I was on team big-government. By Claire Lehmann in The Australian.
I come from a Labor family. … However, like many people from lower-middle or working-class backgrounds, I drifted away from the left as I grew older, with various life experiences shaping my views. The experience that most influenced that drift was working inside the Australian Public Service.
At 25, after graduating from university, I moved to Canberra to work for the federal Department of Health. What I encountered there changed the way I think about the role of government, permanently.
The Department of Health is situated in a gigantic office building in Woden [an area of Canberra]. In every team I worked in, the pattern was the same: one or two people carried the load for a team of six to eight.
The rest ranged from disengaged to functionally incapable. In one team, I sat next to a woman who spent her entire working day researching property online. She could not conduct a basic web search for work purposes. She could not file documents alphabetically. She had been in her role for years, on a salary of $65,000. She could not be fired.
Having spent a decade working in cafes and restaurants from age 14 to 24, encountering this felt like a slap in the face. Were blue-collar workers busting themselves for a wage while desk workers lounged about doing personal research projects? Apparently in Canberra, the answer was yes.
Of course, this does not apply to every federal public servant. But what I witnessed in my one year inside the department was not unusual. One deputy secretary I worked under complained to me that “the federal government just throws money down the toilet”.
We had flextime. We had morning teas almost every day. And still the union representatives lobbied for better conditions – conditions that could not possibly have been more generous. A friend of mine, given so little work that she had nothing to do, would cry in the toilets out of despair.
I quit after just one year, ashamed of abusing the taxpayer. But that was 15 years ago. Since then, the problem has got only worse.
Under the Albanese government, the APS [Australian Public Service, i.e. the bureaucrats] has grown by 26 per cent since 2022. The cost of running it has blown out by 42 per cent to $114.6bn: roughly $8200 for every Australian taxpayer, every single year. Budget papers show the cost of running the bureaucracy has been revised up by $19.6bn across the next four years. The explosion of cost in the public sector will eat up more than half the savings the government expects to make from cutting the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And for what? To feed a public service that the government has lost the ability to control.
Government spending sits at 26.8 per cent of GDP, the highest level since 1986 outside the pandemic. This is the monster that Jim Chalmers’ budget refuses to name. And because he cannot face it, the 2026 budget has been shaped around it – designed not to tame the beast but to find new ways to feed it. Our tax policy is effectively being redrawn to support the growth of the public service, without politicians ever taking that choice to the public for a mandate. …
The inequity that exists today is straightforward: every productive worker in the economy is subsidising a public service that cannot be made to perform, cannot be made to shrink and cannot be held accountable. The only reason there is not more outrage is that most Australians have no idea how much it is costing them. …
The fault line is no longer between labour and capital but between private and public sectors; those who produce and those who administer those who produce
Much of the left has simply become a party of patronage. Join the team, barrack for every lefty cause, and you will probably be rewarded with a cushy job on tax money — either in the public service, as a contractor to the government, or at an NGO. But you have to be a loyal team member to get the money.
It’s a moral thing. People in the real (private) economy are paid because people voluntarily pay them for their goods or services. People on the government team get paid out of taxes, which are compulsory, backed by force (imprisonment).