Its been a long held belief that council and government have been over staffed for a LONG time and by and large have been considered inept and hard to deal with ... as an entity. Telstra have been cutting jobs for a long time as have many other businesses in the private sector.

Queensland government just cut off 14,000 jobs (and demand we thank them for not lobbing off 6,000 more) from what they consider non-essential and 'surplus to requirements'.

In Brisbane right now the media (social and MSM) are all over this like a pack of dogs on a carcass, and possibly justifiably so but, ignoring the stress dumped on the workers - but acknowledging and sending thoughts - are the cuts justified?

No not that many, and not to health and education.
Yet they, both QLD and NSW are both helpful and in an extraordinary way a future predicted, Abbott,s action will be the same.
At a time Gillard is incapable of winning anything, Liberals are intent on giving her a rails run.
And by this time next year, well not Gillard but Labor is in with a show.

The way I'm seeing it is that instead of investigating where some fat can be trimmed - so to speak - they've just looked at the books and identified wages being their greatest expenditure and decided to knock that back by a tonne.

Makes it wrong, IMO.

Probably about half of what they should have cut. We can see by the public servants reaction that they have no interest in what's best for the long suffering tax payer, just keeping their own pay packet rolling in, despite in so many instances, doing nothing for it.

Yes have a look at Telstra. Less than half the staff of when they were public servants, doing twice as much work. This shows the PS are still probably 40% over staffed now. If no more sackings, there should be at least a freeze on hiring for many years.

If we had been hearing rumblings from with in the PS of complaints of over manning, I may have some sympathy for those now losing their jobs, but there was no such rumblings. They were prepared to bludge along, in their over paid positions, & to hell with those footing the bill. Well to hell with those now providing the savings.

Belly it is crazy to say none from some special area. A bludger is a bludger anywhere. Probably half of those in make work positions were merely slowing the rate of work down, not facilitating it.

Job cutting is wrong. If a job is not needed than transfer the job holder to another position. If the position is highly paid then offer the incumbent voluntary retirement & if that is not an option put the jobholder on a reduced pay until the job holder's expertise makes him a viable option to get another higher paid position. We simply can not afford to keep Public Servants simply for being there. I see public Servants costing us up to a million Dollars a year for no visible or apparent benefit to Qld.
Meanwhile we are obliged to get three quotes for anything over a thousand Dollars, wasting ours & businesses time at the expense to the taxpayer. Something needs changing in the present idiotic system.

Just history repeating itself I am afraid.

We just keep goimg from money in the bank, to broke, borrowing well beyond our means, back to cost cutting just so labor can get back in one day and start the process again.