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‘Responding to Demographic Change in the Australian Public Service’

The Commissioner

Lynelle Briggs
Lynelle Briggs is the Public Service Commissioner. She has held this position since November 2004.

See also:

Demography and Sociology Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

2006 Australian Social and Economic Policy Lecture Series

22 August 2006

1. Introduction

I would like to thank the Demography and Sociology Program in the Research School of Social Sciences for inviting me to speak to you today, as part of the 2006 Australian Social and Economic Policy Lecture Series. I am honoured to be included with so many eminent people in this lecture series.

I would like to acknowledge the world class research done here.

Our understanding of demography is critical for the development of Government policies and programmes. In speaking today about responding to demographic change in the Australian Public Service, I intend to cover two aspects of demographic change:

firstly, its impact on the Australian Public Service (APS for short) as a provider of policy advice and programmes; and
secondly, its impact on the APS as a major employer.

2. The Demographic Challenge

I want to start by describing briefly the broad demographic challenge confronting Australia, which will be familiar to you all, but forms the backdrop for much of what I want to say today.

It is well known that as the baby-boomer generation retires, the Australian population will age rapidly over the next several decades. That is not to suggest that baby boomers are the cause of population ageing, because this is a consequence of a long-term decline in fertility and increasing longevity. The effect of the baby boomer generation has been to delay population ageing and to magnify its effects. It is therefore not surprising that it has become the focus of the demographic shift that is underway.

It is projected that the segment of the population aged over 65 will double over the next four decades, and the dependency ratio (that is, the ratio of dependants to the working-age population) will increase significantly. As demographic change begins to tell we could see an increased demand for public spending on health and aged care and pressure on age pensions, coupled with a decline in the workforce participation rate.

For the last 20 years or so, policy makers have been very concerned that this could result in serious fiscal pressures because, as government spending increases, this could outpace the growth in government revenues.

Despite its intuitive attraction, and the Treasurer’s famous exhortation to ‘have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country’, increased fertility (although part of the policy mix) is likely to have relatively minor effects on population ageing in Australia and, ultimately, on our economic growth.

Productivity Commission projections suggest that an increase in net migration, to 140,000 for the next forty years, would have only a modest impact on population ageing¹. In fact, in order to maintain our current age structure through migration, our population in 2045 would need to be about 85 million, compared to the current projection of about 28 million—it would be a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’².

Instead of increased migration or increased fertility, the Productivity Commission’s 2005 report on the Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia therefore suggests that increasing workforce participation rates, and, in particular, productivity growth will be critical to responding to the fiscal pressure that we are likely to experience in Australia in the next 40 years. The report notes, however, that population ageing is a slow process, allowing time for governments and industry to respond, and it therefore shouldn’t be conceived as a crisis—yet.

3. The APS as a Provider of Policy Advice and Programmes

I want to turn now to the implications of demographic change for government policy and programmes.

Markets in Australia are adjusting to accommodate the needs and preferences of an ageing population and other consumers. In much the same way, public sector services and programmes need to evolve to reflect the needs of both a greying nation and its other citizens.

Health and aged care services are obvious examples of where we will need to accommodate growing demand by older Australians.

In May this year the Minister for Ageing, Santo Santoro, announced the extension of government-funded community aged care services to the growing number of people living in retirement villages. This measure will support older people to remain in their homes, and is an example of the sort of changes I expect we will see in order to maintain peoples’ independence as they age.

I hasten to add that the effect of population ageing is not limited only to the more obvious policy areas of health and ageing. Instead it will be (and already is) the catalyst for changes in policy, services and programmes right across the public sector: transport services, housing, superannuation, income support, migration programmes, education, the use of e-government for service delivery, and urban and community planning.

We need, therefore, to understand across all portfolios what the demographic change that is in-train means and how it will affect us.

To cut a long story short, I think it will have implications for:

the demand for government services;
how services are delivered;
agency and overall budgets; and
our capacity to develop and deliver affordable and appropriate strategies.

Developing the right mix of programmes and services in response to demographic change is clearly an important part of the challenge for the public sector. A significant and, in practical terms, indivisible part of the equation will be responding to the budgetary implications of population ageing.

In some critical age-related areas regulated or delivered by governments, it is very likely that over time fiscal pressure will build as increased demand outstrips growth.

