The Greens are pushing to cap the public service's spending on major consultants and restore staffing to pre-Coalition government levels in a newly released $6.58 billion policy aimed at revitalising the federal bureaucracy.
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Public-sector wages would also lift by 4 per cent annually for four years, at a cost of $2.6 billion over the forward estimates, in a bid to drive wage growth across the private sector under the party's public service policy.
The Greens are also proposing reforms to the appointments of senior bureaucrats aimed at reducing politicisation, and want to bolster protections for public servants expressing their political views and participating in advocacy or running for public office.
Greens senator Larissa Waters said the public service was being tasked with more than its staffing numbers could possibly achieve, following years of staffing cuts and outsourcing.
"That's led to a hollowing out of skills and the people who are left are doing their absolute best, and they're very good, but there's not enough of them to do an increasing amount of work," she said.
"So I certainly don't blame the public servants for that; I absolutely hold the government completely responsible for that."
The Greens want public service staffing restored at 2012 levels, before Labor and to a larger extent the Coalition reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy, in a policy that would add about 13,000 staff to departments and agencies.
"Importantly, it should then be increased to keep pace with population growth, if there is population growth, which is projected, because more people need more services," Senator Waters said.
The Greens are proposing to limit public service spending on the "Big Four" consultants - KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PricewaterhouseCoopers - to 7.5 per cent of agency budgets, in a policy intended to reverse years of growing spending on consultancies.
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Consultancy bills within the public service have soared past the half-billion dollar mark in eight months as the federal government deals out $2 million a day to the big accounting firms.
Senator Waters said the spending cap would also increase transparency on consultant advice and government decision-making.
"A lot of those consultants reports, they're not FOI-able, they're not disclosable. They're kept quiet," Senator Waters said.
"They have far less scrutiny over their contents than they would had they been produced in-house by public servants whose job it actually is to do that sort of work."
The pay rise proposal would push wage rises far higher than the current increases to public servant remuneration, which are tied to the wage price index under Coalition government-imposed restraints.
The Greens also wants to strengthen the independence of senior bureaucrats by establishing an advisory panel to recommend on appointments. Its recommendations would be reported to Parliament and the government would have to justify any decision not to follow its advice.
Agencies would also be required to report on and address their gender pay gaps, and to champion diversity in their workforce through targeted strategies, including a quota for disabled employee representation.
The policy, costed at $6.578 billion across the forward estimates, would be funded through cuts to consultancy spending and taxes on billionaires and big corporations, the Greens said.
Greens candidate for Canberra Tim Hollo said outsourcing had damaged the lives of people on contracts trying to meet rising costs of living with insecure employment, and had undermined the quality of governance.
"The idea that you have people in positions for lengthy periods of time, and you build up that knowledge and that understanding of how governance works in your particular area, that's been trashed by this," he said.
The Greens have released their public service policy after Labor promised it would remove caps on public service staffing, audit the usage of labour hire across the sector, commit to improving job security by limiting fixed-term contracts and address pay gap inequalities between agencies if it won government.