The Coalition are also trying to pretend that it wasn’t their original policy to cut the public service by 41,000 positions and that it was always going to be through natural attrition. Which is not what Bridget McKenzie said when she was asked about this last week – McKenzie said that they would decide where the cuts would happen after they won the election.

Hume is now trying to pretend that nothing has gone before the ‘natural attrition’ policy:

We actually never said that there were going to be forced redundancies. That was a Labor lie. It was a
Labor lie from the beginning. We had always planned to sensibly reduce the size of the public service over time. Now, at the end of that period of time, five years, there will be a savings of around $7 billion a year to the taxpayer. We think that’s really important to get the public service back to its right size, but
ensure that it’s also delivering the effective and efficient services that Australians rely on. We won’t’ be touching frontline services, and that’s why we won’t be touching national security portfolios.