Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 109

The State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report

Today the Centre for Policy Development releases The State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report, as part of our Public Service program.

DOWNLOAD the report here.

 

 

The report's key findings include:

a widening gap between the anti-public servant rhetoric of some politicians and commentators and the positive attitudes held by Australian citizens about public servants and the services they deliver and
a decline in the ratio of public servants per capita in contrast to claims of public service 'bloating'.

Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has declared the Coalition's plans to slash public spending and axe at least 12,000 public servants' jobs if they gain government at the next election in a rush to bring the budget to surplus. In recent days it has been revealed the Coalition plans to cut public spending by $70 billion, shutting down entire government departments.

The Australian Public Service (APS) employs approximately 160,000 people across 133 agencies, making it one of our largest employers and most significant investments. The staffing of the APS generates heated debate in the media as well as in Parliament. Views are polarised.

But what do we really know about the APS? And does much of the rhetoric match up to the reality?

The State of the Australian Public Service analyses 20 years of opinion research on  the public service. The report finds evidence of a disconnect between frequent public service 'bashing' by politicians and commentators and generally positive views of the public sector in the general community.

Most Australians are willing to forego income to pay for public services. There's a strong preference for services to be provided by the public sector: twice as many people support public over private provision of health and education for example.

Our research into long term staffing trends also contradicts the portrayal by some politicians and media commentators of a public sector that is 'bloated'.

 

"To return the ratio of APS staff to Australian citizens to 1991 levels would require increasing APS staffing to approximately 214,000, an increase of approximately 50,000 staff."

Unless the community expects less of the public service or the APS is able to deliver its services with significantly fewer employees, the argument that we have a 'bloated' public service is baseless.

The report also finds that the APS is an increasingly top-heavy workforce that does not reflect the diversity of the Australian community, with Indigenous Australians and people with a disability under-represented, and women under-represented in the senior ranks.

Dr James Whelan, the report's author and Director of CPD's Public Service Program said, "British Prime Minister David Cameron's 'Big Society' vision entails cutting the public sector budget by ₤80 billion, freezing wages and calling for tenders for most services. At a time when the public service is under attack in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and the US, Australian politicians who are tempted to follow suit should be aware of Australian voters' strong support for the public sector."

CPD's  The State of the Australian Public Service offers an accessible handbook of all you need to know about attitudes toward the public service and staffing trends.

DOWNLOAD The State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report here.

MEDIA For all media enquiries or to arrange an interview with our Public Service Research Director and report author, Dr James Whelan, please contact our Communications Director, Antoinette Abboud on 0414 920 801 or antoinette.abboud(at)cpd.org.au

Mike Steketee | Misapprehensions, Not Facts, Drive Our Dysfunctional Asylum-Seeker Debate

Mike Steketee looks at Australia's dysfunctional asylum seeker policy and the politics of fear in light of the Malaysia Solution, the High Court injunction, and bipartisan distortions of reality. He finds that the Labor party has long ago stopped trying to educate and lead on this issue, splitting policy from politics.

Mike cites Former Immigration Department head and CPD Director John Menadue, who "estimates that we could save somewhere between $150m and $425m a year by abolishing mandatory detention and releasing asylum-seekers into the community after initial health and security checks, as is the practice in other countries."

To read Mike's full article in The Australian, click here.

Ben Eltham | Disability Reform Will Be A Milestone

The Gillard Government needs a big policy win. Showing a commitment to a national disability insurance scheme would be the most significant extension of the welfare state in decades, writes Ben Eltham.

Article first published in New Matilda here.

Of all the lotteries of life, dealing with a lifelong disability must be among the most difficult. An Australian suffers a permanent disabling spinal injury about once every 30 minutes. Many of these injuries will require full-time care for the rest of that person's life.

And yet, as the Productivity Commission reporthanded down this week makes clear, the life prospects for many Australians with a disability can be grim indeed. Worse, the result is almost always enduring disadvantage, both for those disabled, and for their families, loved-ones and carers. You can't state it any more bluntly than the Commission does when it writes, "people with disabilities and their carers are among the most disadvantaged groups in Australian society".

