Speech – CPSU Delegate Conference
**Check against delivery**
Good afternoon everyone.
Thank you for having me here today.
And thank you to the delegates in this room.
You spend your working lives delivering services Tasmanians rely on and working in the institutions Tasmanians are proud of.
On top of that, you then give more of your time to represent your colleagues and improve your workplaces.
The theme of this conference is For the Public Good.
I think that gets to the central question for anyone who wants to lead a government:
What is government for – and what does it need to be capable of doing?
As a former public school teacher, and long-time union member, I have always understood government through the people who actually deliver it.
Teachers and teacher assistants.
Nurses and allied health workers.
Correctional officers and court staff.
Child safety workers.
Scientists, planners, engineers, and policy officers.
The people processing applications, administering programs, maintaining systems, supporting victims, protecting our industries, and making thousands of decisions every day that keeps the state functioning.
When those services work, people don’t notice them and often take them for granted.
But when they stop working, people notice very quickly.
That is why capability matters.
And that is why frank and fearless advice, professionalism, and integrity matter.
Governments need people who will tell ministers what they need to hear, not simply what they want to hear.
They need expertise.
They need institutional knowledge.
And they need a workforce confident enough to identify problems before they become crises.
Good government depends on it.
In my Budget Reply earlier this year I spoke about the kind of Labor government I want to lead.
Government should make people’s lives more secure and expand opportunity for all.
It should work hardest for those who need it most.
Public education.
Universal healthcare.
Affordable housing.
Fair wages.
Secure jobs.
Those things exist because previous generations decided there were things we should provide collectively as a society for those who need them.
And because working people, like us, organised and fought to make them happen.
And that is precisely why what is happening today in Tasmania is so frustrating.
After 13 years of the Liberals, they’re cutting jobs and services to pay for their waste.
Eric Abetz calls it “operational efficiencies.”
I think Tasmanians deserve some plain English.
The Government has ordered almost $1.5 billion in cuts.
Over 1,700 jobs.
More than $700 million is being ripped out of Health.
Another $228 million from Education.
And the cuts are being made right across the State Service.
We’re only at the tip of the iceberg, but the specialist Safety and Wellbeing Service in the Department of Justice has been abolished.
That service provided case management and psychological support to workers exposed to traumatic and difficult work, including correctional officers and legal staff.
State Growth or Building Tas – whichever name you want to use – is being gutted.
Cybersecurity officers. Senior Geologists, art curators, mining and policy specialists, transport expertise and network supervisors.
Screen Tasmania has been cut back to less than two full-time equivalent staff.
At TasTAFE, 12 courses and over 50 jobs were cut, including teaching positions.
In the last fortnight we’ve seen that Service Tas opening hours in regional towns will be cut back.
And just this week we’ve heard that another hundred job cuts are on the way.
These are not theoretical discussions about the future size of government.
These are decisions about capability.
About who performs work.
About where services are available across our state.
About what expertise the government retains.
And about what happens to the workload when someone leaves.
That is the argument I believe Tasmania needs to have.
Not simply:
How big should the public service be?
But:
What do we need the public service to be capable of doing?
I am not going to tell you that everything inside government works perfectly.
It doesn’t.
You know that better than anyone.
There are systems that duplicate work.
Processes that are unnecessarily slow.
Technology that should have been replaced years ago.
Functions that could work better across agencies.
Money that could be spent better.
And government should constantly look for those things.
But there is a fundamental difference between reform designed around better outcomes and beginning with a savings number and requiring agencies to work backwards from it.
Labor’s approach will start with capability.
Before making major workforce changes, ask:
What services are we trying to provide?
What workforce does it require?
What skills are critical?
What happens if those skills leave?
What work stops?
What pressure moves somewhere else?
And what is the true cost if the government must buy that capability back later from consultants, contractors, or labour hire?
That is a more disciplined way to manage both a workforce and the Budget.
It would also mean doing several things differently.
First, workforce planning should follow service planning – not the other way around.
I do not support setting an arbitrary whole-of-government headcount number and then treating every position as interchangeable.
Some areas may need fewer people over time.
Others will need more.
The starting point should be the service government expects an agency to deliver, and the workforce required to deliver it effectively.
Second, before accepting a redundancy, government should know what expertise is leaving with that person.
Can the work genuinely cease?
Can it be absorbed?
Is there somebody else with the same specialist knowledge?
Does accepting the redundancy create a succession problem?
Will we be hiring a consultant six months later to do the same work?
Those should be basic questions.
Third, redeployment and mobility should work properly across the entire State Service.
The State Service should operate much more like one employer.
If capability is no longer required in one agency but desperately needed in another, moving people should be easier.
A public servant should be able to build expertise in one department, take it into another, and continue building a career without unnecessarily starting again.
