Australian election 2025: Albo rips into Coalition on plans to cut 41,000 Canberra public servants

The Prime Minister says key government services would be cut in a ferocious attack on the Coalition’s promise to slash the Canberra-based public service by 41,000 workers.

Peter Dutton has confirmed this would be done through voluntary redundancies and natural attrition, and only affect public servants in Canberra.

Anthony Albanese questioned whether the Coalition was aware their cuts would include senior defence leadership and crucial national security agencies.

“ASIO, the Australian Signals Directorate, all of our security and intelligence agencies, where does Peter Dutton think they are based,” Mr Albanese told reporters while campaigning in Perth on Thursday.

“They are based in Canberra, in our national capital,”

“Where does he think they are – the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that deal with the issues of which we’re talking about here, relationships with other countries.”

He added that two-thirds of the Commonwealth public servants in Canberra would be out of a job as a result of the policy.

This includes two-thirds of Services Australia are based in Canberra and “deliver payments to pensioners, that deliver payments to people who are out of work, that deliver emergency payments for people who’ve been through natural disasters”.

While Mr Dutton has said the cuts would not effect service-delivery or defence and national security roles, Mr Albanese listed a range of other government departments that are headquartered in Canberra.

They included the National Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

He said the Coalition and Peter Dutton had proved they are “not ready” to govern.

“I think it’s impossible to actually be too outrageous on the comments that they are making in this campaign,” he said.

“Peter Dutton is showing that they are just not ready for government.

“I think that Australians over the next nine days, have an important decision to make, because there is a real choice of this election. My government that is competent, is orderly, has a plan for Australia … or this mob that will cut and wreck.”

Mr Dutton, while campaigning in Hobart earlier on Thursday, defended the Coalition's plan, saying not all 41,000 positions were filled at the moment.

Nationals Leader David Littleproud also defended the plan, saying the Coalition wanted more frontline services and cited employment figures that showed public service was the only sector were jobs were increasing.

“We’re saying that we’ve got to have a public service that is nimble, that focuses on frontline services,” Mr Littleproud told the National Press Club.

“We want more beds in hospitals and less desks. That is what I think Australian taxpayers would expect of their government if delivering the public service that is fit to deliver that.”

“We’re not going to walk in and slash and burn day one. We’re going to be respectful. And we’re going to make sure that we get the outcomes that we’re looking for.”

The Coalition has already been forced on a plan to make federal public servants work from home after a backlash from women voters.

Independent senator for the ACT, David Pocock, has also attacked the policy.

“That would devastate the ACT economy, it would plunge us into recession – 41,000 would knock 10 per cent off our gross territory product,” he told ABC Afternoon Briefing.

“This is reckless policy from the opposition, and its reckless politics trying to import this US DOGE-style Donald Trump, Elon Musk politics, where we vilify the public service, we vilify our capital city to try to get votes elsewhere.

“If you look at what Mr Dutton has said, if you don’t touch Home Affairs, if you don’t touch frontline services, if you don’t touch our security agencies, you are probably left with about 5000 public servants trying to run the whole thing.”