Labor attacks 'warped' consultancy spend

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on government consultants and contractors in the past year, prompting an angry response from Labor.

Labor finance spokesman Jim Chalmers has slammed the government's extensive use of consultants. (AAP)

Labor has blasted the Turnbull government's "warped" priorities in outsourcing bureaucratic work as figures reveal ballooning spending of taxpayer dollars on consultants and contractors.

An analysis of the government's procurement site by The Australian suggested $9.7 billion was spent on services including labour hire, external contractors, rent and legal advice in the past year.

But Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said the "false and misleading" analysis massively overstated the government spending by rolling multi-year contracts into one.

A breakdown of the AusTender data shows consultants were paid close to $536 million in the past year, up from around $396 million in 2013, when the size of the bureaucracy peaked under Labor.

Labor finance spokesman Jim Chalmers said in many cases, the outsourced work could be done by public servants, were it not for staffing cuts and hiring caps.

"When you look more specifically at the money that is being spent on labour hire, that is a multiple of what it was under Labor," he told reporters in Brisbane on Friday.

"When you look at the money spent on lobbying and branding and marketing and project management and risk management and all of these sorts of individual types of spending, you will see that there have been really substantial blow-outs on Mathias Cormann's watch."

However, Senator Cormann said the overall cost of federal government administration, including the use of contractors, had dropped significantly under the coalition and was projected to fall further.