Perhaps the most iniquitous aspect of disability care in Australia is how unfair it is. The level of care that people can access varies widely according to completely arbitrary factors. Where you live and how you acquired your disability can mean the difference between some level of care and almost none at all. If you suffer a crippling injury in a motor vehicle accident, for instance, there is needs-based care available, provided through no-fault insurance schemes run by several of the states. But other types of disability, or the same disability caused by a different circumstance, have no such cover.

The Commission quotes Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten, who has been campaigning on this issue for some time, explaining how unfair the current arrangements are:

"It has been said to me that the best thing to do for someone who has fallen off the roof of their home and suffered a spinal injury, is to bundle them into the car and drive it into the nearest lamppost. Yet people injured in accidents … are the comparatively lucky ones."

 

The reason people injured in accidents are, as Shorten says, comparatively lucky, is that other types of disability have no insurance at all. Disabilities caused by medical conditions, by genetic fluke or acquired in the womb are not covered. For the families of many of these people, there is no financial assistance available to them of any kind. A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that levels of unmet need extended to hundreds of thousands of Australians. And the unmet need extends across many different types of required care, accomodation and human services.

The Commision quotes the ABS as estimating "almost 42,000 primary carers who had indicated a need for more assistance with respite alone". Most of this unmet need is of course met by family and loved-ones. The economic and social cost to Australia is vast.

In addition to the unmet need, the chronic under-funding and the lottery of state-by-state provision, the Commission also identifies some of the more typical problems governments always face with service delivery, such as a lack of clear responsibilities, a fragmented approach, failures to intervene early, and a lack of clear planning for the future.

In summary, the current arrangement are a blight on Australian society. If we measure our social progress by the care and provision we make for the most vulnerable and needy, then Australia's current system of disability care is nothing less than an indictment.

In place of the current state-based, ad hoc arrangements, the Commission recommends a comprehensive, universal, national insurance system, akin to Medicare. Two schemes are proposed. The first, a National Disability Insurance Scheme, will "provide insurance cover for all Australians in the event of significant disability". A parallel insurance scheme, called the National Injury Insurance Scheme, will build on existing motor vehicle accident insurance, in order to extend cover to "cover the lifetime care and support needs of people who acquire a catastrophic injury from an accident."

Together, the two schemes will be the key components of a broader policy to improve the coverage and level of care of Australia's disability services nationally. The Commission argues the main function of the new policy should be "to fund long-term high quality care and support," with other important roles including "providing referrals, quality assurance and diffusion of best practice".

To roll all this out will take years and cost billions. The Commission has taken a conservative approach to its timetable, arguing that the scheme will require extensive consultation and negotiation in order to make it through the minefield of federal-state relations. As a result, it will not come to fruition until 2018-19. Western Australian premier Colin Barnett has already taken a shot at the proposal, telling reporters: "I am getting a little tired of schemes coming out of Canberra to take over areas of state administration only to find that they invariably fail".

The extra cost will be about $6.5 billion annually. The Commission argues the Commonwealth should simply find that money in the budget, or, failing that, introduce a Medicare-style national levy. Even if some of the states don't agree to sign up, the Commission still thinks Canberra should go ahead, such are the advantages for the nation in terms of productivity gains and social inclusion. No doubt the details will be hashed out in many meetings with quarrelsome state premiers in the years to come.

But let's take a step back and examine the bigger picture. This will be the largest expansion of the Australian welfare state in decades. It really is a milestone for the way our society provides for its least fortunate. And, at least at the moment, it seems as though the package has won cautiously bipartisan backing, most importantly from a newly relaxed Tony Abbott back from his European holiday.

In time, these reforms will come to be seen as the single most important social policy reforms of the Gillard government. Pair them up with the carbon tax and the increase to the base rate of the pension, and the long-term reform record of this Labor government begins to look rather more substantial than it has so far been given credit for. Of course, much work is yet to be done. But Gillard, Shorten and the entire government must be commended for signing up to this scheme. Credit must also go to the Productivity Commission, whose monumental report is testament to years of detailed, rigorous policy development, and to the disablity sector itself, whose tireless lobbying has finally borne policy fruit.

