More than 400 Illawarra workers will lose their jobs within a year due to new funding cuts to the public sector, the union representing these workers says.
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However, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said the union’s numbers were “fake news” and that frontline staff have increased between 2011 and now.
The Public Services Association highlighted that, in Tuesday’s budget, the treasurer slugged their sector with an “efficiency dividend” of three per cent, up from two per cent in the past year.
Read more: How the NSW Budget 2018 shafted Wollongong
This means various public service departments will need to cut costs by this amount each year.
Using the total workforce, the PSA calculated that the public sector would need to shed 11,800 jobs in a year to absorb these cuts, with 444 jobs lost in the Illawarra.
The union’s Assistant General Secretary Troy Wright said childcare workers, park rangers, teachers assistants and disability carers would be at risk.
”In our experience, the regions wear these cuts harder than even Sydney does,” he said.
”Regional public sector jobs tend to be the front line ones.”
Asked if it would be possible for departments to find these “efficiencies” without slashing jobs, Mr Wright said “traditionally no, this has been found by job cuts”.
For instance, he said national parks staff had been depleted and the recent amalgamation of police commands had been in response to the two per cent efficiency imposed this year.
But Mr Perrottet dismissed the figures as “a fanciful number scratched out on the back of a beer coaster and designed to do nothing but scare people unnecessarily”.
“In this budget we have actually committed to hire hundreds more front line staff such as nurses, doctors, teachers and paramedics,” he said.
He did not answer the Mercury’s questions about how public departments were expected to make cost savings to absorb the reduction in funding.
Mr Wright questioned the treasurer’s definition of “front line staff”, saying that just because the government was increasing numbers of nurses, doctors, teachers and paramedics did not mean front line staff were not being affected.
“What’s happened in the police, for example, is that whilst they have made uniformed police immune to these cuts in the past, 20 per cent of the police force is non-uniform,” he said.
“This affects front counter staff, the communications units, the forensic people… and that 20 per cent is left to bear the full three per cent of the job cuts.
“We can say categorically that there are no ‘back office jobs’ in the public service any more.”