A Labor senator has condemned the centrepiece of the Rudd Government's budget savings drive the public service efficiency dividend as an unworkable blunt instrument.
''It's just lazy public policy,'' said Western Australian Ruth Webber, whose term in the Senate expires next week. ''They've [efficiency dividends] gone past their use-by date.''
The extra one-off dividend obliges all government departments and agencies to cut 3.25 per cent from their running costs this year, before reverting to the previous 1.25 per cent level.
Senator Webber said the move was arbitrary and meant the Government was shirking hard decisions on spending cuts, handing them over to agencies, some of which had no room to move.
''Some are cut as far as they can be cut,'' she said, citing the Government's major service deliverer Centrelink as a prime example of an organisation where further cuts would only hurt clients.
''What are you going to do?'' she asked. ''Close 2 per cent of the offices and get rid of 2 per cent of the people [receiving government payments]?''
She agreed that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as a former senior bureaucrat, should be alive to the notion that a wholesale ratcheting up of the efficiency dividend was a process that was being superceded.
''Sometimes there's nothing much new in what we do,'' she said.
Her experience of the Senate Estimates process had confirmed her view that a whole-of-government approach was needed, with ministers making individual decisions to cut expenditure, not relying on an across-the-board reduction in running costs.
''I just hope they won't do it again,'' she said, echoing the warning sounded by ACT Labor senator Kate Lundy from the time of the budget.
Senator Webber said Canberra's national cultural institutions would be particularly hard-hit by the one-off increase, a position endorsed by Senator Lundy and the ACT's Liberal senator, Gary Humphries.
Senator Webber, who gives her valedictory speech to the Senate tonight, expressed reservations also about the limited extent to which the Rudd Government had undone the Howard government's WorkChoices industrial-relations policy.
''That's just me,'' she said of a position that had not won her wide support in her home state, where Australian Workplace Agreements had been first introduced and well received because of the ''ridiculous'' strength of the economy thanks to the mining boom.
She urged the Rudd Government to established the ''purest model'' of an emissions trading scheme, including petrol and transport.
''You've got to have everything in,'' she said, acknowledging that doing so could be ''tough'' for industry and for some working families but saying an all-in system was the only way to avoid ''energy poverty'' for households.
''If we are serious about changing behaviour, then price is the way you do it,'' she said.
Senator Webber, a fourth-generation Labor Party member, took her deselection by her party philosophically, expressing gratitude for her six years in the ''special place'' that was the Senate.
She was rolled for her preselection partly because she supported Mark Latham in the 2003 leadership contest, which Kim Beazley, backed by the overwhelming majority of the Western Australian party hierarchy, lost by one vote.
''I'm not very good at doing what I'm told,'' Senator Webber said yesterday.