It has been a long time coming, and it's still along way away, but the eventual passage of a national disability insurance sheme in this country means that Australians with a disability — and their families and carers — can finally look forward to a future where lives can be lived with a measure of dignity.

 

Kate Gauthier | The Refugee Debate

The Refugee debate took another turn this week with the High Court stopping the Gillard Government flying off its first planeload of refugees as part of the so-called "Malaysia Solution".

It's the latest development in an increasingly heated public debate on how to deal with this issue. The last months have seen riots, sit-ins on the roofs of detention centres and what some have called bumbling policy on the run by the Gillard Government.

Well what does it all mean?

Kate Gauthier, Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development and co-author of our upcoming report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate of Refugees and Asylum Seekers, argues that policy makers are making decisions not based on what's best for the community but what is best for their political party.

LISTEN to Kate's interview with Tim Brunero on Radio Adelaide's Breakfast program here.

Find out more about our upcoming report here.

Lenore Taylor | Poll Shows Support For Media Regulation Inquiry

Lenore Taylor highlights a new Essential Research poll showing that 60% of voters support a parliamentary inquiry into media regulation. With the launch of Newstand's online petition, in consultation with the Centre for Policy Development, there is increasing pressure from the community for media regulation to be put on the political agenda.

To read Lenore Taylor's full article, click here.

Eva Cox | Why We Need a Fairer Society

With growing inequality, a cataclysmic financial crisis, and widespread social unrest, the state is failing act as the preserver of the national well-being. Unless we start considering what makes a good society and rethink our emphasis on economic growth and markets, democracy and civil society will deteriorate further.

Read Eva Cox's take on the London riots at Crikey, here.

Ben Eltham | Disability Reform Will Be A Milestone

The Gillard Government needs a big policy win. Showing a commitment to a national disability insurance scheme would be the most significant extension of the welfare state in decades, writes Ben Eltham.

Originally published at New Matilda. 

Of all the lotteries of life, dealing with a lifelong disability must be among the most difficult. An Australian suffers a permanent disabling spinal injury about once every 30 minutes. Many of these injuries will require full-time care for the rest of that person's life.

And yet, as the Productivity Commission reporthanded down this week makes clear, the life prospects for many Australians with a disability can be grim indeed. Worse, the result is almost always enduring disadvantage, both for those disabled, and for their families, loved-ones and carers. You can't state it any more bluntly than the Commission does when it writes, "people with disabilities and their carers are among the most disadvantaged groups in Australian society".

Perhaps the most iniquitous aspect of disability care in Australia is how unfair it is. The level of care that people can access varies widely according to completely arbitrary factors. Where you live and how you acquired your disability can mean the difference between some level of care and almost none at all. If you suffer a crippling injury in a motor vehicle accident, for instance, there is needs-based care available, provided through no-fault insurance schemes run by several of the states. But other types of disability, or the same disability caused by a different circumstance, have no such cover.

The Commission quotes Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten, who has been campaigning on this issue for some time, explaining how unfair the current arrangements are:

"It has been said to me that the best thing to do for someone who has fallen off the roof of their home and suffered a spinal injury, is to bundle them into the car and drive it into the nearest lamppost. Yet people injured in accidents … are the comparatively lucky ones."

 

The reason people injured in accidents are, as Shorten says, comparatively lucky, is that other types of disability have no insurance at all. Disabilities caused by medical conditions, by genetic fluke or acquired in the womb are not covered. For the families of many of these people, there is no financial assistance available to them of any kind. A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that levels of unmet need extended to hundreds of thousands of Australians. And the unmet need extends across many different types of required care, accomodation and human services.

The Commision quotes the ABS as estimating "almost 42,000 primary carers who had indicated a need for more assistance with respite alone". Most of this unmet need is of course met by family and loved-ones. The economic and social cost to Australia is vast.

