Public service union refuses to back Labor at Victorian election, condemning job cuts and $1.2bn consultant spend

Exclusive: Community and Public Sector Union denounces ‘privatisation by stealth’, joining growing number of unions turning on Carroll government

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Victoria’s public servants union says it will not support Labor at this month’s state election, condemning the government for cutting public service jobs while spending $1.2bn on consultants.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) will announce the decision on Wednesday, joining several other unions that have refused to back Labor or are actively campaigning against the government ahead of the 28 November poll.

Although the CPSU’s Victorian branch is not formally affiliated with Labor, it has worked closely with the party in the past. But its secretary, Jiselle Hanna, told Guardian Australia it can no longer support the government.

“If Ben Carroll’s government won’t commit to no job cuts in the public service, then our union cannot support him,” Hanna said.

The Labor government has made successive cuts to the Victorian public service (VPS), a smaller subset of the public sector that is largely administrative, as it seeks to rein in employee expenses – the state’s largest area of expenditure.

This included cutting about 1,000 VPS roles including more than 300 executive positions, and merging several government entities following an independent review, led by Helen Silver, last year. The government has said the changes delivered $4bn in savings, while frontline roles weren’t affected.

As of June 2025, there were some 58,000 employed in the VPS – compared with the almost 400,000 in the total public sector.

Hanna said since the Silver review, there had been more than 200 further restructures, many of which had resulted in “redundancies, job losses and pay cuts”.

“The public service used to be a reliable and secure place to build a career – that job security doesn’t exist any more, it’s been replaced with precarious employment,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Coalition has committed to implementing an indefinite hiring freeze across all back-office public service roles if it wins government, saving $22bn over a decade. The opposition has said the hiring freeze would remain in place until VPS staffing levels returned to the population-adjusted equivalent of 2014–15 – when it was last in government.

Hanna said both Labor and the Coalition’s distinction between frontline public sector roles and back-office VPS roles overlooked work performed by public servants including directing firefighters during bushfires; analysing DNA, fingerprints and ballistics; developing school curricula and investigating childcare centres.

She said while the union accepts “budget savings need to come from somewhere”, cuts to the public service would only lead to increased use of consultants, which she described as “privatisation by stealth”.

Analysis released by the union, based on Victorian government annual reports since the 2017-18 financial year, showed Labor has spent $1.2bn on consultants across 10 departments. The Department of Treasury and Finance had the highest spend of about $222m since 2017, while the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action had the highest annual spend of about $86m in the 2024-25 financial year.