When talking yesterday about the Coalition’s plan to cut 41,000 public servants, Peter Dutton said:

“I want to make sure that we are spending money on frontline services, not back-office operations,”

The Coalition are obviously sensitive to voters concerns about the impacts that these cuts might have to public services. But does just committing to cut back-office operations really make sense?

If you sacked all the administration workers in a hospital then the amount of time that doctors and nurses could spend caring for people would drop dramatically, as they would now need to attend to all the administrative work.

Worse, because doctors and nurses are trained and proficient in providing medical care, they would not be as efficient at doing the administration as the previous admin workers. This means the admin work would take more hours to do. The back-office staff help make the front-line services more efficient.

Claims that massive cuts to the public service can be done without reducing services to Australians might make a good campaign slogan, but if political parties plan to make cuts, they should be up front with people about what the real effects they will have.