of honesty, much of the credit for this apparent awakening appears to have come from a new book called Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
The last time there was this much enthusiasm among Labor MPs for an economics book starting with the letter ‘A’, was when Clive Hamilton released Affluenza in 2005.
It, of course, had a very different conclusion, about the ills of economic growth.
Abundance, by contrast, apparently reveals that red tape can have unintended consequences, too much regulation thwarts progress and that economic growth delivers not just more material wealth but a better quality of life.
A critic might say some of these insights were already available in earlier and perhaps less fashionable works by the likes of Milton Friedman and Frederic Hayek.
Naturally, I was curious about the book that had Labor MPs talking like undergraduate libertarians, so I’ve joined Canberra’s largest book club and I’m reading Abundance.
Abundance does have insight.
In an age of pessimism, it is refreshingly optimistic about what western democracies can achieve.
It rightly embraces technological change as an engine of not just economic growth but better lives.
And it couches its critique of the failings of big government in language progressives can safely embrace, at least in theory.
I hope Labor MPs and Senators were at least a little bit embarrassed reading about the transformative role nuclear energy could play in providing abundant, environmentally friendly energy in this utopian progressive future.
I was less taken by the vision of lab-grown fake chicken becoming a staple of all of our diets, but each to their own.
Perhaps its most searing moral critique is for cities and states governed by American liberals and their planning regulations which limit new housing and do so much harm to the young and disadvantaged.
If anything, Australia’s problems with housing affordability are even worse than America’s.
The median house prices listed in the book designed to shock the reader - San Francisco at $1.3m, Manhattan at $1.1m, LA at $1m, Seattle at $900,000 or Boston at $830,000 - seem almost affordable by Australian standards, even accounting for currency differences.
Klein and Thomson are clear that regulation - in particular zoning and building codes - are to blame.
And they rightly note this doesn’t just hurt young families trying to buy their first home, it directly contributes to social ills which should trouble us all, like homelessness.
The Albanese government appears to have embraced this logic with enthusiasm, especially for the housing market.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil has promised to pare back a “thicket of regulation” which had built up and given “the distinct impression to builders around the country that we don’t want them to build any more homes.”
What remains to be seen is how they will deliver this in practice.
There’s nothing that’s easier to oppose in abstract and harder to reform in practice than red tape.
Everyone hates “red tape”.
But every individual piece of regulation exists because it has a constituency or vested interest arguing for it.
All were put in place for at least seemingly sincere reasons by someone who thought it was necessary, or profitable.
And many of those constituencies which clamour for more regulation are important to centre left political parties, like environmentalists and unions.
The test for Labor is how much they are willing to stand up to these constituencies and actually reduce red tape to tackle the profound problems in our economy with productivity and housing affordability.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has recognised the seriousness of this challenge by appointing my colleague and friend Andrew Bragg as our Shadow Minister for Productivity and Deregulation, as well as housing.
The Coalition sincerely wishes the Albanese government well in this task. They will have our enthusiastic bipartisan support if they do actually want to reduce red tape.
We will be holding them to account for their performance against measurable outcomes like regulations repealed as well as productivity increases and homes built.
And we’ll be judging the productivity and tax summit on the concrete ideas which emerge to facilitate this.
At the very least it must not take us backwards.
It would be bitterly ironic if the government’s much-touted roundtable becomes the mechanism by which productivity is ultimately stifled because it leads to the overregulation of technologies like AI at the behest of unions.
Our economic team led by Ted O’Brien will of course also be proposing our own constructive policy ideas to address these wicked policy problems.
The Coalition will take a pragmatic approach to empower a public service that is more efficient, more agile, and focused on delivering the services that matter most to Australians.
We will embrace free enterprise and take a non-ideological approach to service delivery, ensuring the person that is best-placed to perform a job is the person who gets the job – whether they come from the public or private sector.
We will ensure government plays a leadership role in the adoption of new technologies to drive innovation and improve government processes, which will in turn drive productivity growth across the entire economy.
And we will bring a customer service mindset to the delivery of government services to ensure Australians have the best possible experience when interacting with government and provide confidence to taxpayers that their money is being spent effectively.
As you would expect at this early stage of the political cycle, we haven’t yet settled on any specific policies with regard to the size and the operation of the public service.
We will provide those details in due course.
But what I can provide you now is a commitment to do things differently, and an invitation to work with me on that policy development process.
We are in listening mode following the election, and I am very much in the market for good ideas.
I look forward to discussing these issues in further detail with you today.
ENDS