In addition to the unmet need, the chronic under-funding and the lottery of state-by-state provision, the Commission also identifies some of the more typical problems governments always face with service delivery, such as a lack of clear responsibilities, a fragmented approach, failures to intervene early, and a lack of clear planning for the future.

In summary, the current arrangement are a blight on Australian society. If we measure our social progress by the care and provision we make for the most vulnerable and needy, then Australia's current system of disability care is nothing less than an indictment.

In place of the current state-based, ad hoc arrangements, the Commission recommends a comprehensive, universal, national insurance system, akin to Medicare. Two schemes are proposed. The first, a National Disability Insurance Scheme, will "provide insurance cover for all Australians in the event of significant disability". A parallel insurance scheme, called the National Injury Insurance Scheme, will build on existing motor vehicle accident insurance, in order to extend cover to "cover the lifetime care and support needs of people who acquire a catastrophic injury from an accident."

Together, the two schemes will be the key components of a broader policy to improve the coverage and level of care of Australia's disability services nationally. The Commission argues the main function of the new policy should be "to fund long-term high quality care and support," with other important roles including "providing referrals, quality assurance and diffusion of best practice".

To roll all this out will take years and cost billions. The Commission has taken a conservative approach to its timetable, arguing that the scheme will require extensive consultation and negotiation in order to make it through the minefield of federal-state relations. As a result, it will not come to fruition until 2018-19. Western Australian premier Colin Barnett has already taken a shot at the proposal, telling reporters: "I am getting a little tired of schemes coming out of Canberra to take over areas of state administration only to find that they invariably fail".

The extra cost will be about $6.5 billion annually. The Commission argues the Commonwealth should simply find that money in the budget, or, failing that, introduce a Medicare-style national levy. Even if some of the states don't agree to sign up, the Commission still thinks Canberra should go ahead, such are the advantages for the nation in terms of productivity gains and social inclusion. No doubt the details will be hashed out in many meetings with quarrelsome state premiers in the years to come.

But let's take a step back and examine the bigger picture. This will be the largest expansion of the Australian welfare state in decades. It really is a milestone for the way our society provides for its least fortunate. And, at least at the moment, it seems as though the package has won cautiously bipartisan backing, most importantly from a newly relaxed Tony Abbott back from his European holiday.

In time, these reforms will come to be seen as the single most important social policy reforms of the Gillard government. Pair them up with the carbon tax and the increase to the base rate of the pension, and the long-term reform record of this Labor government begins to look rather more substantial than it has so far been given credit for. Of course, much work is yet to be done. But Gillard, Shorten and the entire government must be commended for signing up to this scheme. Credit must also go to the Productivity Commission, whose monumental report is testament to years of detailed, rigorous policy development, and to the disablity sector itself, whose tireless lobbying has finally borne policy fruit.

It has been a long time coming, and it's still along way away, but the eventual passage of a national disability insurance sheme in this country means that Australians with a disability — and their families and carers — can finally look forward to a future where lives can be lived with a measure of dignity.

Public Service in the News

Wandsworth councillors clock up 40 years of public service > Two councillors saw their four decades of public service in local Government marked this week at a special ceremony hosted by the mayor of Wandsworth Councillor.

Zimbabwe Public Service Minister Mukonoweshuro Dies in South African Hospital > Former University of Zimbabwe Vice Chancellor Gordon Chavunduka said Zimbabwe has lost a serious and hardworking individual who was dedicated to his work as an academic and a committed government minister.

Michigan voters OK public safety, senior services millages: Kirksey says residents 'want the finest public safety …' > Voters supported a 1.7-mill increase for public services (police and fire personnel and support costs) and 0.25 mills to maintain cultural and senior services, including the local Seniors Center

'Open Public Services' White Paper: the risky road to privatisation > The White Paper's privatisation model is taken directly from a report published last year by three senior partners at KPMG called How to shift power from Whitehall to public service customers. In February this year David Cameron appointed one of its authors, Paul Kirby, as the government's head of policy development. KPMG won the first contract for NHS commissioning following the abolition of primary care trusts and would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of open-door privatisation.

