Nobody begrudges a teacher, nurse, police officer or public servant trying to secure better pay and conditions. Nor should anyone who values liberty be enthusiastic about telling people who they can associate with. Public sector employees are also citizens, and should be free to join organisations, speak, lobby and campaign like everybody else.
But public sector unionism is not the same as private sector unionism; the employer is not a private business but the state; the money being negotiated belongs to taxpayers, and citizens often have no practical alternative but to use the services being withheld during organised industrial action.
That changes the equation. Why should employment by the state include a legally privileged power to bargain collectively over public resources, or interrupt public services, to compel concessions from a democratically elected government?
Australian union membership is increasingly concentrated in the public sector. Unionism has collapsed across much of the private economy, yet remains comparatively strong among government employees.
ABS data from 2024 puts public sector union membership at approximately 32.2 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in the private sector. Government itself has grown into a massive employer, with around 2.6 million public-sector jobs in Australia.
This creates an obvious problem. A public sector union seeking a pay rise has a concentrated incentive to organise, campaign and apply pressure. The cost of whatever it wins is dispersed across millions of taxpayers.
Public servants should enjoy the same civil liberties as every other citizen, but they should not enjoy a privileged capacity to organise against the public that employs them.
In the private sector, a union bargains with an employer spending its own money. Push too hard and the company can lose customers, shrink or fail. There is a natural limit to what can be extracted.
Governments do not face the same discipline. Ministers and senior bureaucrats negotiate with money raised through taxation. If costs rise, the government can tax more, borrow more, cut somewhere else, or pass the bill to future taxpayers.
Public sector unions also allow public servants to exercise political influence more than once.
As citizens, members of public sector unions have the same vote as every other Australian. But in addition, their union can campaign, donate, lobby and pressure MPs individually and governments generally, as well as gain a second institutional channel of influence by bargaining directly with government over public expenditure and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw services if their demands are not met.
That does not literally give public servants two votes, but it does give an organised minority leverage that ordinary taxpayers do not possess. An organised public sector union can exert significant control over government, even if that government may have received an overwhelming electoral mandate.
This is where the democratic question becomes unavoidable: should a powerful minority of organised public servants be able to organise against the democratic voting majority?
The problem becomes more acute when bargaining extends beyond wages and conditions into public policy. Staffing levels, outsourcing, deployment, disciplinary rules and organisational structures can constrain the ability of an elected government to change how public services operate.
At that point, collective bargaining can become a shadow political process. Voters elect a government to govern, yet it can be constrained by agreements no voter approved, and that may outlast the politicians who signed them.
Then there is industrial action. A private sector strike usually imposes its greatest immediate cost on the employer. A public sector strike typically imposes the greatest cost on innocent third parties: the people.
When public transport workers strike, commuters suffer. When teachers strike, parents and students suffer. When health workers take action, patients may suffer. If police, prison officers or emergency workers withdraw their labour, the consequences can become far more serious.
Unlike consumers in a competitive market, citizens cannot usually take their business elsewhere. There is no rival passport office, alternative police force or competing criminal justice system across the road. Government frequently grants itself a monopoly over the very service being withdrawn.
Australia already accepts curtailed public sector unionisation in one important area –Australian Defence Force personnel do not enjoy ordinary trade union rights. We recognise that national defence, military discipline and obedience to lawful civilian authority are incompatible with soldiers collectively withholding their labour.
Once that principle is accepted, the debate is no longer about whether public sector union rights may ever be restricted. It is about where the line should be drawn.
Other democracies draw it in different places. Britain prevents police officers from belonging to ordinary trade unions and from striking. Germany allows career civil servants to organise but prohibits them from striking. In the United States, North Carolina allows public employees to associate but prohibits collective bargaining arrangements. Japan imposes strong restrictions on police, coast guard and prison officials.
These examples point toward a more defensible libertarian position than simply banning public sector unions outright.
Why should employment by the state include a legally privileged power to bargain collectively over public resources, or interrupt public services, to compel concessions from a democratically elected government?
A group of nurses who want to meet after work and campaign for better salaries should be free to do so. Public sector workers should be free to join associations, publish criticism and lobby for political change.
However, none of those freedoms necessarily creates a right to compel the elected government to bargain collectively, obtain exclusive bargaining status, bind future governments over matters of public policy, or withdraw monopoly public services as leverage against taxpayers.
Those are not natural rights; they are powers created and protected by law.
Libertarians should be especially suspicious when the state creates legal privileges for organised interests inside the state itself. Reform should begin by removing those privileges. Public sector unions should not have an automatic entitlement to collective bargaining. Matters such as outsourcing, staffing structures, headcount policies, deployment and agency design should remain with elected governments. Strikes should be prohibited in coercive and essential services, with a strong case for special restrictions covering police, prisons, emergency services and similar institutions where continuity is fundamental.
Liberal democracy is supposed to rest on political equality: one person, one vote, with governments accountable to the whole electorate. Public servants should enjoy the same civil liberties as every other citizen, but they should not enjoy a privileged capacity to organise against the public that employs them.
Government in Australia is already large and powerful enough. We should be wary of building another layer of organised power inside it.
It must be voters through democratically elected representatives who ultimately decide how taxpayers’ money is spent and how public services are run, not an organised minority of government employees with special leverage over both.
An important and very insightful contribution. Thank you, Steve, for bringing this issue into focus.
The problem is particularly acute in Australia because public-sector unions are disproportionately influential within the union movement and the broader ALP political structure. Their members are not simply negotiating with an ordinary employer—they are negotiating over taxpayer money with a government in which the union movement has substantial political influence.
As the article points out, public servants retain every right to associate, campaign and lobby. But collective bargaining gives an organised minority an additional lever over government expenditure and, ultimately, over the taxpayers who fund it.
That creates a fundamental conflict: the people who receive the taxpayers' money should not have privileged power to determine how that money is spent.
This is an issue libertarians should be paying much more attention to. The answer isn't to take away anyone's freedom of association—it is to remove the special legal privileges that allow organised public-sector interests to exert disproportionate influence over elected governments.
A very worthwhile article and an important contribution to the debate.