Given the Coalition are pretty stuck on that ‘36,000 extra public servants’ number, it might be a good time to remind you that in the last year of the Morrison government, the Coalition spent $20.8 BILLION on consultants – which is the equivalent of about 54,000 full-time public servants.

So that’s about a third of the public service in private hands.

For some added context, the most recent data shows there are 185,343 employees in the public service – and that is across service delivery, research, regulation, project management and policy development.

So before the Coalition goes even more wild on the APS, let’s look at federal public servants as a percentage of the working population.

In June 2008 the APS made up 0.75% of the population. In 2012, it was 0.74%. In 2016 that dropped to 0.64%. That dropped further in 2020 to 0.59% (and remember the short fall was made up by contracting the private sector)

So what is it now? In June 2024, APS employees as a percentage of the population made up….0.68%.