While tax revenue as a share of GDP is projected to rise by less than 0.1 percentage points of GDP from 2003-04 to 2044-45, spending is projected to rise by about 6.5 percentage points of GDP over the same period³. So, today’s fiscal pressure is likely, in the absence of appropriate policy interventions, to be tomorrow’s ‘fiscal gap’—projected to be about $2.2 trillion (in 2002-03 dollars). This quantifies the magnitude of the challenge confronting governments in Australia.

For many of us, the Government’s 2002–03 Intergenerational Report⁴ put population ageing firmly on the radar. The report projected that spending on health and aged care—which could be described as the epicentre of demographic change—would account for much of the anticipated rise in government spending over the next 40 years.

The Productivity Commission’s 2005 report, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, which builds on the Intergenerational Report, projected that health care alone would account for a 4.5 percentage point of GDP increase in government spending, followed by a 1.4 percentage point increase for aged care and carers and a 1.7 percentage point increase for aged pensions. It is projected that there will be some modest reductions in spending on some safety net payments and on education.

Ross Gittins⁵ recently argued in his ‘Monday Comment’ column in the Sydney Morning Herald that the next wave of public sector reform ought to begin with health care.

Spending on health care is, of course, strongly age-related. The following examples are illustrative:

the average pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS) cost for a male aged 65-74 is 18 times those for a male aged 15-24
across health services as a whole, expenditure for those over 65 is about 4 times greater than for those under 65, and rises to between 6 to 9 times greater for those aged over 85.

Consider, then, that within four decades, the proportion of the population aged over 65 will be double current levels, and the proportion of the ‘oldest old’ (those aged over 85 years) will triple.

While health, aged care and pensions are the areas that will generate the greatest fiscal pressure, our response will need to be much broader. The Productivity Commission’s 2005 report, Economic Implications for an Ageing Australia, which builds on the Intergenerational Report, argues that population ageing requires new policy approaches at all levels of government, and will require action on a number of fronts.

In Government, this has become known as Dr Ken Henry’s ‘3 Ps’—population, participation and productivity.

Population

While it is generally agreed that population policies have only a modest role to play in responding to the fiscal pressure arising from population ageing, policies such as the ‘baby bonus’ have been well received, and we need to ensure that our overall policy settings in relation to fertility and migration support our efforts in other areas to maintain economic growth.

Participation

Workforce participation, on the other hand, is well understood as an area where there is scope to improve the overall outlook for economic growth.

Much of the recent emphasis in the public and private sectors has been on increasing the workforce participation of mature aged workers. Interestingly, though, the area of workforce participation where Australia compares very poorly with other OECD countries is for prime aged males (those aged 25-54). We are ahead of only Hungary and Poland⁶.

According to the Productivity Commission the situation relative to other OECD countries is overstated due to the way data is collected, but is still poor. Why this is the case is not entirely understood. Structural changes in the Australian economy, which have seen a shift away from unskilled blue collar work, and huge growth in the service sector, where women have dominated, are part of the answer. Some unskilled men have, it seems, been marginalised in the workforce, and relatively large numbers have now moved to the Disability Support Pension (which is not included in labour force participation data) or other welfare payments. The Government’s welfare to work programme is designed to get people who are disadvantaged in the labour market into a job.

The participation rates for prime aged females are closer to the OECD median, but still behind all of the countries we tend to benchmark ourselves against— New Zealand, the UK, Canada and the US. It may be that we need to provide more support for child care and encourage much wider use of flexible employment arrangements and equal employment opportunity policies in the private sector if we are to see this improved.

For older males and older females, we are at about the median for the OECD, but again, a little behind our benchmarking cohort. This suggests there is scope to do better.

Productivity

Productivity, the third part of the equation, is also critical. There is considerable potential for improved productivity through policy reform that supports incentives and capabilities that lead to greater efficiency and innovation. To quote the Productivity Commission:

“A future reform agenda to enhance Australia’s productivity performance needs to be wide-ranging, including economic and social infrastructure, labour markets, taxation, natural resource management, innovation policy, and regulatory processes generally. The Agenda encompasses all levels of government⁷”.

It is clear, then, that our approach to improving and maintaining even higher productivity needs to be concerted and wide-ranging, and connected across agencies and across all levels of government.

This means that we must keep our eye on the reformist policy agenda and build on our early efforts with whole of government working and associated cultural changes.

The COAG⁸ agenda has also been contributing to the improved effectiveness of cross-jurisdictional work and policy development in recent years. I can confidently predict that COAG work will become increasingly important in addressing productivity improvements, given the cross-jurisdictional dimensions to population ageing.

