An audit of the Australian Public Service (APS) workforce has found close to $21 billion was spent hiring tens of thousands of external contractors and consultants in the final year of the former Liberal-National Coalition being in power.
The audit looked at the 2021-22 financial year, examining how the APS was outsourcing work, and what those arrangements were costing the budget.
It found there were roughly 54,000 full time-equivalent roles being filled by external workers, on top of the 144,000 staff directly employed in the APS.
The cost to the budget was estimated at $20.8 billion for the year.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who commissioned the audit, said it revealed a very expensive "shadow workforce" within the public service.
She criticised the former federal government for keeping a cap on public service hiring, which the government has argued required the additional labour to be brought in.
"The Morrison government maintained its artificial cap on public servant numbers, promoting a mirage of efficiency, but were at the same time spending almost $21 billion of public money on a shadow workforce that was deliberately kept secret," she said.
"The Albanese Labor government acknowledges that there is a role for external labour in the APS but, where it is used, it should provide a clear value-add and not simply [to] plug holes created by an ideological obsession to gut the APS."
Outsourced service providers collected nearly 70 per cent of the funding, with the bulk of the rest going to consultants and contractors.
Across the various government departments, the cost of outsourcing work made up roughly 25 per cent of their annual expenses.
Responding to the figures, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton pointed out that 2021-22 captured much of the COVID-19 pandemic period, which placed significant and unexpected pressure on a range of government departments.
"There are services that were provided to Australians during the course of COVID, obviously, that were one-off and there was additional expenditure," he said.
He argued the then-Labor opposition was calling for increased spending at the time.
The Commonwealth Public Sector Union seized upon the figures, saying they were evidence staffing caps in the public service are counter-productive.
National secretary Melissa Donnelly said the new figures revealed the true cost of forcing departments to resort to outsourcing their work.
"This is a direct result of the staffing level cap, the arbitrary measure imposed by the previous government to limit public sector workers," she said.
"But what we see is it is both inefficient and expensive."
