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Introduction
The Australian Public Service Statistical Bulletin 2004–05 is a statistical overview of APS staffi ng produced on a financial year basis. It provides details of staff employed under the authority of the Public Service Act 1999 (the PS Act). Staff employed in Commonwealth-owned companies, statutory authorities, the defence forces and government business enterprises that are not employed under the PS Act are not included. State and local government staff are also not included.
The ‘Main Features’ section provides an overview of the report, together with a number of tables and graphs. Later sections cover ongoing and non–ongoing staff in more detail.
Changes to the Bulletin
This year we have increased the amount of information presented in the Bulletin in the following ways.
- The Bulletin is now in landscape format. This allows more space to show separately some organisations that have previously been included with their portfolio department. These are: Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, Questacon, Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator, AusAID, Child Support Agency, CRS Australia, Migration Review Tribunal, Refugee Review Tribunal, GeoScience Australia, IP Australia, Australian Office of Financial Management, National Competition Council and the Royal Australian Mint.
- Landscape format also allows 15 years of data to be displayed in the historical tables instead of 10, with additional calculations in some tables.
- In 2004-05, a major project was undertaken linking employees’ separate periods of service together to allow us to obtain more information on individual APS work history (see Appendix 1 for more detail).
- Data on the educational qualifications of APS employees has been included for the first time since 1989.
Source of data
From July 1999, APSED replaced the Continuous Record of Personnel (CRP) as the source for APS employment statistics. Data held on the CRP was migrated to APSED to form the historical series for ongoing employees.
APSED records information for both ongoing and non-ongoing employees (the CRP held data only for ongoing employees), including staff on leave without pay and other unpaid inoperative staff. Agencies provide data from their HR systems to the Commission on staff movements such as engagements, promotions and separations, as well as a ‘snapshot’ for all staff at 30 June each year. This information is used to verify and, where necessary, update APSED data. While the Commission has tried to ensure data integrity and has undertaken an extensive audit of data provided by agencies, it cannot accept responsibility for inaccuracies in the data supplied.
When referring to the data in this publication, or making comparisons with previous Bulletins, the reader should be aware that there have been changes over time to the conceptual definitions which support the data. Differences in data definitions due to the migration of CRP to APSED are explained briefly below and in detail in the Explanatory Notes at Appendix 1.
About the data
A headcount approach underpins the Bulletin—that is, people working part-time are aggregated with people working full-time without weighting.
Time series data reflects the APS as it was at a particular point in time. When comparing trends over time, the data may vary due to coverage changes within the PS Act. For example, in 1999 the Parliamentary agencies ceased to be covered by the PS Act. Administrative changes affecting APS numbers are detailed in Appendix 4 and Appendix 5.
Due to differences in data sources and data definitions, there may be variations between data in this publication and that published by individual agencies.
Where proportions are presented, results have been rounded to the first decimal place. Due to this rounding, the percentage results for some tables may not add up to exactly the total shown.
Data for the Senior Executive Service (SES) includes employees grouped with the equivalent SES bands under the Public Service Classification Rules 2000.
Data includes inoperative staff.
During 2004–05, extensive audits and error checking of APSED were undertaken and errors in the historical data were corrected. The following points, therefore, should be taken into consideration when making comparisons between data in this publication and previous publications.
- Previously published data for both ongoing and non-ongoing staff may have been revised and therefore may not necessarily be comparable with that in previous years’ publications.
- In some previous years a number of people who separated on 30 June were excluded from the count of the ongoing and nonongoing employee population. The major impact of the exclusion was on the non-ongoing population. Data for earlier years has been corrected for this publication.
- Following the introduction of the broadbanding of classifi cations in 1999, data in this publication reports the maximum classification level and is, therefore, not directly comparable with data for earlier years. This will result in some employees being reported at a higher than actual level (i.e. at the top of their broadband). Significant improvements in the quality of data provided by agencies in recent years have resulted in fewer agencies reporting broadbanded classifi cations. For example, at June 2003 over 31,000 employees had a different maximum and minimum classification. By June 2005 this figure had dropped to almost 3300. Therefore, data on classifications is not directly comparable with that from earlier years. See Appendix 2.
- APSED data reports the actual classifi cation of staff and includes temporary assignments to a higher level for periods of greater than 90 days. Previously, CRP data referred only to substantive classification.
- As part of the process for loading data from the CRP onto APSED, an audit was undertaken of employees who were current at June 1999. A number of records were found where nonongoing employees had been recorded as ongoing on the CRP. This led to a recalculation of ongoing employee numbers in the years preceding 1999. Employees who were employed at June 1999 were included in this audit. However, those who had been employed in earlier years but who had since left were not included. It can be assumed that there was an overestimate, which cannot be quantifi ed, of ongoing employees in those years.
- EEO data published by the Commission may differ from that published by some agencies. An independent review of the Commission’s then current practice of retrospectively changing a person’s EEO status if it changed during their employment was undertaken in early 2001. The review supported the continuation of the practice for reporting for non-English speaking background (NESB) and Indigenous status as these characteristics are likely to be constant throughout an employee’s career. Disability, however, may change with time and APSED has been modified to record the status change for an individual and the date at which that change was notifi ed by the agency.
- The provision of some EEO data by APS employees to their agency is voluntary. Therefore, as with any large voluntary data collection, APSED tends to under-represent the number of Indigenous Australians, people with a disability and people from a non-English speaking background (NESB).
- 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 2005.
The APSED Internet Interface (APSEDII)
Last 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. APSEDII provides user friendly, internet based access to APSED data. The interface facilitates workforce planning and benchmarking by allowing users to produce tables similar to those published in this Bulletin. Users can run queries to provide Bulletin-style tables with data about an organisation and, for comparative purposes, about other agencies in that size grouping.
The interface produces charts and tables and also allows users to download the queried results and manipulate the data further in other applications such as Excel. For example, a small agency might be interested to see how its classification distribution by sex compares to other small agencies or it might be interested in comparing its classification by age profile to other agencies. The interface allows the user to make the appropriate selections on the web page then generate the query and any charting or download requirements.
Agencies can also use a secure link to drill down into their data at a level of detail not available in Commission publications. This feature should greatly assist agencies in accessing useful data for workforce planning.
APSEDII is available at https://www.apsedii.gov.au
APSED services
The Commission can also provide disaggregations and analyses of the data presented here, in formats other than those published, on a fee for service basis.
Enquiries or suggestions about this Bulletin, or the analyses and other services we provide, are welcome and should be directed to:
Sue Johnson (02) 6272 5505 or Christopher Giuliano (02) 6272 5125
HTML and PDF versions of the Bulletin are available from the Commission website at:
Production team
APSED director: Sue Johnson
APSED managers: Colin Farlow
APSED maintenance: Ray Maher, Christopher Giuliano, David Judge, Greg Watman, Catherine McLean, Arianna Polacheck, Stephen Burden, Jillian Mahoney, Anh Nguyen
APS Statistical Bulletin prepared by: Christopher Giuliano, Jillian Mahoney and Stephen Burden.