The Commonwealth and the States and Territories are, for example, taking steps to address health workforce shortages, and COAG has agreed to establish a single national registration scheme for health professionalism. This will facilitate workforce mobility and reduce red tape.

A successful example from the aged-care sector illustrates what happens when Governments do collaborate. The Home and Community Care Programme (HACC) has been funded on a cost-share basis for over 20 years by Commonwealth and State Governments, and delivered by community providers. The programme has successfully provided a comprehensive, coordinated and integrated range of basic maintenance and support services for frail aged people, people with a disability and their carers. It has allowed these people to retain their independence, an issue that will only become more important into the future.

Community expectations

Our efforts in the APS to get the right policy balance as we respond to demographic change will also continue to be influenced by changing community expectations.

Australians are much more sophisticated consumers of government services than they were only some 20 years ago. Their focus has switched from expecting the Government to provide the basic fundamentals of health care, shelter and welfare, towards the overall quality and standard of government services.

Australians increasingly expect high quality, seamless, accessible and responsive service delivery that is tailored to individual needs, and where outcomes are transparent. They also expect a greater say in the development of policies and programmes. In other words, Australian citizens expect much more from their governments than ever before, and they expect it to be delivered well and exactly when it’s needed.

We can expect ageing baby boomers to expect more than the current 65 and over cohort. We can expect, and we are seeing, younger generations demand more too – who would have thought a baby bonus of $5000 would have been possible, even 5 years ago? In the year 2000, who would’ve imagined that we would be rescuing citizens from the Lebanon, from Asian tsunamis or from terrorist bombings within a few years?

While much of this is driven by modern communications, political pressure and the experience of a wealthy, well educated democratic country, one can’t help thinking that we are living in a world of enormous change, which is fundamentally challenging to public administration and government.

Influencing the behaviour of individuals

So, it is not surprising then that, just as peoples’ expectations of what the governments and the public sector will deliver are increasing, our Government is looking at how it can influence the behaviour of individuals so that they take greater responsibility for their long-term health, their circumstances, and their overall well being.

Greater personal responsibility can be a good thing in itself. It enables society to function with a less coercive state and judicial system; it enables public goods to be provided with a lower tax burden; and can enhance the quality of life of the whole community.

Behaviourally-based interventions can also be significantly more cost-effective than traditional service delivery, which tends to spread funding much wider, but with less depth or targeted impact.

This sort of approach isn’t entirely new, as our lives are full of laws and regulations that guide our behaviour. The way the approach is being experienced today is in things like user pay initiatives to achieve better environmental outcomes, and shared responsibility agreements in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. I expect we will see a greater emphasis in this direction in years to come.

Readiness and capability

The implications of population ageing are, in general, well understood in the public sector. The issue in the short to medium term will be about the public service’s overall readiness and capability to adjust in time to meet changing expectations and needs.

This highlights the importance of the work of the Department of the Treasury in preparing the Intergenerational Report.

As Dr Henry⁹ has said:

“Understanding the effects of aging has provided a structure for us to prioritise policy action. … It is now common within government for policy proposals to be evaluated against the benchmarks of increasing productivity and labour force participation. The significantly more rigorous testing of the sustainability of policy proposals is almost entirely due to the publication of the Intergenerational Report. ”

The report has provided critical intellectual input into broad policy development. What is less certain at the moment is our capacity at the individual agency level to recognise trends, their implications and to do the strategic thinking and planning that is necessary to manage them effectively.

For some time now I have been concerned about the erosion in some areas of the public service of the capacity for sound research, policy-development and analysis. Many public service research and dedicated policy areas have been wound back due to fiscal restraint and ongoing budget cuts in the Australian public sector and the rising demands for the delivery of more and more.

I think public sector leaders may also have failed to give adequate consideration to the effect of programme based budgeting and management on our long-term policy and research capability when it was introduced. While I do think policy has benefited from closer proximity to and knowledge of delivery issues, I think it has suffered from a failure to nurture talented policy thinkers and researchers.

Today many of our best policy people are doing great shorter term policy work on important government programmes, but they haven’t got the time for more strategic long-term work and they don’t necessarily feel that they have the time or capacity to help young policy analysts and researchers learn the trade. It is clear that this lack of focus on the development of internal APS policy and research skills, and the adequate resourcing of such skills, is not in Australia’s best interests.

