Australians could have to wait weeks longer, or even months, for social service payments if Peter Dutton delivers on his pledge to slash public service 41,000 jobs, new Albanese government analysis shows.
The opposition is ramping up its efforts to sell budget savings through cutting bureaucrat jobs as the key to helping other Australians out with the cost-of-living crisis.
But the Coalition is yet to clarify where those jobs will be slashed from, or how many, despite the shadow public service minister, Jane Hume, previously ruling out cuts from frontline service staff. It is not clear how 41,000 jobs would be cut without frontline service workers being affected.
Labor is concerned those cuts could impact service delivery agencies, like Services Australia and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, where the bulk of new roles have been created.
If those jobs are cut, Labor says claiming for the age pension would take almost three months rather than one month, processing paid parental leave would take one month rather than three days, and Medicare claims would take seven days to process, rather than the current two.
Carers would wait 76 days to receive the carer payment rather than 17, and families claiming the family tax benefit for the first time would wait 54 days rather than six.
“If Peter Dutton cuts, you will pay,” the public service minister, Katy Gallagher, said on Thursday.
Fresh data for federal government social service payments over 2024 showed wait times drastically dropped over the period, with around half of payment claims taking an average of under two weeks to process.
The Albanese government credited the improvements to the addition of 3,500 frontline roles in Services Australia in the 2024-25 federal budget.
In the first quarter of 2024, applicants for the disability support pension waited an average of 109 days. By the October to December quarter, that average wait time was down by 48%, to 57 days.
Jobseekers experienced a similar drop, with the average processing time decreasing from 28 days to nine days.
The average time for Services Australia to answer a call dropped 26%, from 19 minutes in the January to March quarter to 14 minutes 15 seconds by the October to December quarter.
The number of callers diverted to congestion messaging – where a call is answered by an automated voice, which advises the caller that online services are available and then hangs up – was also down 92.7% by 2024’s final quarter, from almost 4.4m to less than 320,000.
Gallagher said the possibility of mass job losses would lead to Australians “waiting longer on hold and longer to receive your payments”.
“Rather than helping you with cost of living pressures, the Liberals and Nationals want your money locked away in the government bank account for longer,” she said.
“The last time the Coalition was in government, they delivered worse services, propped up by expensive consultants, and oversaw the era of robodebt.
“Under the Morrison government, service deliver tanked, outsourcing to expensive consultants boomed, and thousands of Australians were hounded for debts they didn’t owe through the illegal robodebt scheme. Labor won’t let that happen again.”
In the latest federal budget, Labor increased its average staffing level for the public service by 3,436 jobs for 2025-26 financial year, with the total number of roles now expected to reach 213,439.
Most of those roles were in the National Disability Insurance Agency, the tax office and the defence department.
It means 41,411 jobs have been added to the public service since Labor took office in May 2022. In 2024-25, the average staffing level for Services Australia grew to 30,218, from 26,692 in the previous year.
Dutton on Wednesday suggested all 41,000 roles would be slashed, suggesting the roles are “not going to help families put food on their table or deliver the services that they need as a family or as a pensioner”.
The veterans’ affairs department has also grown under Labor, with staff tipped to reach almost 3,500 in 2025-26, from 2,154 in the Morrison government’s final budget in March 2022.
The veterans’ affairs minister, Matt Keogh, said the additional staff had worked to clear a backlog of veterans’ claims that reached into the tens of thousands by 2022.
Claims now took two weeks, a government source said, where they would previously take more than 200 days.
Hume questioned on Tuesday why staff had been permanently added to the department to clear a temporary backlog.
“If they were there to address a backlog and that’s been done, what are all those staff doing now?” Hume said on ABC.
Keogh claimed the Coalition would frontline veterans’ affairs workers if elected, placing “more stress on those important service men and women who have helped our nation”.
