The tight restrictions on recruitment that have squeezed the federal bureaucracy over the past 20 months are about to be lifted, though some milder limits will remain.
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On Wednesday, the Public Service Commission will relinquish control over the hiring of government staff and hand responsibility back to individual departments and agencies.
The current cap on recruiting graduates and other entry-level employees will be scrapped, and all job opportunities will be open to public competition. Previously, since late 2013, existing public servants had been given priority access to new jobs so as to limit the number of redundancies.
The Abbott government imposed tough central controls over recruitment soon after it won office. The limits were referred to widely as a "hiring freeze" though, in practice, the bureaucracy was allowed to recruit sparingly.
However, Employment Minister Eric Abetz said on Tuesday the government had now reduced the size of the bureaucracy "without compromising the delivery of services to Australians".
"This included a reduction of 14,500 positions secretly planned by the previous government but neither publicly announced, nor budgeted for," he said.
"This has been achieved in an orderly manner, by natural attrition and voluntarily redundancies."
The senator added the hiring restrictions "were always interim measures".
The Australian Public Service shrank by almost 11,000 staff last year alone – the deepest annual cut since John Howard's first term as prime minister.
The bureaucracy lost about 15,500 staff between June 2012, when its size peaked, and the end of 2014. About 1100 of those jobs were shed under Labor before the Coalition was elected, though Labor disputes that it would have overseen more job losses if it had won the election.
The Public Service Commission's latest advice to agencies, issued on Tuesday, says the government "remains committed to managing the size of the public sector".
"The modified arrangements return responsibility to agency heads to manage the size of their workforces – including recruitment activity – in line with government expectations," the commission says.
"From July 1, 2015, APS agency heads will be expected to notify vacancies in the Public Service Gazette as open to all eligible members of the community. Agency heads will be able to do this without the approval of the Australian Public Service Commissioner."
The commission says departmental secretaries and agency heads "will be accountable for ensuring that staffing is consistent with [budget] estimates, except when subject to further government decision".
The budget papers said that over about 18 months, the g
The government estimates the bureaucracy's workforce will shrink by just 71 jobs this financial year after three consecutive years of steep job losses.
