The G20 comparison makes sense as a starting point, mhaze.

The interpretive step is the interesting part though. A higher share of public employment doesn't necessarily imply "bloat" by itself. It can also reflect how services are delivered. Countries that provide health, education, policing and local services predominantly through public institutions will naturally show higher public employment than those relying more on private providers or quasi-public entities.

You mentioned teachers and nurses being around 15% of the total. That suggests a significant share of the number reflects frontline service delivery rather than administrative bureaucracy.

To demonstrate "bloat" in the sense you're using it, the key evidence would be that administrative or regulatory layers have expanded disproportionately relative to service delivery. The aggregate employment figure alone can't really tell us that.

"That suggests a significant share of the number reflects frontline service delivery rather than administrative bureaucracy."

It doesn't suggest that at all. It shows that the majority of the people in the numbers are bureaucrats, back-office staff from the PM dept through DFAT, the Federal Education Dept, all the state equivalents and down to local council office staff. These front line people you want to concentrate on are a fraction of them.

When doing these type of broad-brush international comparison, its come with the caveat that national numbers are usually not directly comparable as I said from the get-go. But it also comes with the understanding that differences over the broad area tend to even out. And when the differences are so stark as per the numbers I showed, minor anomalies are neither here nor there.

Still if you just don't want the numbers to be true, don't want to believe they show a significant problem in the Australia polis, then concentrating on the minutia is definitely the way to go.

mhaze,

I'm not suggesting the numbers aren't true. (Why would I want them to be false when it could mean that we have more, or better resourced, public services?) I'm simply questioning the inference being drawn from them.

The point is simply that an aggregate public employment figure doesn't tell us how that workforce is distributed between service delivery and administrative roles.

You mentioned earlier that teachers and nurses alone account for around 15%. Once you add police, emergency services, defence personnel and other operational staff, the share of frontline roles becomes a substantial part of the total.

If the claim is that most of the workforce consists of bureaucratic or back-office roles, that would require a breakdown of occupational categories rather than the overall employment number. Without that breakdown, the aggregate figure can't really demonstrate administrative "bloat" one way or the other.

Australian population increased by 8.72% between 2012 and 2025.

Australia Federal Public Service increased by 30.6% in the same period.

But not bloated?

If you think the higher numbers in the public sector gives measurably or even un-measurably better service then so be it.... a majority of one.

mhaze,

That's a different metric from the international comparison you started with, but it's a more concrete one.

Population growth isn't necessarily the right benchmark for public sector staffing though. Government workload is driven by programs, regulation, compliance requirements, defence, welfare administration and so on, none of which scale neatly with population.

For example, the last decade included major expansions in areas like biosecurity, cyber security, NDIS administration, aged care oversight and pandemic response capacity. Those functions increase staffing requirements independently of population growth.

So the relevant question isn't simply whether the APS grew faster than the population, but whether the expansion reflects new policy responsibilities or inefficient administrative layering. That requires looking at where the growth actually occurred.

Under the Coalition the number of "private consultants" to government mushroomed to around 54,000. The Labor Government has reduced that number significantly, delivering $1 billion in savings 2024/25, by reducing spending on bloated private consultants, contractors, and the labour hire outfits.

mhaze, conveniently leaves out Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland

Whats the point, Australia is the best country in the world, and its partly due to a hard working public sector that we enjoy such a high standard of living. On the mhaze list which of those countries would you prefer to live in before Australia?