Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher came out swinging against Coalition claims of wasteful spending on Wednesday morning.

She accused them of a "slash and burn" approach to the public sector, and of having learned nothing about why you need a resourced service.

Those lessons presumably ought to have been delivered alongside the blows dealt by the robodebt royal commission report and the alleged PricewaterhouseCoopers tax leak.

Public sector capability lies at the heart of both scandals.

The minister's defence of the public service was an easy one to deliver, given she is a Senator for the ACT, who once worked for the main public sector union.

For the Coalition's part, the new spokesperson on government waste reduction, James Stevens, says he doesn't want to cut public service jobs but does want to ask about them.

Specifically, he's referring to an increase of about 10,000 roles in the May 2023 budget.

The questions he has are not really about logistics - "Where are they?" and "Why do we need them?" - as he has indicated.

Those answers are already in the budget papers, as both he and Senator Gallagher know.

The real question is: "Should your taxpayer dollars be funnelled towards comfortable, bureaucratic jobs?"

And, as both he and Senator Gallagher know, he's not asking it of Canberrans.

While tens of thousands of federal government jobs are spread across the country, Canberra is still the public service town.

His mission could hit a nerve outside of Canberra, in places where the acronym "APS" means nothing, and there is so much else to worry about.

It is, however, unlikely that the size of the public service will be evocative enough to win votes in these places.

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Labor also has the advantage of having a monetary figure to challenge the Coalition with - the $20.8 billion spent on an external workforce by the Morrison government in 2021-22.

The Albanese government has taken steps to bring public service work back in house, but it's still not clear how much it is spending on external labour now.

It has dodged questions on conducting another audit, and passed the baton to agency heads to continue slashing the external labour bill.

While Mr Stevens' messaging may not land where he wants it to, for now, it will continue to ricochet about the Canberra bubble.

And with an election looming, he won't be backing off on government waste any time soon.

But nervous bureaucrats should remember Mr Stevens' insistence that he isn't looking to cut jobs, just to talk about them.