Main features

Abbreviations

A list of the abbreviations used in this report is available at Appendix 3

Size of the Australian Public Service

At June 2006 there were 146,434 staff in the Australian Public Service employed under the PS Act. This represented a 9.6% increase in comparison with the June 2005 number of 133,593. Table 1 shows ongoing and non-ongoing employee numbers by sex from June 1992 to June 2006.

During 2005–06, 5076 ongoing employees moved into coverage of the PS Act—4968 (or 97.9%) of these were employed by Medicare Australia which moved into coverage on 1 October 2005. Coverage changes for the last 15 years are set out in Appendix 4 ‘PS Act coverage changes’.

There was strong growth in ongoing staff numbers during 2005–06, increasing from 123,452 employees at June 2005 to 134,632 employees at June 2006 (an increase of 9.1%). The largest increases in ongoing staff numbers were in Centrelink (978 or 4.0%) and in Defence (921 or 5.2%). The largest reduction in ongoing staff numbers was in Veterans’ Affairs (97 or 4.0%).

Non-ongoing staff numbers rose by 16.4%, from 10,141 at June 2005 to 11,802 at June 2006. Over half of the growth in non-ongoing employment was concentrated in five agencies: Centrelink (up by 258), Defence (256), ABS (236), DEST (209) and Immigration (207).

Appendix 4 ‘PS Act coverage changes’ and Appendix 5 ‘Changes to Administrative Arrangements, 2005–06’ should be carefully noted when examining tables that compare agency numbers from one year to the next.