That means better common workforce planning, stronger professional streams, secondments, and career pathways across agencies.
Fourth, we should rebuild capability inside government where it makes financial and operational sense.
And Tasmanians should be able to see whether government is genuinely building that capability.
A Labor government would support regular reporting on consultant, contractor, and labour-hire expenditure alongside permanent workforce capability.
Not just how much government is spending externally, but what skills it has in-house, where capability gaps exist, and whether temporary external spending is becoming a substitute for maintaining a capable permanent workforce.
If government says it is saving money by reducing permanent staff, Tasmanians should be able to see whether those savings are simply reappearing somewhere else in the form of consultants, contractors and labour hire.
There will always be a role for specialist external advice.
But consultancy should supplement government capability, not replace it.
Hollowing out expertise and then repeatedly purchasing it back is not an efficiency.
A capable government needs its own economists, engineers, planners, digital specialists, procurement expertise, project managers, policy capability, and institutional memory.
Fifth, workers and unions should be involved before decisions are settled.
Consultation cannot mean announcing a restructure and then asking workers what they think about implementation.
The people doing the work often know exactly where processes are failing.
They know which systems duplicate effort.
They know where a vacancy can sensibly remain unfilled – and where losing one person will cause a major problem.
A government interested in genuine efficiency should want that information early.
Sixth, technology should be introduced with a clear workforce strategy.
Artificial intelligence will change the public sector.
The question is whether government manages that change deliberately or simply allows it to happen.
Technology should remove low-value administrative work, improve access to services, and allow skilled people to spend more time exercising judgement and expertise.
It should not simply become a predetermined job-reduction target.
And seventh, the State Service should compete to be a good employer.
Tasmania competes for skilled workers.
Government competes with the private sector, interstate employers and increasingly with employers that allow people to work from almost anywhere.
Flexible work is part of that competition.
Where a job can be performed effectively through flexible arrangements, including working from home, government should focus on performance and outcomes rather than presenteeism.
And underpinning all of this should be a respectful industrial relationship.
That does not mean a Labor government and the CPSU would always agree.
We wouldn’t.
You represent your members.
Government has responsibilities to the entire community and to all taxpayers.
There will be difficult negotiations.
There will be disagreements.
But disagreement does not require disrespect.
And consultation should never be treated as a problem to be managed.
We have recently shown what can happen when Labor listens to workers and then uses Parliament to act.
For years, workers and unions campaigned for Easter Sunday to be recognised as a public holiday.
Tasmania was the only state where it was not.
People in retail, hospitality, health, aged care, disability services, emergency services, and other industries could work Easter Sunday without the same public holiday recognition applying interstate.
So Labor introduced legislation.
The Government opposed it.
We argued our case.
We worked across the Parliament and changed the law for the better.
That outcome came from workers organising and making the case for change.
Labor’s role was to listen, put legislation before the Parliament and build support for it.
That is also how I want a future Labor government to approach public-sector reform.
Not just talking to the CPSU, or other unions when an enterprise agreement expires.
Not consulting workers after a decision has been made.
But recognising that the people who deliver government have useful information about how government could work better.
Because you know where processes break down.
You know where there is unnecessary bureaucracy.
You know where expertise is being lost.
You know which systems waste time.
You know where workforce shortages are creating risks.
And you know which reforms would genuinely allow people to work more effectively.
Tasmania has significant challenges ahead.
An ageing population.
A health system under pressure.
Poor educational outcomes.
A housing shortage.
Major infrastructure requirements.
Rapid technological change.
A difficult fiscal position.
And the need to lift productivity and attract investment.
Government cannot solve those challenges by itself.
Business, unions, and communities all have important roles.
But every one of those challenges requires competent government.
A government able to plan.
To procure well.
To regulate intelligently.
To manage projects.
To analyse evidence.
To provide services.
To respond when something goes wrong.
And to give ministers frank advice about difficult decisions.
That requires a capable public service.
So when I think about the public good, I do not think the debate should be about whether government is inherently big or small.
The more useful question is whether it works.
Whether taxpayers get value for money.
Whether services are delivered properly.
Whether government retains the skills it needs.
Whether workers are supported to perform at their best.
And whether the state has the capability to deal with the challenges in front of it.
If Labor earns the privilege of forming government, that is the standard I want us to apply as an employer.
High expectations of performance.
Respect for professionalism.
Frank and fearless advice.
Better workforce planning.
Genuine consultation.
Strong career pathways.
Modern and flexible workplaces.
Less unnecessary outsourcing.
And reform driven by better services and better value – not a headcount target.
Public servants are not simply a cost in the Budget.
They are also part of the capability Tasmania needs to solve its problems.
That is the conversation I want to have with the CPSU.
And that is what For the Public Good means to me.
Thank you.
