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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