Added to this, we are not seeing the universities challenging our policy assumptions nor staking out new policy agendas to any real degree either. I think that it is time that we forged stronger links between the sectors and saw an active exchange and dialogue of personnel and ideas.

In summary, we need a strong focus on ensuring that the public service has the capabilities it needs to respond effectively to demographic change in the wider community. This covers not only the areas of research capability, but also runs to strategic thinking; the ability to drive innovation and efficiency; to deliver an improved level of service and to work in an increasingly collaborative way. And, we need all this at a time when the labour market is drying up.

4. The APS as an employer

So, what does all of this mean for the Australian Public Service as an employer?

In order to understand the impact of demographic change on the APS, it is useful to understand some of the major changes that have taken place in our operating environment in the last couple of decades: just as we have seen major structural change in the economy overall, we have also seen significant structural change in the public sector.

Our operating environment—workforce

For much of its history, the APS comprised a much more diverse set of job roles: ranging from scientists and engineers, through to blue collar maintenance workers, car drivers, tea ladies and cleaners, the typing pool, and those working in white collar jobs.

Over its history, most recruits to the APS have entered at the base level with the expectation of a ‘career for life’. In 1983–84 more than three-quarters of new starters joined at what are now the base APS 1-2 levels. The majority of recruits were under 25 and more than a quarter were aged below 20 years. Most employees remained at lower levels, with almost two-thirds of all ongoing staff in the mid 1980s being at what are now the APS 1-4 levels.

That was then, this is now

Today, only about 1% of our workforce is aged 20 or under, and more than half are aged 40 and over. Our average age is now 42, compared to a youthful 32 in 1984. We can expect our ageing to continue to be magnified, relative to the wider Australian workforce, given that about 40% of new recruits are aged 35 or over. The baby boomers recruited in the 1970s and 1980s are now moving into the 45 to 54 age group. In 2005 close to a third of ongoing APS employees were in this age group.

The Australian Public Service now has higher entry levels and streamlined classification structures. Staff typically commence at the APS 3–4 levels or higher. New recruits generally advance fairly quickly to higher levels.

Today, 55% of the public service are women, compared with 38% in 1984. Part-time work was only introduced in 1984, and now 18% of women employees work part-time.

Our operating environment—the nature of our work

This shift in the profile of our workforce has been driven by broader economic, social and technological developments in Australia, which have given rise to new social demands, new approaches and technologies to respond to those demands, and new relationships between governments and citizens.

At the same time governments in Australia and around the world have relinquished control of key economic levers by, for example, floating their currencies and deregulating financial systems. They now have to use an interacting set of complementary measures to achieve the same goals.

All of this has had a major impact on the level of the complexity of issues dealt with in the APS, as well as on how we work, and the skills we need to meet the expectations of the Government and the community.

The Government is looking to the APS to develop new and innovative ways of achieving their policy objectives. In order to increase workforce participation, for example, the Government’s welfare to work policy uses a range of measures across policy areas, such as education, training, child care, health, income support and mutual obligation which are tailored to the particular circumstances of individuals.

Interconnected strategies addressing complex problems of this nature are now delivered through a more devolved set of arrangements, including the privatisation of some previously government businesses, a shift from direct service delivery to regulation and contracting out, and the creation of quasi-markets. These are the tools of government as it responds to changing needs and capacities in the 21st Century.

For the APS, all of this has meant that there is a much greater emphasis on specialist and professional skills:

ICT management
contract management
accounting and financial management
relationship management

And the list goes on. Not surprisingly, we expect more of people too. We have seen significant increases in productivity in the last 20 years.

The Integrated Leadership System, based on five core capability clusters, gives a sense of the scope of what is required of our employees. The capability clusters are:

shapes strategic thinking
achieves results
cultivates productive working relationships
exemplifies personal drive and integrity
communicates with influence

Given the change in the operating environment of the APS, it is not surprising that ours is now a predominately graduate workforce. Almost half of all APS employees and two-thirds of new recruits have tertiary qualifications. This compares with only 19% for the overall working-age population, and is roughly double the figure in the APS in the mid-1980s.

This broadly describes the APS of the 21st Century, shaped by successive governments and broader social, technological and economic changes over which we have had little control.

Sometimes it seems as though we are scrambling to adjust our culture and processes to meet the shifting needs and expectations of the community and of the government, and sometimes we fail and fail badly. At other times, I am delighted by how quickly we adapt.

