The Albanese government has rejected the idea of forming a unit to cut government waste in Australia after the idea was floated by two billionaires.
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk will head the new Department of Government Efficiency for the incoming Trump administration and Aussie mining magnate Gina Rinehart said such an idea ‘was much needed in Australia too’.
However, appearing on Wednesday morning’s Sunrise program, federal minister for Housing Clare O’Neil said ordinary Aussies should get a ‘chill up their spine when we see a couple of billionaires getting to talk about efficiencies in government services’.
‘What that really translates too for your viewers is drastic cuts to essential services like health, education, and other services that we ordinary Australians rely on,’ Ms O’Neil told Nat Barr on her Sunrise show.
‘This has no relevance to Australia.’
‘Why does it though?’ Barr interrupted.
‘Because Nat the government does some incredibly important things. It looks after our sick children in hospital, it educates our children, it pays for aged care for Australians,’ Ms O’Neil replied.
‘These are abstract things to billionaires who can pay their own way, but for ordinary people, these are meaningful and important things in their lives.’
However, Barr was still unconvinced.
‘A lot of people might be sitting there in their lounge rooms today thinking, “well, OK, I mean whether you like Elon Musk or not, but if someone gets to be a billionaire, they may know how to make money, they may know how to cut waste”,’ Barr said.
‘Let’s give them a go.
‘I just think people at home might be open, I mean we, we know you have to run the government, but maybe people are interested in drilling down on exactly where the money’s going, maybe we should be open to that.’
Meanwhile, the Shadow Minister for Finance Jane Hume accused Ms O’Neil of being ‘enormously disrespectful’ in her answer when talking about Mr Musk and Ms Rinehart, who are worth over $466billion and $30bn respectively.
‘You don’t get to be the world’s richest man and Australia’s richest person by accident, you get there because you’ve got some ideas about how to be efficient, and how to be effective and how to be profitable,’ Ms Hume said.
‘I wish that government would spend taxpayers’ money more wisely, and so should you.
‘In fact, there’s 36,000 additional public servants that have come on board since this government began. 36,000.
‘Now that’s at a cost of billions of dollars, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily feel $36,000. Public servants better served than I did two years ago.’
Ms Hume appeared to be referring to a report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that stated 26,000 public servants had been added to the bureaucracy since the Albanese government took power in 2022.
With more than half that increase being new positions in Canberra the wage bill had spiked by 23 per cent in the national capital.
Overall public sector wages were $37bn a year, which was up from $32.5bn in June 2022, with a total workforce of 365,400.
The report said 15,100 commonwealth public service jobs were added in 2023-24 after 11,000 job were created in the first year of the Albanese government.
