Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie was the guest on ABC 7.30 overnight, as the ‘sensible’ voice to clean up some of the public service cut mess. As you can expect for anyone working with the post-it Coalition policies have been scribbled on, she didn’t manage to do a great job.

We are not making any cuts to front line services. And no matter how often the Labor Party tries to say we’re cutting biosecurity agents or we’re going to make some sort of cuts to front desks in Centrelink offices, that is not the case.

We are not cutting the service providers to the public, what we are looking to do is the additional public servants and those roles that have been created under the last three years that have also driven up the cost to the Australian taxpayer into the tune of billions of dollars.

That’s billions of dollars that’s not being spent on building hospitals, schools, rail, filling potholes, our defence force. So we want to have a sensible approach to budget appropriation which doesn’t see taxpayers money funneled into roles that aren’t required to deliver front line services, so that we can get on with actually delivering the types of services and infrastructure. and defense forces that the Australian public needs and deserves.

OK the new public service roles include Services Australia and the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Barnaby Joyce told his local Seven News that he wouldn’t allow for any cuts there:

We’re not cutting DVA jobs because I’ve actually fought for the increase in DVA jobs to get the backlog of claims through. 

But McKenzie says the Coalition don’t know where the cuts will be coming from. Just that they will be made.

As Jane Hume has made very clear, we will be taking a very close look at this if we are successful at the next federal election, because it would be inappropriate at this time to be naming different types of roles when we don’t have the actual ability not being the ministers, not being able to comb through the detail of departments and what the Labor Party has done on their watch and the prudent thing to do, the responsible thing to do would be to make those decisions very shortly to come into government, if we get the great privilege of [being elected to government].

So no cuts to frontline services (where have we heard that before) but we won’t tell you where the 41,000 jobs will be coming from until we are in government. But it will be new hires under the Labor party. But not the frontline service hires. Which means it has to be other people, doing other roles, but we can’t tell you which ones. And also the education department is woke, so we should be filling potholes with the money we spend there.