The scale of the Coalition’s planned spending cuts won’t be revealed before the federal election, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has suggested.
Dutton on Sunday also repeated his claim that energy would be cheaper under the opposition’s nuclear plan – despite the modelling underpinning the strategy explicitly not assessing the impact on power bills.
The opposition leader has promised a new era of budget restraint if the Coalition wins the election – due by May – as he continues to blame government spending for fuelling the cost-of-living crisis.
Appearing on ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton said cutting “wasteful spending” would result in a reduction in overall commonwealth expenditure.
But the opposition leader suggested the full extent of the cuts wouldn’t be disclosed before the election, meaning voters would be in the dark when they cast their ballot.
“We need to sit down and look through an ERC [expenditure review committee] process, which would be the normal course of things,” Dutton said on Sunday. “We’ll do that in government.”
Dutton ruled out a repeat of the commission of audit launched under former prime minister Tony Abbott which informed sweeping cuts proposed in the ill-fated 2013 budget.
“We know what we’re doing,” the Liberal leader said.
“We’re able to hit the ground running and we’ve worked with the departments, with many of the departmental heads that are there now, and I have no doubt that we’ll be able to find where Labor has put fat into the system that is not helping do anything but drive inflation.”
One known target for the Coalition is the federal public service, in particular the 36,000 extra positions created under the Albanese government.
Asked on Sunday if all of those positions would be axed, Dutton said “frontline” roles would be preserved. But he made clear a Coalition government would not allow the federal bureaucracy to surpass 200,000 positions, as forecast in the budget papers.
Dutton last week revealed diversity and inclusion jobs would be in the firing line in echoes of US president Donald Trump’s assault on DEI.
Senior Labor ministers seized on Dutton’s latest comments as proof he was planning to hide planned cuts from voters.
“Peter Dutton has promised big cuts but he won’t tell you what he’ll cut until after the election or what that means for Medicare, pensions and housing,” the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, wrote on X.
The finance minister, Katy Gallagher, attacked Dutton for not revealing where the cuts would be made. She argued pension wait times and quality control to combat NDIS rorting would be affected.
“What he’s not telling people before the election is that he will once again cut Medicare, he will cut the pension and he will cut important cost-of-living relief which is helping Australians get by,” she told newswire AAP.
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“Australians can’t afford Peter Dutton’s secret cuts to vital services and payments.”
It is not unprecedented for parties to make cuts in government that weren’t explicitly disclosed in opposition.
Labor launched multiple rounds of a “waste and rorts” audit after winning the 2022 election, which axed billions of dollars in Morrison government commitments.
In Sunday’s interview, Dutton again argued power prices would be cheaper under the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors at seven sites across Australia from the mid-2030s.
The opposition leader claimed it was reasonable to assume the 44% difference in the cost of the Coalition’s proposal compared to Labor’s renewables-focused plan – as modelled by Frontier Economics – would translate to cheaper power bills.
The Frontier modelling did not make findings on prices, a fact explicitly spelled out in its own report.
Reminded of that on Sunday, Dutton doubled down.
“That’s the economics of it,” he said. “All other variables being equal, if you have a 44% reduction in the overall cost to deliver that model, that is going to translate into that price reduction for households and for businesses, and that’s what we must do.”
The 44% cost differential is based on the assumption the electricity grid would be substantially smaller under the Coalition’s plan, which Labor said would cause a $4tn hit to the economy.
The Coalition’s nuclear plan in the Frontier analysis is compared to a scenario where Labor’s preferred plan produces 45% more electricity.
