Fears relief could add to inflationary pressures – as it happened

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Jane Hume: Coalition government would offer real savings' and not offsets' in budget

The Liberal senator and shadow finance minister, Jane Hume, is now speaking to Patricia Karvelas on ABC RN Breakfast, rebutting everything Jim Chalmers just said.

The most important thing we would do is rein in expenditure ... And I'm not saying that we would make cuts. I think that that is far too simplistic a term. But when something gets tight, for instance, we probably wouldn't put on an additional 8,000 public servants which is what we've seen from this government just in the last 12 months ...

We would make sure that the guardrails were on the budget so that we had a tax to GDP ratio, so that not only do we have offsets for your expenditure - which is of course, what this government is talking about when it says savings - we would have genuine savings and bank those savings to make sure that you don't just deliver a surplus in one year, but you deliver it sustainably in future years.

The previous Coalition government spent $20.8bn outsourcing more than a third of public service operations, an audit has found.

The federal government released the findings of the Australian public service audit of employment on Saturday, which examined the hiring practices and associated costs of 112 public service agencies, excluding the CSIRO, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and parliamentary departments.

It's nonsense to say that consultants aren't needed to assist with public service responsibilities. All governments need external expert support and advice and often it's a more efficient means of having access to that expertise.