How well we respond overall to demographic change will be critical to our success in the long-term.

Our workforce

We can visualise the APS as a microcosm of the wider workforce. Our workforce, those employed under the Public Service Act 1999, numbers about 134,000, and the full Commonwealth public sector is larger again.

In some respects we are leading the way on ageing and demographic change. This is evidenced¹⁰ in part by the fact that over the past decade Government, Defence and Administration recorded the second largest increase in the proportion of workers aged 45 years and over.

This has been due partly to the natural ageing of the ongoing workforce and partly to recruiting older workers.

The challenges for the APS as an employer have been on the radar for some time now—first we had the 2003 Management Advisory Committee, a forum of Secretaries and Agency Heads established to advise the Australian Government on matters relating to the management of the APS, report on Organisational Renewal.¹¹ More recently MAC has released the Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce report.

The Organisational Renewal Report projected that the profile of the APS workforce will continue to be an ageing one.

It suggested that while a significant core of the APS workforce will continue to be long-term, full-time and employed on an ongoing basis into the future, there will be much greater variation around the core. There will be more movement in and out of the public service. There will be more lateral recruitment, including external engagements at middle and senior management levels. There will be more people working part-time and other alternative working arrangements. There will be a greater influence of life stage and work/life balance considerations on working patterns.

MAC’s more recent Managing and Sustaining the Australian Public Service Workforce report¹² outlines the workforce challenges that every APS agency is confronting or will confront in the years to come in more detail. These issues include shortages of specialist skills, retention issues and the growing diversity of career paths.

The challenge—put simply—is to recruit, retain and develop the people we need.

The Australian Public Service, like many industries, faces a supply shortage, as new entrants to the market contract over the next 10-15 years and as the baby boomer generation retires.

This will create particular problems for the APS, given our reliance on specialist skills; the concentration of a sizeable proportion of our labour force in Canberra; and the generally lower level of remuneration of APS employees compared with the private sector.

Part of the challenge will be for agencies in the Australian Public Service to make themselves competitive, and to make sure they have the strategies in place to develop and retain high quality employees.

We know from the Management Advisory Committee’s work in 2003, for its report on organisational renewal, and from the Commission’s annual employee survey for the State of the Service report, that our employees want different things from their employment at different points in their career.

Older employees place a premium on flexible working arrangements. Flexibility might include the opportunity to take time out to pursue other interests; to work part-time to accommodate voluntary work or elder care responsibilities; or to work on a ‘seasonal basis’.

Younger employees, on the other hand, also value flexibility. Their emphasis, however, is on opportunities to combine work and study; to develop their skills; to do interesting work and to put their skills into practice. They are a generation of APS employees who, in a tight labour market, will demand (and, I expect receive) more in order to retain their loyalty.

We will have to come to terms with the fact that significant numbers will come into the APS and take advantage of the opportunities for training and development, and take those skills elsewhere. The challenge for the APS is to provide workplaces that they will come back to, as part of what has been described as a ‘portfolio career’. We hope they will come back to us because there is real personal and community benefit in working in the national interest, because we are a good employer which provides attractive work-life balance flexibilities that aren’t available elsewhere and because we treat our people well.

In the main, we hope we don’t lose them in the first place. This is because there are clear risks for the APS associated with these sorts of career patterns in terms of lost investment, lessened subject knowledge and depth of public service experience.

But, if we do lose them, we need to recognise and make the most of the opportunities that we will also derive. It is likely, for example, that those who return to us and those who join us mid-career will have a greater diversity of experience; so we should try to capitalise on the benefits this will deliver.

Our more flexible workplace relations, coupled with the devolution of employment powers to agency heads, is allowing agencies to respond to the preferences of their employees in ways that are mutually convenient to both employees and their employers.

We will need to do more of this if we continue to see the feminisation of our labour force. Our young and our male employees are telling us that salaries matter to them and that our salaries are too low. Sooner or later, governments are going to have to relax the strings of fiscal restraint, so that we can compete more effectively in the labour market for skilled young people and for men, so that we can have the best public service possible and so that we can maintain a staffing base which is representative of the Australian community.

One of our most obvious successes has been our ability to attract increasing numbers of graduates to the public service workforce. Most agencies are out there now doing just that – we have increased massively our numbers of graduate trainees in the last couple of years, in the hope that this will provide a buffer for the expected loss of so many baby boomers. It gives us a few years to train them up and to develop them as fully effective professionals and technicians.

