Dutton borrows from Abbott: ‘I won’t cut frontline public services’​on February 6, 2025 at 3:25 am

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised not to cut frontline public servants if he wins office, even as the Coalition vows to slash tens of thousands of bureaucrats and save billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

The commitment sharply limits the roles Dutton could eliminate as prime minister, ruling out public servants such as those who process welfare payments and approve defence force veterans’ medical claims.

“We are not cutting frontline positions,” Dutton said at a rare press conference in Parliament House. “I want more money going [to] frontline services. I want more money going to health and education. I want to make sure that we can get the GPs into areas at the moment where they’re not practising.”

Former opposition leader Tony Abbott promised during the 2013 election campaign that his government would make no cuts to health, education, the ABC or SBS. His decision to break that commitment helped end his prime ministership when Malcolm Turnbull challenged him in 2015.

Dutton promised to release the opposition’s costings on its planned cuts before the election, days after signalling on the ABC’s Insiders program that voters would have to wait until after the election to get final details of those cuts.

“We need to sit down and look, through an ERC [expenditure review committee] process, which would be the normal course of things. We’ll do that in government,” he said on Sunday when asked about the details about prospective public service cuts.

Asked on Thursday if Australians would have the Coalition’s costings on the cuts to the public service before the election, Dutton said “of course they will”.

The opposition leader has previously signalled up to 36,000 public servants could be cut, delivering a saving of up to $6 billion, and recently appointed Nationals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as the Coalition’s new shadow minister for government efficiency.