Women, junior staff and the lowest paid public servants will bear the brunt of an order to start sacking the federal governments 14,000 temporary workers, an analysis of government workplace statistics shows.
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Graduate and indigenous recruitment will be slashed and hiring will be frozen across the bureaucracy with a challenging process to be followed before any new public servants can be hired.
The Public Service Commission has issued orders to departmental bosses not to renew any temporary contracts or casual positions and to begin sacking non-ongoing workers. There are 14,273 temporary staff in the service across Australia, according to the latest figures from the commission, with 60 per cent of them women, 75per cent of them earning $42,000 a year or less and 25per cent under 25 years old.
Non-ongoing workers are more likely to be providing front-line services in agencies like Centrelink, Medicare and Immigration in regional Australia.
The move comes after the failure to shed significant numbers of public servants though "natural attrition" as part of the policy the Prime Minister brought to the election to slash the bureaucracy by 12,000.
Analysis by The Canberra Times shows departures from the service had slowed to a trickle in the first seven weeks of the Abbott government, with only 251 people leaving their jobs and most of them going with redundancy payouts.
Graduate and indigenous recruitment has been capped at 1300, a cut of 347 positions, and the AusAID graduate program has been scrapped completely as part of the governments $4.5 billion in cuts to the foreign aid budget.
Dozens of recruits who had been offered jobs and were preparing to start their careers in February in the scrapped overseas aid agency have been told not to show up.
Public Service Commissioner Stephen Sedgwick used blunt language to decide the fate of thousands of temporary, casual, contract and other workers.
"Consistent with the intention of these arrangements to support a significant reduction in APS employment overall, agency heads will take measures to ensure that existing non-ongoing employment arrangements cease at the end of their current term, and refrain from entering new arrangements, other than where the agency head approves a particular requirement in order to meet a critical business demand," the instructions state.
"Agency heads should also consider cancelling non-ongoing arrangements in the case of programs that have been closed or downgraded."
The commission has retained the rhetoric of natural attrition around the cuts, despite the growing number of departments looking to cull their workforce with redundancy payouts - issuing a complex flow-chart outlining the tortuous new process for hiring a public servant.
Tony Abbott continued to insist on Friday that the 12,000 cuts could be achieved through natural attrition.
"We took this policy to the election we are determined to reduce the size of the Commonwealth public sector payroll by some 12,000," the Prime Minister said.
"Were determined to do that, but were going to do it by natural attrition.
"In the ordinary course of events, obviously departments and agencies make decisions every day about peoples employment, but that is a matter for the relevant people in departments and agencies within the overall parameters of government."