We are also conscious of the need to ensure that we are developing the next generation of leaders to replace the large number of baby boomers who are leaving the public service and will continue to do so over the next decade or so. Seventy per cent of our Senior Executive Service and more than 55% of our EL2s are aged over 45. I don’t think this can yet be described as a leadership crisis, but without the right intervention now, the potential is there.

We need to be mindful that people are getting to senior positions much sooner than they once did, and haven’t necessarily had the experience and development opportunities that their predecessors did. Our development work here needs to focus on some of the capabilities, such as strategic thinking and innovation, that I mentioned earlier. We also need to learn how to talent spot more effectively, and to develop our stars to achieve their full potential. Many other countries have excellence streams, yet we have steered away from anything which seeks to single out the stars for fear of alienating the majority who may see this practice as unfair. When potentially half our leadership will retire in the next ten years, we need to break through these cultural norms and do what is necessary to nurture our leadership talent.

I am also of the view that we need to invest more in new technologies to streamline processes and to save labour. The Government recently released its latest e-government strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda. The strategy concentrates on applying ICT to improve and reform underlying government processes.

Its key themes are: meeting users’ needs; connected service delivery; value for money, and public sector capability.

The more connected approach to service delivery outlined in the document will mean more efficient government, and greater use of online, electronic and voice-based service delivery systems. However, this will not of itself be enough to compensate for the growing shortage of skilled workers.

The APS needs to position itself to respond to the challenges of ageing and demographic change. It needs to continue to recruit and maintain a workforce that can deliver high quality advice to government, deal with the increasing complexity of the policy challenges that confront us, and deliver effective services to all Australians.

We should be a model employer in terms of showing that older workers can contribute to the workforce. I acknowledge that our participation rates for those aged over 55 lag behind the private sector, primarily because of our superannuation arrangements. We are trying to do better, and now find that more and more of the over 55s are returning to work for us in a different capacity, which suits everyone.

The Australian Public Service is developing new strategies to ensure we have an effective workforce to serve the Australian Government and the Australian people. We are responding to demographic change by improving workforce planning and streamling recruitment practices. We are implementing strategies to recruit and retain employees in high demand such as accountants and statisticians. We are working on developing approaches to interagency mobility so that we develop a flexible and mobile workforce. We are investing in identifying and developing future leaders. We have a long way to go before we can fully meet the challenge of demographic change, but we are on our way.

The extent to which the APS can meet these needs in the short to medium term will, to a large extent, help determine whether we have the workforce we need into the future.

5. Conclusion

The Australian Public Service has been through a period of very rapid change. We are adjusting to the reality of public service in the 21 st Century, where change is part of the environment we operate within.

Responding to demographic change, firstly as a provider of policy advice and deliverer of programmes, and, secondly, as a major employer, is among the most pressing challenges that we face. It goes to the heart of what we are here for: to deliver policies and programmes for the Government and better outcomes for the Australian community.

It also begs the question: are we able to maintain the organisational capacity—including a highly skilled and sustainable workforce—to meet the expectations of the Government for responsive, robust and innovative policy advice and to accommodate successfully the needs and preferences of Australian society?

I don’t think we really know the answer to these questions yet. Success isn’t assured, but we have a strong institutional sense of what we need to do, and the commitment to keep working at it.

We will need to keep our eyes firmly on the prize.

Productivity Commission, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, 2005, p. 17.
Ibid p.17
Productivity Commission, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, 2005, p. 35.
2002–03 Budget Paper No 5 Intergenerational Report
R Gittins, ‘Public sector reform begins with health care’, Sydney Morning Herald, p17 10 July 2006
Gary Banks, Productivity Commission, 2005.
Productivity Commission, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, 2005, p. 40
COAG Communiqué 14 July 2006. <www.coag.gov.au>
Address by Dr Ken Henry to the Treasury Conference "Macroeconomic Policy and Structural Change in East Asia", 24 February 2005 <http://www.treasury.gov.au/contentitem.asp?NavId=&ContentID=959>
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. Workforce Tomorrow, Adapting to a more diverse Australian labour market, p11, 2005 <http://www.workplace.gov.au/workplace/Category/ResearchStats/LabourMarketAnalysis/WorkforceTomorrow-AdaptingtoamorediverseAustralianlabourmarket.htm>
Management Advisory Committee, Organisational Renewal, 2003
Management Advisory Committee, Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce, 2005

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