The Gold
Review

How to save public money without
cutting the Victorian Public Service

Anonymous Expert Victorian Public Servants

May 2025

What is the Gold Review?

This document was produced by volunteers from A Voice For Members (AVFM) to show that job-focused alternative approaches are possible if the Allan Government truly wishes to improve Victoria’s budgetary and fiscal position.

Read the Gold Review

You can read the document in PDF form using the link below.

The Gold ReviewDownload

PDF | 4 MB | 89 pages

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Executive Summary

The Gold Review is a public servant-led counterproposal to the Independent Review into the Victorian Public Service (VPS); otherwise known as the Silver Review.

The Silver Review proposes cuts to the VPS headcount of between 3,000 and 6,000 positions as a savings measure for the Victorian Government. The Gold Review rejects this option and offers sensible alternatives.

Included in the Gold Review are:

  • 5 findings on the hidden costs of public service cuts, which absorb 40 cents in every dollar of savings made by cuts
  • 2 additional findings, showing that the VPS is already smaller than its relative pre-pandemic size, and that growth in the proportion of executive staff in the VPS is out of control
  • 5 recommendations for alternative savings measures, yielding $437.9 million in 2025-26 and $1,827.9 million over the forward estimates to 2029-30.
  • 3 recommendations for alternative revenue measures, yielding $1,955.1 million in 2025-26 and $8,780.0 million over the forward estimates to 2029-30.

The net fiscal effect of these 10 recommendations would be a boost of $13 billion dollars to the Victorian state budget over the next 5 years. By contrast, the findings of the Silver Review will boost the state budget by only $2.85 billion dollars over the next 5 years.

Chart 1: Net fiscal effect of the Silver and Gold Reviews, in millions of dollars.

Read the Gold Review to find out more.

Disclaimer

The Gold Review is a contribution to the larger public conversation on what Government is and should do; and demonstrates that public servants can offer constructive, practical solutions.

Victorians shouldn’t have to accept job cuts as either inevitable or the only possible option to achieve the Government’s budgetary and fiscal goals.

The alternative savings and revenue measures recommended in this document are intended to spark discussion. These are ideas that we believe are worth considering, but are not formal AVFM policy – nor the only alternatives that Government might consider.

A full list of AVFM’s policy platform can be found here, or you can view a brief summary here. Many other organisations, too many to list here, have also made contributions to the public conversation on Government saving and spending priorities.

AVFM is a democratic organisation which is contesting the CPSU SPSF Victoria leadership elections. If elected, AVFM will consult widely with, and seek endorsement from, members before formally adopting any position on State Government policy.

The above document, ‘The Gold Review: How to save public money without cutting the Victorian Public Service‘, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International.