The new West Australian government is looking at setting up new super departments.

The Labor administration says WA has more agencies than any other state or territory, and some departments must be merged.

A review has been launched into reforms for the public service, in a bid to save millions.

WA has 29 major departments, compared to 20 in Queensland, 17 in South Australia, 13 in the Northern Territory, 10 in both New South Wales and Tasmania, and seven in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory.

Treasurer Ben Wyatt says it has to change.

“It is financially unsustainable,” he said.

“Without pre-empting anything, yes of course there will be savings if you are collapsing government into a smaller number of agencies.

“Whilst that is a more important part of what we are trying to achieve, we are also want to achieve more user-friendly government to West Australians.”

Mr Wyatt says the Government wants to cut the number of agencies by 20 per cent, but the review will guide decisions on which departments will be merged.

“The Government is currently in the process of drawing up the terms of reference for the Service Priority Review which will commence within weeks,” he said.

Some suggested mergers so far include Treasury and Finance, Planning and Transport, the creation of a new Department of Economic Development that brings together State Development, Mines and Petroleum, and possibly parts of the Department of Commerce.

University of Western Australia Business School senior economics lecturer Andrew Williams has told reporters that delivering such huge reform in the public service is very difficult.

“The reality is this is a really large organisation, with 100,000 employees and $30 billion in revenue etc, and so the ability to be able to do this is really difficult,” he said.

“They have public sector unions, they're not going to accept massive redundancies, so the cost element may be difficult and of course it's always difficult to improve efficiencies.”