The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury
Assistant Minister for Employment
The Hon Luke Gosling MP
Special Envoy for Defence, Veterans’ Affairs &
Northern Australia
Member for Solomon
OPINION PIECE
You can't build a great nation by subtraction
Published in The NT News
6 April 2025
In challenging times, Australians don't retreat. We build.
From the Snowy Hydro Scheme to Medicare, superannuation to the global financial crisis response, we've always chosen to meet economic pressure with purpose.
That's what Labor has done over the past three years and what this year's Budget sets us up to continue.
We are delivering cost-of-living relief for today and nation-building reform for tomorrow: universal tax cuts, cheaper energy, more social housing, stronger Medicare, and investment in education and skills.
Underpinning it all is investment in our public service and a belief in Australians' capability to solve problems and to help each other.
It's part of a broader philosophy: when Australians face pressure, a responsible government turns up and creates public value.
Peter Dutton offers a very different path.
In his budget reply, he promised to repeal Labor's tax cuts - which means clawing back $536 from every taxpayer - and to cut 41,000 public service jobs.
Cutting everything but your taxes is not a plan to relieve pressure in the short or long-term. It's a formula for making it worse. It's subtraction disguised as reform, and it doesn't add up. To put it in perspective: 41,000 jobs is more than three packed TIO Stadiums.
Nationally, it's one out of every five public servants. These are not idle roles - they are central to public capacity. And when you take away public capacity, it's not simply Canberra that pays. It's the people waiting on the other end of the phone, and people all around Australia - including the NT.
Labor made a different choice in the past three years. We lifted the staffing cap, reduced reliance on expensive consultants, and prioritised permanent, skilled public service jobs. Labor has added at least 300 public service jobs in Darwin and 161 in Outback NT. There are now about 2250 APS employees across the Territory - more than 1.5 per cent of the employed population, or roughly one in every 63 Territorians. These jobs aren't abstract. They're real, steady, modestly paid jobs that help keep the nation running. More than 90 per cent of public servants are in ongoing, permanent roles.
In Darwin, one in five Commonwealth public servants is a First Nations Australian; in regional NT, it's one in two.
They aren't high-paid executives - they're the quiet heroes of the Australian Public Service: Services Australia staff paying pensions, Veterans Affairs processing entitlements for our former ADF members, IT specialists who keep the systems operating, rangers who keep our parks running, the administrator making sure services are delivered, the payroll officer and accountant.
They're the people who do the unglamorous, essential work that keeps systems running and communities supported. Government done well is a force for good and it relies on these people and jobs.
Peter Dutton says he won't touch frontline services. It is not possible to cut 41,000 public servants without cutting frontline services.
Labor invested thousands of additional staff in Services Australia, Veterans Affairs, Defence, our biosecurity and other areas. Cutting public servants will impact the services that Australians and Territorians rely on from Centrelink to payments to veterans.
It means fewer people working at some of the Territory's biggest Commonwealth employers, such as the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water. Cutting 41,000 public servants does not remove the need for the work they do. Rather, it pushes it into the hands of private consultants, at a higher cost to taxpayers and with less transparency.
We've seen where this logic leads. When the Coalition was last in power, they cut more than 12,000 jobs from the public service prior to Covid19. Over 10 years there were 725 fewer jobs in Darwin. The result? Under their system, there were longer queues, fewer services, and pressure on already-stretched teams.
You don't strengthen a system by weakening its foundations. You can't put an artificial cap on public service numbers, and instead rely on expensive contractors, without impacting the foundations of the public service as the Coalition did. In economics, that's called a false economy: when short-term savings lead to long-term pain.
Labor's approach is different. We build.
Luke Gosling OAM is the Federal Member for Solomon and Special Envoy for Defence, Veterans' Affairs and Northern Australia.
Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury & Employment.