Oh yeah, one more thing. At the time the CSA has been growing faster than it ever has during its history, most parents arrange their affairs with no involvement from the CSA and over 40% of all CSA paying parents are unemployed, which is some 80% of all unemployed men.

One of the biggest problems with this empire-building and nest-feathering is that is has no relationship with the efficient delivery of services, or to workload.

The PIGS are showing us what happens when you pay people high wages to watch people do things that were going to happen anyway.

http://webofdebt.com/ See the many articles by Ellen Brown.The fundamental problem is the banking system counterfeiting our currencies.

the public service is working as hard as it can.
Yes,
to further their Super Annuations at everyone else's cost.

Antiseptic
While I disagree with the idea that feminism is to blame for everything wrong with the public service I would not be surprised if CSA staffing figures were rubbery.

Single and divorced women have to work that is a reality, if they were living off the government purse you would be having a rant about the costs (financial and otherwise) of single parenting. I will never understand why single mothers attract this sort of anti-women sentiments in a way that single fathers never do. But that is life I guess, one of the negatives of being a women but it is illogical and unfair in a society that pushes the idea of a fair go. Your gift of arguing a position is reduced by these rants.

As for figures, they are often rubbery where departments opt for outsourcing (casual labour) where figures are essentially inaccurate or misleading in terms of 'real' staffing levels. I can't comment on the CSA specifically as I don't know the history.

runner
Not a miracle or divine intervention, we have agreed on issues previous to this. But it is heartening to observe people who disagree on essentials do at times come together in some areas of debate. :)

Pelican, this link shows the trends in APS employment.

http://www.apsc.gov.au/stateoftheservice/0910/chapter9.html

"One of the consistent, long-term trends in the APS has been continuing growth of women’s representation. This year, that trend has reversed, albeit very slightly. The total number of women increased by 1.6%—from 93,600 to 95,052—while the number of men increased by 1.9%—from 68,237 to 69,544. Despite this, the APS remains a more feminised workforce; women still account for a majority of APS employees—57.4% of ongoing employment and 57.7% of total employment, down from 57.5% and 57.8% respectively last year.3 This was the first year that women’s proportional representation among ongoing employees had fallen since 1994–95 when the ACT Public Service and several repatriation hospitals (all of which had highly feminised workforces) moved out of coverage of the PS Act. Before that, the last time their proportional representation fell was in 1961."

and

"The increase in non-ongoing employment during 2009–10 was much greater for men than for women (22.2% growth compared with 16.5%)."

and

"There is still considerable variation between agencies in the proportional representation of men and women. Of agencies with more than 1,000 ongoing employees, Medicare (80.4%) had the highest proportion of women, followed by DHS (75.6%)."

DHS and Centrelink inform and enforce Government policies affecting people. given the lack of male representation within those organisations is it really surprising that we never hear anything about helping men coming from them?

As I said, feminism has a lot to answer for, and with Unions and the ALP now dominated by career feminists, it will take a serious effort from the Coalition to address the problems they are creating.

I hope they have the strength to do so.

Pelican, as you've not responded, I'll just add one further comment.

Single women have to work, but they do not have to only work in jobs that have no purpose other than to create female employment.

Moreover, we the taxpayer do not have to be spending enormous amounts of money creating higher-level jobs just so women can have higher-level jobs.

That report I referred to in the last post says:

"Figure 9.6 shows that women’s representation among promotions to all classification groups is higher than their representation; however, they are under-represented in engagements, particularly in the EL group. The number of promotions is much higher than the number of engagements for both EL and SES groups so, in the long-term, relatively higher promotion rates for women will have more impact on their representation in these classifications than will the lower engagement rates."

In other words, "we can't find good women performers to appoint, but we're able to find lots of mediocre performers to promote".

The effect of this is:

"Representation of women in both EL and SES classifications is higher for younger age groups—women account for 54.8% of ELs aged less than 40 years and 38.6% of SES aged less than 40 years."

In other words, the men at the top are getting older and the women are getting younger. What do you think will happen when that large group of older men retire? Will there be a sudden push for more men when women represent 70% of all SES positions?

Should there be? Why/why not?