Given that the public service is one of the battlegrounds of this election campaign, it might also be worth taking a look at the Services Australia capability review. The Coalition says more staff in the APS doesn’t result in better service (apparently outsourcing those jobs to the private sector for three times the cost is much more effective!) but the capability review found:

“With the support of short-term government funding, the agency recently recruited over 5,100 APS 3 and 4 level staff between November 2023 and March 2024, to address excess demand in the system. The additional resourcing reduced claims on-hand by more than half (from a peak of 1.35 million), and over one million phone calls were answered, reducing call wait times.”

Now, it is not perfect and people are still having issues reaching Services Australia. But will cutting the number of staff help address that? Logic would say…no.