'Reality lags behind rhetoric' for healthcare and social enterprise, warns King's Fund > Fierce competition could wipe out the nascent emergence of social enterprise healthcare providers unless they are offered better support and longer-term contracts. The warning comes from the UK's leading healthcare think-tank, The King's Fund, in a major new report entitled Social enterprise in healthcare.

Duke signs No 5 > Trinidad and Toago's Public Service Association yesterday signed their third collective agreement for the week for a five-percent wage increase, this time for monthly paid workers.

Environment Canada to slash 776 jobs >  Former assistant deputy minister says the new cuts "will have a significant ability on the capacity of Environment Canada to deliver both the science, which is needed for policy way beyond Environment Canada, but also the delivery of services" such as weather forecasting.

 

Right to Public Service > Recently Jammu & Kashmir Government in India has taken one more step ahead towards good governance by enacting "Right to Public Service Guarantee Act 2011", in conformity to Section 13 of constitution of Jammu & Kashmir.   Government has made administrative machinery realize that service to people is a top priority. The Government officials exist for the people and should ever remain accountable to them. On the other hand the law will also sensitize people about their entitlements.

 

Ben Eltham | The GFC Is Back – And It's Here To Stay

Why has the global financial crisis returned? In fact, it never went away. Ben Eltham looks at the global binge that led us to the great recession – and what we should expect from here.

First published in New Matilda here.

The thing you need to remember if you want to understand the dramatic gyrations in the world's markets over the past week is that the global financial crisis never went away.

In 2008, the GFC swept across the northern hemisphere — and then the entire world — after the failure of the merchant bank Lehman Brothers. As we know, its proximate cause was the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble — the result of lax lending practices, US financial deregulation and plenty of outright fraud.

But the deeper causes of the GFC were far more complex. The current economic malaise that grips much of the rich world is the result of decades-long trends that have created huge imbalances in the world economy, and which cannot be unwound easily or painlessly.

The US domestic economy, for instance, has been hollowing out for decades. There has been significant growth in the US economy in the past 30 years, of course, but soaring income inequality in America has seen the super-rich capture most of it. In contrast, real wages for Americans with high-school diplomas have actually fallen. In the 1950s and 1960s, US industry created millions of jobs in offices and factories that paid living wages and allowed a middle-class lifestyle. But that process has reversed since the mid-1970s, with US manufacturing stagnating and working conditions becoming more and more precarious. The city of Detroit is the starkest example: a once-wealthy metropolis, Detroit has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent decades as its auto manufacturers have failed.

For a time in the mid-2000s, it looked as though the indomitable US consumer would continue to spend, no matter the underlying economic conditions. But we now know that this spending was largely driven by massive credit growth in the form of easy mortgage loans and credit cards. US household debt more than doubled between 1999 and early 2008, much of it squandered in expensive gambles on rising house prices. According to Chicago University economist Amir Sufi, US household balance sheets are now "in worse condition than at any other point in history since the Great Depression".

But despite the debt-fuelled spending binge, underlying economic conditions in the US were surprisingly weak. Even before the massive job losses of 2008 and 2009, the United States economy had been creating jobs very slowly, in a comparatively weak recovery from the recession of the early 2000s. As a result, the current downturn has erased all the job creation gains of the 2000s: by January 2011, the Washington Post was reporting that "there has been zero net job creation since December 1999″.

By the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, debt-laden parts of the US economy were already in deep recession. The terrifying credit crunch that followed triggered the onset of a deep economic contraction across the US. Recent revisions to the US statistical data show that in the last quarter of 2008, the US economy was shrinking almost as severely as during the Great Depression.

From there, the contagion spread to Europe and the north Atlantic, claiming over-leveraged financial institutions wherever local conditions or lax regulation had allowed similar unsustainable bubbles to inflate. By mid-2009, entire nations such as Iceland and Ireland were insolvent.

