I have witnessed the Public Service in action first hand with many Departments & let me tell you Philip S is on the money.
Only the many public servants of no relevance will dispute that.
Of course we need a Public Service but do we need bureaucrats on huge salaries who contract their duties to outsiders at huge expense ?

Someone asked recently "how many people are employed on global warming
committees, boards, in government, local, state and federal.
People in universities, companies etc etc."
It would be a rather large number and probably explains why any comment
that global warming is just not true gets such a violent reaction.

Anyway, no matter how many are so employed it is a large overhead.
The evidence seems to be getting shakier as time goes by.
I wouldn't have a clue whether it is true or not, but it does not matter anyway.

Bazz, would you rather we ignore the effects of global warming when deciding what infrastructure to build?

Aidan Quote "Evidence would change my mind. But you appear to be baulking at the numbers despite the absence of evidence there's a problem at all,"

You have outdone your ignorance here, I have given you the figures as provided in the article which equates out to close to 1 public servant per 12.5 people so that is okay by your understanding of economics.

Your first mistake is to believe the figures, you could easily add 100 to 200 thousand to that figure but you are just trying to be a SA, which you fail at.

How many would be still classed as public servants if there jobs were not contracted out, they are still doing the exact same job they were before but now are paid by a contracted organization which gets the money from the Government plus extra for admin costs.

Go to centerlink (public servants)they send you to job search providers (used to be public servants).

Hospital cleaners, catering and others used to be done by hospital employees now done by contractors.

The list is long.
Too much effort for you but just go to your local council, state or federal government office and ask them for a FOI request on what services that they used to provide are now done by contractors.

There you have by slight of hand reduces the number of public servants (in name only) but still appearing to keep up the same level of service.

ABC subsidize something to the tune of over 1 Billion dollars per year
you might as well count them as private public servants.

What about the people employed by AUSAID what are they classed as?

All above paid for by taxpayers except for a very very small number public servants do not generate any revenue equivalent to what they get.

On the money side there would probably be many more hundreds of thousands of retired public servants getting health pensions.

//As of June 2018, Australia was home to 1.987 million public sector employees, of which 240,700 worked for the Commonwealth government.//

Can we get a break down of those figures? Because whilst I'm quite certain we could cull some of the bureaucracy, and that nobody will miss parking inspectors, a lot of those public servants will be in jobs that need doing. Teaching is a necessary profession, medicine and nursing are necessary professions, emergency service workers are necessary profession, the defence force is necessary... the list goes on.

There are certain services currently provided by the public sector which we are still going to require, and what's more require people because they're jobs that machines aren't well suited to (yet), regardless of how we pay for them. And I'm not sure it's always advantageous to privatise everything.

no one will ever be able to identify the efficiency or otherwise of that many public services. In some places they are totally overstaffed and in some places understaffed. Usually top and middle management is well overdone with few Indians doing the work.