Australia’s political landscape has been thrown into fresh tension after Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor faced intense media scrutiny over a key 2025 election campaign pledge that an internal Liberal Party review found directly contributed to Peter Dutton’s electoral defeat.
The pressure on Taylor comes days after he delivered the Coalition’s budget reply speech on Thursday, where he laid out the opposition’s core platform: reining in what the party frames as out-of-control government spending, rolling back Labor’s tax reforms for housing investors, pushing back against the current government’s clean energy transition agenda, and announcing a series of targeted policy cuts.
When pressed by reporters in Canberra on Friday about the fate of Australia’s public sector, which has expanded by more than 45,000 full-time roles since the Albanese Labor government took office in 2022, Taylor avoided committing to the controversial public service cuts that Dutton took to the 2025 election.
“I want to see better government, not bigger government,” Taylor told reporters, framing his party’s proposed savings measures as a means to prevent future income tax hikes for Australian households and rule out new taxes on personal savings and small business operations. He added that a future Coalition administration would end corporate welfare funneled to offshore entities and scrap what he called wasteful “climate bureaucracy” created by the current government.
When reporters pushed Taylor again to clarify whether the Coalition would cut public service jobs, and whether he would rule out the 40,000-cut target Dutton previously announced, Taylor only confirmed that the party would cap public service growth to avoid forcing tax increases.
The original pledge of deep public service cuts traces back to Dutton’s early 2025 election campaign, which also included plans to eliminate widespread work-from-home arrangements for public sector employees, a policy modeled on former U.S. President Donald Trump’sDepartment of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and mass public sector layoffs backed by Elon Musk. That policy ultimately backfired spectacularly, according to an internal Liberal Party post-election review that Taylor attempted to suppress.
The review found that while the initial wave of public sector cuts announced by Trump and Musk’s DOGE garnered some early positive support among Australian voters, public opinion shifted sharply negative in a short period. It noted that Dutton’s decision to launch a shadow government efficiency portfolio modeled directly on Trump’s DOGE, paired with the explicit pledge to cut 40,000 public service jobs and eliminate work-from-home policies, was widely labeled by voters as overly Trump-like and deeply unpopular. The policies were eventually watered down or reversed entirely before polling day, too late to reverse the electoral damage, the review concluded.
Responding to Taylor’s comments on Friday, current Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher defended the size of the current Australian public service, saying it is “the right size” to meet the needs of Australian communities.