Before the election, the Coalition warned regularly it would impose a hiring freeze when it won office so as to reduce the Australian Public Service by 12,000 staff. Tony Abbott also ruled out redundancies, saying the job losses ''will all be through natural attrition''.

However, the bureaucracy has continued to advertise well over 100 vacancies a week since the September election. Copies of the APS Employment Gazette also show the government will employ at least 221 new public servants this month, even though the freeze was scheduled to begin on October 1.

In contrast, the gazettes have so far reported only 49 staff departures in October. Almost three in four of those have been via redundancy payouts.

The gazette data is incomplete, and some hiring and retrenchment decisions were made under Labor or during the caretaker period. However, the business-as-usual approach to advertising jobs - there were more than 500 vacancies open in October alone - suggests the government's freeze has been ignored.

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Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said on Sunday that work was under way to implement all Coalition policies, including the recruitment freeze.

''We have already started on the restructure of the public service, including the amalgamation of departments,'' he said.

''As we said before the election, we are going through a calm, methodical and structured process to deliver the good government Australians have voted for. This is how we will continue to approach the implementation of all our election commitments, including [the freeze].''

The Parliamentary Budget Office's post-election report, release late last week, revealed the Coalition's hiring freeze excluded federal police, customs and border protection staff, military personnel and spies.

It also said that, for the policy to achieve its savings target of $303 million this financial year, the government must shed 6000 staff in the nine months to June 30, 2014.

The Community and Public Sector Union's national secretary, Nadine Flood, said that target looked ''increasingly unachievable''.

''It demonstrates a lack of thought into the impact of these cuts on services and the public service itself … It seems likely that the government will now have to resort to other measures such as redundancy programs, which this government did not have a mandate for when it went to the polls.''

The ACT's federal Labor parliamentarians - Kate Lundy, Andrew Leigh and Gai Brodtmann - said the government would need to shed a job every hour until the end of the financial year to meet its target.

Senator Lundy said: ''We can only assume that these cuts are not motivated by wanting to trim waste, but by Prime Minister Abbott's disdain for Canberra and ideological opposition to the public service …

''Canberrans deserve to know how these 12,000 job cuts are going to be delivered, and what further cuts the Abbott government has in mind.''

The APS gazettes suggest the main employers of public servants this month were the Prime Minister's Department (25 new staff), the Immigration Department (15) and the Defence Department (13).

The agencies with the most vacancies open were the Taxation Office (44 jobs), the Bureau of Meteorology (28), Customs (21) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (20).