Victorian public service union refuses to back Labor at state election

The CPSU's Victorian branch is not formally affiliated with Labor but has worked closely with the party in the past. Its secretary, Jiselle Hanna, told Guardian Australia that the government's position on job cuts had made support impossible.

"If Ben Carroll's government won't commit to no job cuts in the public service, then our union cannot support him," Hanna said.

The Victorian public service is a smaller, largely administrative subset of the public sector, with about 58,000 people employed in it as of June 2025 against almost 400,000 across the total public sector. The government has made successive cuts to it as it seeks to rein in employee expenses, the state's largest area of expenditure. Those changes included cutting about 1,000 VPS roles, among them more than 300 executive positions, and merging several government entities following the independent review led by Helen Silver last year. The government has said the changes delivered $4bn in savings and that frontline roles were not affected.

Hanna said more than 200 further restructures had followed the Silver review, many of which had resulted in "redundancies, job losses and pay cuts". She said: "The public service used to be a reliable and secure place to build a career – that job security doesn't exist any more, it's been replaced with precarious employment."

The Coalition has committed to an indefinite hiring freeze across all back-office public service roles if it wins government, which it says would save $22bn over a decade. The opposition has said the freeze would remain until VPS staffing levels returned to the population-adjusted equivalent of 2014-15, when it was last in government.

Hanna said the distinction both Labor and the Coalition draw between frontline public sector roles and back-office VPS roles overlooked work performed by public servants, including directing firefighters during bushfires, analysing DNA, fingerprints and ballistics, developing school curricula and investigating childcare centres. She said the union accepted "budget savings need to come from somewhere", but that cutting the public service would only lead to increased use of consultants, which she described as "privatisation by stealth".

Analysis released by the union, based on Victorian government annual reports since the 2017-18 financial year, put Labor's spending on consultants at $1.2bn across 10 departments. The Department of Treasury and Finance had the highest spend at about $222m since 2017, while the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action had the highest annual spend at about $86m in the 2024-25 financial year. The CPSU has launched a campaign urging Victorians to sign a pledge supporting the public service and committing not to vote for candidates who propose cutting jobs. The campaign does not endorse any party, but highlights that the Greens and the Victorian Socialists oppose public service job cuts and the privatisation of public assets.

Other unions have also taken election-related actions. Last week the Electrical Trades Union's state council resolved not to run a statewide campaign for Labor, despite spending more than $1.6m supporting the party at the last election. The same day, the United Firefighters Union launched an advertising campaign urging Victorians to "put Labor last", and the Australian Services Union is running advertisements calling the premier a liar as part of its long-term campaign to lift the 1.5% rate cap on councils. Members of the Australian Education Union have said they will not campaign for the party, and the Health and Community Services Union has eight members running in this election, none of them for Labor.