Bureaucratic Bloat

Well, you know, we've heard this for time and memorial really, that um, you know, go going back to the early 80s, uh, there was uh you know promises to cut the public service. And I went back to have a look because the biggest reformers of the public service, of course, was the long y labor government. I mean, they slashed the public service, but they did it by corporatizing, by turning public uh service departments into SOEs. Uh, and uh they certainly cut the number of uh public servants um down to uh about 30,000. Um and if you look at the public service employed around wait for it, 66,000 people in 1984 at the end of uh the Molduna after. Yeah, well, now we employ 63,000. So it's it's gone up and down, up and down all the way. What you see with changes of government generally are that national tends to come in, uh they tend to cut the public service but employ more consultants. Well, uh they've really now said they're not going to employ more consultants, they're going to cut the consultancy bill. If there's ever a time, uh, at as at the moment, if you were to cut the public servants, uh, it's the easiest time to do it with AI. You can put a lot of the work that's done by the pen pushers in the background of the public service into AI. So uh that'll be used a lot more uh if you see the plans that was uh that were outlined by Nicola Woodis today. Uh it was interesting that you made the point that um they expect to save 2.4 billion dollars uh overhauling the public service. Now, does that go into the budget money and to where we see the budget uh forecasts for the future uh does it before? Well, it's done for budget broadcasts, isn't it?