The State budget has expanded service spending across many policy areas and the employee benefits balance sheet shows increases across all components (wages, leave, etc) to 2022-23.  This is based on the 'expected financial impact of employing more staff to increase service delivery and on approved wage outcomes resulting from public sector enterprise bargaining agreements'.  There's $200 million saving over four years by reducing spending on consultancy and labour hire plus further savings on whole of government efficiencies which include; 

The ED over the forward estimates is severe at about $1.8 billion but our early intervention will see this done as program expenditure base reviews.  Program expenditure base reviews are a smarter more transparent way for finding real savings and we’ll be all over the Departments on this.  That’s our next priority.  Instead of Departments protecting their favorite patches and applying the ED as they’ve done in the past by just culling the lowest paid admin policy jobs the reviews, with our input, will flush out these obsolete programs. 

The commitment on jobs, skills exchange, and no redundancies should mean work is available in any new spending priority program while savings can come from older former budget initiatives. 

It’s important to note that the projected budget surplus going forward is 6 times higher (1.6 billion p.a.) than the ED. 

Discussion is underway about establishing a Skills Exchange which CPSU expects to commence on 1st July.  
In relation to bargaining treasury’s forecast wage price index improvements over the forward years augers well next year and beyond.

There was no mention of wages policy, redundancies, or gender pay equity in the budget.