What enabled all that cheap consumer credit during the 2000s? The answer, in global terms, was Asian savings — the so-called "giant pool of money". Loose US monetary policy throughout the 2000s, aided by the ideological foibles of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, kept US treasury bonds at very low rates. As a result, investors increasingly sought out higher-returning investments, without necessarily understanding the risks. The deep savings pools of Chinese and other Asian countries meant US banks could raise all the money they wanted on wholesale international credit markets, and the corrupt US ratings agencies came to the party, rating ridiculously risky financial instruments such as collateralised debt obligations at safe-as-houses "AAA" levels. Of course, the houses weren't safe, and the CDOs weren't either.

Hence, by 2007, a global economic system had developed in which cheap Asian savings were financing over-leveraged US consumers to buy over-valued US houses and cheap Asian goods, fuelling trillions of dollars of speculative investment in the process. When the real estate bubbles finally burst in the US, UK, Spain, Ireland and the rest, that system unravelled.

We seem to have already forgotten how seriously the GFC affected China, especially Chinese export industries. Thousands of factories closed and millions of Chinese workers were thrown out of work. The Chinese government responded with one of the biggest stimulus packages of any economy, ploughing trillions of yuan into local economy in a bid to keep factories open.

Much of that money came in the form of cheap loans from state-owned banks to provincial governments, and much of it was spent on huge infrastructure programs of dubious value. The stimulus meant China was able to ride out the crisis and emerge strongly from the downturn in recent years. But the legacy includes significant inflation pressures, a nascent Chinese property bubble and huge debt issues for those state banks and provincial governments.

Indeed, across the world, the legacy of the financial crisis can be summed up in one word: debt. The response of rich world governments to the crisis was to drop interest rates to zero, borrow money to stimulate the economy, and to take on the damaged liabilities of failed banks. In Australia, where the stimulus was relatively large and surprisingly effective, the medicine worked. But in many northern hemisphere countries, the recession was much deeper and the eventual stimulus was not large enough.

As many economists warned in 2008, the recovery from the Great Recession has been weak. For many of the unemployed, it has been non-existent. Huge debts mean consumers and households are still struggling to de-leverage and to build their savings back up. Many lost their jobs and their houses. Hence, consumer spending is understandably weak. The years since 2008 have therefore seen anaemic growth in the northern hemisphere. Many rich countries have been left with huge budget deficits and weak economic growth.

What's worse, political reaction to the crisis has moved policy in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Worried by fears of sovereign debt, many politicians in the US and Europe have decided that their government budgets must be moved rapidly back to surplus in order to start paying down all that increased debt. As a result, countries like the UK have embarked on deep cutbacks in government services at the very time their sickly domestic economies can least afford another hit to growth. The US budget is headed in the same direction in the wake of the deal brokered bteween the White House and the Republicans to end the stand-off over the debt ceiling.

In fact, neither the US nor the European countries are well-placed to weather a round of austerity. The UK economy is almost at a stand-still, while the US economy looks like it has a chance of going backwards. What is required is more deficit spending to create jobs now, followed by a return to surplus in several years. Instead, the US debt ceiling deal appears to have committed America to the worst of all worlds, with no extra spending to ward off a double-dip recession right now, but no credible long-term strategy to deal with America's public finances either.

And then there's Europe. As we observed in June, the sovereign debt problems of Europe's periphery nations like Greece, Portugal, Ireland Italy and Spain (the so-called "PIIGS" nations) are all related to the broader problem of the European monetary union. With all countries sharing the Euro, they can't devalue their currency to improve their export competitiveness. Nor can they inflate their way out of debt problems by running an inflationary monetary policy — that too is set centrally, essentially by the Germans.

As leading economist and former Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbon pointed out on Lateline on Monday night, Greece, Ireland and probably Portugal are insolvent. "They need not only to have their debts written off, but they also need to have about a 30 per cent depreciation of their exchange rate," he remarked. But they can't do this while staying inside the Eurozone, so the only way out for the so-called PIIGS countries therefore has been to cut wages and to cut government spending. This has improved balance sheets, but it has also harmed economic growth — according to McKibbon, "the policy approach is to deflate by 30 per cent".

