Yup nothing to really see here.

For instance Commonwealth public servant numbers have been decreasing for years even while the population figures have been climbing. Blokes like Philip S kick up about staffing so the government contract out their roles which lessens workers pay but fatten CEO wallets or reduces centrelink staffing levels to way less than just inadequate.

Those with a philosophical slant opposed to public enterprise will always have a mind set that conjures up images of public servants as overpaid, lazy, incompetent fat cats, on high salaries sitting around an office somewhere high in the stratosphere spending their working life staring out the windows and drinking coffee, thinking of their huge retirement pension.

Philip S the economic expert claims we have too many PS's on the payroll. Well. where is your evidence to support that claim. We all know a million plus is a very large number, be it dollars, jellybeans or public servants, Philip what is the correct number, in your view. Don't say Aidan is a SA for asking a reasonable question, something you can't answer.

Belly rightly points out, not all PS's are of the white shirt and tie brigade. Check out the bloke who picks up your garbage every week, but then again he doesn't suit the image and obviously is surplus to requirements.

Indy, who is totally rabid anti public service, claims to know, having dealt with PS's from way back. The old argument, knows a few, and with an already biased assessment of what they are like, assumes all are worthless, and should be done away with.

The best comment has come from Steele;

// Yup nothing to really see here.//

Indy, who is totally rabid anti public service,
Paul1405,
What is with you Lefties that makes you make statements such as the above. I'm not totally anti public service. Show me one single post where I stated that.
What I am rabid anti about is public servants such as you appear to be. Insipid, pointless, expensive to keep & of no obvious use or benefit to the the nation that harbours you & your ilk.
Real Public Servants are vital, pretend ones are a waste of just about everything.
Like the senior bureaucrats I worked with who had to recruit people to cover for their incompetence & let me tell you, there were many.
I recall one woman with integrity who resigned 6 months before her retirement & forfeited a lot of benefits because the itegrity-devoid culture in that branch of the public service made it it impossible for her to bear.
Several of the EO's said when I asked them where they envisaged the area they were
managing would be like in ten years time, I got the same answer from everyone of them. "I don't really care, I'm not going to be here then". In my personal experiences that is the general unspoken attitude of particularly the ALP supporting public servants.

Indy, you have never been known to give any credit to the work of public servants, its always this vitriol about how incompetent they all supposedly are, in your opinion, by default praising your ability at the same time, which could be rather questionable.

//What I am rabid anti about is public servants such as you appear to be// You got that wrong, I'm not a public servant, how do I appear to be so, what else do you get wrong? Then there is no way you could encounter any more than a tiny fraction of the almost 2 million PS, so your generalisations can't be nothing more than your speculative opinion, or you have been extremely unlucky to have only encountered none but incompetents. Without doubt in a workforce of around 2 million there would be a percentage of incompetents, that is not unique to the public service, where were you employed?

A quick look at the back of my envelope tells me that just the pay for public servants is costing around $14,000pa for every real worker employed in private enterprise in the country. That is a hell of a lot for the limited usefulness of most of them.

Interestingly, when Campbell sacked 15,000 or 20,000 of them when assuming government in Queensland, there was not as much as a ripple in the service to the public. In fact building approvals actually sped up, as there were not as many in boxes & rubber stamps to hold them up.

Surely no one who has passed a roadworks could suggest they do much. I passed one yesterday on the way to town. 8 "workers" 6 men & a couple of ladies had 4 trucks, a front end loader, & a couple of lollypop people "employed" to remove a small dead tree, or actually large shrub, that had fallen down on the side of the road.

It took them 5 hours to do what my son & I could have done with a chain saw & a trailer in about an hour.

After our last big storm, 3 men with chain saws, & 8 helpers cleared enough of 3 large gum trees off our road to let cars through, then with a few more, cleared a number of very large trees from Tamborine Waterford road, that had a dozen cars, including some locals, trapped between them. God help them if they'd had to wait for council.

I have to be honest. I've worked both in the public
sector, and in the private, and in both
areas you can find waste and mismanagement -
depending on leadership and organisational behaviour.
I've learned from both experiences and can see the
pros and cons of both areas. Certainly, the Public
sector could do with a shake-up - but who would do that?
Probably an in-house committee - who'd write another lengthy
report with accompanying recommendations that would end up
somewhere in archives for future records and post-graduate
students to study.