Federal opposition leader also doubles down on claim his nuclear plan would cut power bills by 44% despite Coalition’s own modelling being silent on issue. The scale of the Coalition’s planned spending cuts won’t be revealed ahead of the federal election, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has suggested. Dutton on Sunday also repeated his claim that energy would be cheaper under the opposition’s nuclear plan – despite the modelling underpinning the strategy explicitly not assessing the impact on power bills.

The opposition leader has promised a new era of budget restraint if the Coalition wins the election – due by May – as he continues to blame government spending for fuelling the cost-of-living crisis. Appearing on ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton said cutting “wasteful spending” would result in a reduction in overall commonwealth expenditure. But the opposition leader suggested the full extent of the cuts wouldn’t be disclosed ahead of the election, meaning voters would be in the dark when they cast their ballot.

“We need to sit down and look through an ERC [expenditure review committee] process, which would be the normal course of things,” Dutton said on Sunday. “We’ll do that in government.”. Dutton ruled out a repeat of the commission of audit launched under former prime minister Tony Abbott which informed sweeping cuts proposed in the ill-fated 2013 budget. “We know what we’re doing,” the Liberal leader said.

“We’re able to hit the ground running and we’ve worked with the departments, with many of the departmental heads that are there now, and I have no doubt that we’ll be able to find where Labor has put fat into the system that is not helping do anything but drive inflation.”. One known target for the Coalition is the federal public service, in particular the 36,000 extra positions created under the Albanese government.

Asked on Sunday if all of those positions would be axed, Dutton said “frontline” roles would be preserved. But he made clear a Coalition government would not allow the federal bureaucracy to surpass 200,000 positions, as forecast in the budget papers. Dutton last week revealed diversity and inclusion jobs would be in the firing line in echoes of US president Donald Trump’s assault on DEI. Senior Labor ministers seized on Dutton’s latest comments as proof he was planning to hide planned cuts from voters.

“Peter Dutton has promised big cuts but he won’t tell you what he’ll cut until after the election or what that means for Medicare, pensions and housing,” the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, wrote on X. It is not unprecedented for parties to make cuts in government that weren’t explicitly disclosed in opposition. Labor launched multiple rounds of a “waste and rorts” audit after winning the 2022 election, which axed billions of dollars in Morrison government commitments.

Sign up to Morning Mail. Our Australian morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it matters. after newsletter promotion. In Sunday’s interview, Dutton again argued power prices would be cheaper under the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors at seven sites across Australia from the mid-2030s. The opposition leader claimed it was reasonable to assume the 44% difference in the cost of the Coalition’s proposal compared to Labor’s renewables-focused plan – as modelled by Frontier Economics – would translate to cheaper power bills.

The Frontier modelling did not make findings on prices, a fact explicitly spelt out in its own report. Reminded of that on Sunday, Dutton doubled down. “That’s the economics of it,” he said. “All other variables being equal, if you have a 44% reduction in the overall cost to deliver that model, that is going to translate into that price reduction for households and for businesses, and that’s what we must do.”.