Italy and Spain are in a different position. Their balance sheets are nowhere near as parlous as Greece or Portugal, even if their government debt is relatively high. In fact, Italy is actually in surplus currently and continues to pay down debt, even if its economic growth remains weak. But they have become victims of the notorious bond market vigilantes who now see potential weaknesses in the Italian fiscal position. Both too big to fail and too big to bail, serious trouble on the bond markets for Italy and Spain may well pose an insoluble problem for the European Union. Given the size of their economies, the likelihood is that both countries will eventually muddle through. The same cannot be said for the broader EU project, which may end up being forced into a radical experiment such as splitting the Euro currency into two zones, or perhaps issuing whole-of-Europe government bonds through the ECB (so-called "Eurobonds").

The US will most likely muddle through too, even if "muddling through" means significant unemployment for a long time and large parts of the US devastated by economic blight. The US, after all, still has huge reserves of human capital, the best universities in the world, vast productive potential and the unbounded optimism of millions of ordinary citizens. When the US finally does get back to work, its economy will be very different, but no less dynamic, for the wrenching changes of the last decade. Even so, a lost decade looms.

The outlook for China may be more mixed. Facing a serious property bubble of its own, China also has significant problems in its political apparatus, not least the rampant corruption that seems to envelop its provincial governments and lower levels of the bureaucracy. This will pose challenges for Australia if and when the Chinese miracle finally slows down.

In the very long run, the only thing that will halt the after-effects of the GFC is a solution to the debt. The trillions of dollars of debt wracked up in the 2000s binge needs to be either paid down or forgiven, or it will act like a millstone round the necks of governments and households for years. Because political and business elites throughout the world have refused to countenance writing off debts — even in countries like Ireland, where the Irish government had no sensible reason to guarantee all the debt of the breathtakingly irresponsible domestic banks — the current work-out is to slowly pay down debts at the cost of higher unemployment and slower growth.

But economic policies have political consequences, as we're seeing in the London riots right now. As Stratfor's George Friedman argued recently, the policy of bailing out banks and financial elites at the cost of economic pain for the poor has contributed to a rising sense among ordinary citizens of the illegitimacy of the global political system. Eventually, the madness of austerity will become political unsustainable, and one or more countries will begin the fraught process of defaulting on debt.

At that point, the stock market volatility of the last few days will seem like child's play.

Upcoming report | The State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report

An anti-public service campaign, championed by conservative politicians, commentators and think tanks seeks to persuade the Australian community that public servants are over-paid, under-worked and inefficient.

The 133 agencies of the Australian Public Service (APS) have seen  dramatic fluctuations in their staffing during the last two decades. Between 1990 and 1999, approximately one-third of the APS workforce was retrenched.

Although APS staffing levels have almost returned to 1991 levels, the Australian population has also increased. There are now fewer public servants per capita than 20 years ago.  Unless the community expects less of the public service or the APS is able to deliver its services with significantly fewer employees, the argument that we have a 'bloated' public service is baseless.

Our analysis suggests other staffing trends. There has been a shift towards a more top-heavy APS: an increasing proportion of ongoing employees in Executive or Senior Executive Service (SES) positions. Correspondingly, a decreasing proportion of employees are now in lower level positions.

There are also significant gender-based disparities within the APS. Women are significantly more likely than men to be employed part-time and in non-ongoing (short-term or casual) positions, and less likely to be employed in SES positions.

The public service workforce is considerably less diverse than the Australian community in general, with fewer people with disabilities, fewer Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander employees, and a continued under-representation of women in the senior levels

We recently released two excerpts from the upcoming paper:

Staffing the Public Service: How Many Public Servants is Enough? and Attitudes Toward the Public Service.

Download the excerpts here and here if you'd like to read more about staffing and CPD's ideas about the Public Service here.

CPD's upcoming paper State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report will be available mid-August.

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