Thousands of regional public service jobs could be cut if Peter Dutton wins election

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is preparing to detail his plan to cut 41,000 Australian Public Service jobs to reverse "wasteful" spending by the Albanese government.

ACM, the publisher of this masthead, has crunched the numbers to reveal that 22,881 federal bureaucrats are employed in regional Australia - including in Coalition seats.

Mr Dutton, who is expected to make public sector spending a key focus of his budget-in-reply speech on Thursday, March 27, has repeatedly claimed the extra public service roles created since the 2022 election - which rose from 36,000 to 41,000 in Labor's federal budget - are "in Canberra".

But Australian Public Service Commission data shows just 37 per cent of federal bureaucrats (the equivalent of 68,435 full-time roles) were based in the ACT last year - an increase of less than 7500 in the nation's capital since 2022.

Finance and Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher said Mr Dutton's pledge to cut 41,000 jobs from the APS "will mean thousands of workers in regional Australia will be sacked."

"Under his plans ... regional economies will be much worse off and service outcomes would decline just like they did last time they did this to the public service," Senator Gallagher said.

"All Peter Dutton wants to do is cut and regional Australia will pay."

Nationals leader David Littleproud did not rule out public service job losses in regional areas, but said "frontline" roles in biosecurity and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority would be safe under a Coalition government.

"The reality is that [cuts] will not be front-line services," he told ACM.

"Particularly when you talk about the Department of Agriculture, that's biosecurity officers or those jobs - there's no cuts to the Murray Darling.

"Those jobs are still there."

But Mr Littleproud said "tough decisions" had to be made.

"Ultimately the Australian taxpayer has to pay for all this, and we are going broke because of a bloated bureaucracy," he said.

There are more public service jobs in most regional areas since 2022, according to the Public Service Commission data.

Though in small pockets the numbers have declined, including the NSW Mid North Coast, Richmond-Tweed, and the Murray region.

In Western Australia public service roles have been lost in Bunbury and the southern outback.

New England Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said there would be jobs lost through attrition, rather than a swathe of immediate cuts, under the Coalition's plans.

"There's always a natural attrition," he told reporters.

"There's people who retire, there's people who resign, there's people who move up to other jobs."

Senior researcher at The Australia Institute, Lisa Heap, said the concentration of APS employees based in the ACT "has been declining over time".

Part of the reason, she said, was the need to employ public servants to staff frontline service delivery agencies in other states and territories - including regional centres.

These are agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and Services Australia, which houses Centrelink and Medibank, as well as the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Mr Dutton has said he will not cut frontline services when, if elected, he slashes APS jobs, but Labor has questioned this since many of the new roles created since 2022 have been in such agencies.

- with Miriam Webber