The Liberals’ Australian Public Service review should not be used as an excuse to ignore, or delay acting upon, glaring problems in the Commonwealth bureaucracy.

The Turnbull Government must not use this review as a smokescreen to slash frontline services further, like the cuts we’ve seen at Medicare and Centrelink recently.

For this review to be a genuine bipartisan effort, the Opposition should have been meaningfully involved and consulted in its implementation, but we weren’t.

The Liberals have hollowed out the APS and imposed arbitrary caps, which have seen a blowout in spending and consultants and labour-hire and poor morale among public servants.

The Liberals’ attacks on the public service have forced Government agencies to spend more taxpayer money on less.

This review needs to address use of contractors and consultants within the APS, the APS travel budget, senior bureacrats’ salaries, the ASL cap and the amount of full-time and permanent staff within the public service.

Labor has already announced a transparency framework to end the secrecy around contractor spending blowouts in the public service and we’ll have more to say about our broader approach in the lead up to the election.