“The Coalition has never had a policy impacting flexible work in the private sector. That is a Labor lie, and it is a disgrace that Labor has concocted a scare campaign targeting women.”

Hume said the Coalition would no longer mandate a minimum number of days that public servants would have to work in the office, conceding that “many professional men and women in the Commonwealth public service are benefiting from flexible working arrangements”.

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Dutton had already been walking back his flexible work policy, on Friday saying the rules would apply only to workers in Canberra rather than the tens of thousands who live in key electorates around the country.

Another abandoned element of Dutton’s agenda was the commitment to wind back the public service workforce by 41,000 people – the number of bureaucrats hired by the Albanese government.

It had not been clear where Dutton and his shadow treasurer Angus Taylor planned to reduce numbers, as only a quarter of public servants hired since Labor came to power have been employed in Canberra.

The uncertainty about which jobs would go has fed into Labor’s key attack line that Dutton would “cut everything but your taxes”, which the government has been linking to the much more radical cuts to government services in the US under the aegis of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Dutton gave Northern Territory Nationals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price the new portfolio of government efficiency in his frontbench reshuffle on January 25, but she has repeatedly denied any connection to the US department under Musk.

In the most concrete remarks to date about the Coalition’s public service plans, Hume confirmed the reduction would not involve forced redundancies, instead coming from a mix of hiring freezes and natural attrition over five years.

In the latest figures, attrition rates slowed by 5 per cent in the 2023-24 financial year as about 11,000 left the Australian Public Service and another 30,000 were hired.

Shrinking the size of government is critical to the Coalition’s ability to find enough budget savings to allow it to claim it will spend less than Labor and keep inflation down.

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Dutton said in his budget-in-reply speech that cutting 41,000 workers over time would lead to “saving $7 billion a year”.

But this saving is in question because the Coalition confirmed the $7 billion figure was the yearly saving for the fifth year of the policy, with unspecified smaller savings in earlier years. The full detail will be provided in costings closer to the May 3 election.