ILPC 2011 LEEDS
Stream - Jobs and joblessness
Politics, reforms and jobs: How the Queensland public sector fared during the global
recession
Dr Linda Colley
The University of Queensland
The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-09 affected most economies. Governments
scrambled for responses to contradictory pressures in somewhat uncharted territory. On the
one hand they needed to spend more to stimulate their economies and, as far as possible,
prevent their economies sliding into recession/depression. On the other hand, they needed
to spend less and reduce government expenditure to offset their falling revenues. Australian
state governments expend half of their budgets on employee costs and therefore cutting
expenditure often means cutting public servants and the work they do, with the attendant
political, electoral, industrial and economic fallout. Amidst this turmoil, governments have to
face elections and convince voters that they have the best approach to achieving these
contradictory goals and recovering from the GFC.
Australia fared comparatively better in the GFC than many other countries. This
research considers the effects of the GFC on the Australian state of Queensland. The
Queensland government had campaigned in a 2009 election on a platform of job creation
and infrastructure development as the means to economic recovery.
This research consider the GFC, in the context of existing public sector directions
and the broader political economy. The primary research question is the impact of the GFC
on Queensland public sector (QPS) employment, and the research uses qualitative and
quantitative information to address this question. The first analysis is at a structural level.
The research reviews some public management reforms, such as a major machinery-ofgovernment change that streamlined 23 departments into 13 larger agencies, and considers
whether this reform was driven by the GFC. The second analysis is at the policy level, and
reviews the workforce policy changes during 2008 and 2009, to consider whether these were
driven by the GFC. The third analysis is at a more individual level, to consider certain effects
on employees. Did the QPS grow or shrink in these years, creating more or fewer
opportunities for public employment? What was the effect on permanent employment - a
traditional trademark of public employment - and what was the effect on less secure forms of
employment such as temporary or casual work? Were these changes uniform across the
sector or were there variations across different agencies, or across occupations,
classifications, gender or age? The fourth analysis goes beyond the public sector to consider
whether trends within the QPS were comparable to trends in the broader Queensland labour
market. Finally, using these findings, the research will draw broader conclusions about public
management reform and the political economy – to what extent were these reforms
consistent with QPS public management and public employment reforms in recent decades,
and to what extent does it appear that public employment was used as a recession buffer?