Australian public service hurt by lack of economic specialists, academic warns

Leo Dobes, a former public servant with Treasury and Defence, believes a reliance on generalists has hurt the government's ability to make informed decisions about major infrastructure projects.

"We are in quite serious danger of funding a lot of projects that are not really worthwhile," he said.

Professor Dobes, who is based at the Crawford School of Public Policy, said public money was being wasted on roads rather than health and education.

"This is about assessing a project's impact on society as a whole rather than whether a government can afford it," he said.

"You may think that building a road will improve safety and improve lives, but what you don't see is that those resources could be used to build better health facilities or a hospital.

"You've got examples from Brisbane and Sydney of underground tunnels which simply haven't paid their way."

Professor Dobes, who spent 30 years in the public service, said the skills of the bureaucracy had declined dramatically with many departments choosing to outsource complex work.

"Back in the 1960s a lot of public servants were aware of cost-benefit analysis and knew how to do it without relying on consultants," he said.

"The number of people doing harder economics studies at university has also fallen dramatically and a number of students are coming out without a detailed understanding of economics."

In the midst of an election campaign, federal Labor has vowed to limit the use of expensive consultants if elected.

Labor says its analysis of the government contracting website Austender reveals an average of $7.5 billion of taxpayers' money being spent on "management and business professionals and administrative services" by the public service each year over the past six years.

Late last year, the government's plan to move 4000 public servants from the Immigration Department offices in Belconnen to the Canberra Airport was halted by a $27,000 cost-benefit analysis by Deloitte consultants.

The report also found a move to the Brindabella Business Park would place pressure on arterial roads and burden staff with costs equivalent to 10 per cent of their annual wage.

Professor Dobes said departments were too willing to outsource work to consultancies because public servants were unable to do the job themselves.

"The public service has de-skilled itself," he said. "They go more for generalists but there's very little expertise left."

"Consultancies are often part of the problem. Usually this work is tasked out to junior consultants with limited experience and there is no peer review of their findings."

Mr Dobes said the government was often unwilling to release its own economic modelling to the public and called for all reports paid for by the government to be published.

"We get phoned up by government departments asking us for examples of cost-benefit analysis and we can't give it to them because we don't have them," he said.

"The government always hangs onto them secretively and doesn't release these studies and that's half the problem."