Federal Budget 2015: Relief as Joe Hockey turns down heat on public service

The Abbott government came out on Monday morning, all guns leaking, about how the public service was really gonna get it this time.

The figure of 17,000 jobs was brandished, there were going to be agencies abolished, sell-offs, efficiency reviews and bureaucrats in some departments were going to be made to sweat to save those taxpayers' pennies.

But then Tuesday's budget papers confirmed that in 2015, you can't even trust a budget leak anymore.

The hated hiring freeze is finished in a few weeks, there are no new job cuts to speak of and the worst of the redundancies are over.

Much of the sell-offs activity was re-announcements and the vaunted "functional reviews" of the Health and Education departments are not projected to inflict particularly deep wounds.

It appears that all the blood and thundering was an attempt to look like the government was doing something when in reality it wasn't doing much, in keeping with the general theme of Joe Hockey's second budget.

Let's take those 17,000 jobs. That's everybody who left the public service since mid-2013, as it turns out. Some quit, some were fired, some were made redundant, some retired. Some ran off with the milkman, maybe.

But it sounds like a big impressive figure, bigger than the actual net reduction, of about 12,500 which the Coalition has decided will do, for now, and is well on the way to its stated goal of a 16,500 headcount reduction by 2017-18.

They'll get there by keeping the hiring under control and there's certainly no need for the dramatic upheavals of 2014. It's a bit boring, but that won't bother a lot of public servants who have had quite enough excitement lately, thank you very much.

And as for those agency abolitions, in the Agriculture portfolio, for example, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, announced pre-budget he was terminating five "entities".

The nation will bear the loss of the Statutory Fishing Rights Allocation Committee, and the Aquaculture Committee had been trading on past glories, we all know it.

But Budget Paper Number 2 reveals the demise of the unfamous five will net the taxpayer nothing in 2015-16, zilch the following year, nada the year after that, and in 2018-19 the savings will amount to the square root of flip-all.

Ta-da!

The functional reviews sounded tough, but let's take Education; of $131 million in savings identified, all but $7.6 million will come from chopping programs.

When you only hope to find 925 grand in efficiencies this year from an operational budget of $314 million, it's a fair sign the public service is all but tapped out.

So all the indications are that the heat is off.

But if you bump into Senator Cormann in the corridor, remember to act scared.