Dozens of public sector jobs in Tasmania have been left unfilled since March, including a nurse role, library job and park ranger position, as a public sector recruitment freeze bites across multiple departments.
Documents show the extent of the freeze, with Labor leader Dean Winter accusing Premier Jeremy Rockliff of going back on a promise to protect frontline workers.
“When this job freeze was announced, the Premier said this wouldn’t impact frontline services,” Winter said on Saturday. “Today we find out that he’s actually cutting the jobs of nurses, of librarians, of other essential workers.”
The Department of Health tops the list, with 16 recruitment requests blocked since March 3.
Among them are a Clinical Nurse Consultant for gastrostomy and enteral feeding, an Assistant in Nursing and several admin officers who support hospital operations.
Education has been hit with 18 frozen positions spanning a Library Services Officer, Senior Project Officers and IT consultants.
The Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania accounts for 13 blocked roles, including Host Ranger positions for the Three Capes Track and policy officers.
Winter argued that admin roles are vital to keeping frontline services functioning.
“When I talk to nurses, they tell me how important it is for them to have administrative staff to do the paperwork, to take the pressure off them so they can focus on their patients,” he said.
Other departments hit by the freeze include Justice, with three roles blocked, and Police, Fire and Emergency Management, which has been unable to fill two positions, including a Communications Support Officer.
The Departments of Premier and Cabinet and State Growth, have two and five frozen roles respectively.
Winter linked the recruitment freeze to Tasmania’s deteriorating finances, saying the state government had created “$10 billion worth of net debt” requiring “$500 million every year just to service”.
“You could pay for our ambulance service a couple of times over just with that money,” he said.
“These sort of cuts are putting lives at risk, they are putting more and more pressure on our public sector services and they make Tasmania a worse place to live.”
Minister Felix Ellis said the “really focused” freeze in recruiting “non-essential hires” was focused on “the areas that are in the back part of the bureaucracy”.
“We want our bureaucracies to work more efficiently while still delivering great frontline services to Tasmanians,” he said.
“We want to increase our frontline and grow our frontline services. But we make no apologies for working through this in a sensible and measured way so that Tasmanians can get great services, but that the public service is productive.”
“We’re not going to take advice from the overnight armchair experts in Labor … We’re going to be taking advice from the experts who run these systems, including our departmental secretaries.”
