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The Australian Public Service Statistical Bulletin 2003-04 presents a summary of employment under the Public Service Act 1999 at June 2004 and during the 2003-04 financial year, as well as data for the past 10 years. It shows how the composition of the APS has changed over time, and provides an opportunity for assessing the impact of human resource (HR) policies on the structure of the Australian Public Service (APS). A more comprehensive statistical analysis of the APS is provided in the State of the Service Report 2003-04.

The main data source on APS employees is the APS Employment Database (APSED), which contains data extracted from agencies' HR systems. The Australian Public Service Commission continues to work with agencies to improve the quality and timeliness of the data they provide to APSED. To ensure that sound conclusions can be drawn from the data, it is important that agencies continue to assign a high priority to providing accurate and timely data to the Commission.

This year the functionality of APSED was increased through the release of an internet interface (APSEDII) which allows users to construct their own tables and graphs from the most recent APSED dataset. Furthermore, agencies will soon be able to use a secure link to drill down into their agency's data to a more detailed level not available in Commission publications. This new feature should greatly assist agencies in accessing useful data for workforce planning.

Since this Bulletin was prepared, there have been adjustments to the Administrative Arrangements Order; these are not reflected in this report because they occurred after 30 June 2004.

Lynelle Briggs
Public Service Commissioner

December 2004