More pain is coming for public sector employees as departmental expenditure is squeezed further because the State Government wants to build a road the State Budget revealed this week.  Karen Batt said that adding to the cut in Departmental spending is a useless budgetary tool because it's fiscally lazy and it becomes a backhanded job cut.  Departments are well versed at manipulating this edict and programs suffer as vacancies remain unfilled.  The end result is the VPS just fills with labour hire where Departments can hide this spend.  Outlays overall will actually increase.  The Treasurer has fallen for Treasury's standard trap that just makes the forward estimates look balanced.  Not to be put off the Treasurer laughingly dismissed questions about the impact on jobs of cutting a further half a billion dollars of departmental spending. 

ABC reported 'the Government also plans to make $500 million of savings in coming years through a restructure of the public service and by increasing the efficiency dividend, from 2 to 2.5 per cent.  Mr O'Brien says they want to spend less money on Government.  "So we can spend more money on delivering services and infrastructure to Victorians," he said.  But he says the efficiencies are not intended to affect jobs.  "What we're about is delivering better services more efficiently," he said.