The Chinese communists call them ‘Princelings’. The Soviet communists called them ‘Nomenklatura’. Australia’s communists are nowhere near so honest: they call our state-funded elite class, ‘public servants’.
And you can always rely on Labor government to swell their numbers like a plague that eats other people’s money. State Labor governments have grotesquely swelled public service numbers, each time they’re in government. In the state capitals, public servants account for as much as one-fifth of the entire workforce.
Hold my skinny almond latte, says Canberra.
Anthony Albanese’s bureaucracy has been stacked with almost 115,000 compliance, regulation, admin, project management, marketing, human resources, policy and service delivery staff, as Labor seeks to cut red tape and lift productivity and economic growth.
Since Australian Public Service levels hit a 14-year low of 144,704 employees at the end of 2019, an explosion in federal bureaucrats under the Albanese government is set to expand the APS to a record 213,000 staff in 2025-26.
Canberra is a city entirely dedicated to nurturing the taxpayer-funded elite. Nearly half of the city’s workforce is directly employed in the public service.
There’s a very good reason Labor governments are so dedicated to spreading the cancer of the public service: the troughers overwhelmingly vote left. The two biggest public sector groups, teachers and nurses, are hardcore left voters. The public-funded media are twice as likely to vote Green as the rest of Australia.
Put simply, Labor is stuffing the workforce with people entirely dependent on them for a living. Not to mention their ideological fellow-travellers.
While Labor has overseen large increases in female and culturally diverse public servants since the 2022 election, APS data reveals the percentage of Indigenous Australians in the government workforce has fallen. APS staff identifying as Gender X rather than male or female have increased from 106 to 974 since the gender category was first counted in 2017 […]
Breaking down APS diversity group data, as of December last year, there were 38,930 staff with cultural and linguistic backgrounds, 6643 Indigenous Australians, 10,664 people with disabilities and 117,197 women. There are 974 APS employees who identify as Gender X, classified by the Australian Public Service Commission as indeterminate, unspecified or intersex […]
The 2024 APS employee census also found “8.8 per cent of respondents considered themselves to be neurodivergent, another 9.3 per cent of respondents considered that they may be neurodivergent”.
This is the Long March through the Institutions in action.
Labor’s invariable excuse for bleeding the taxpayer dry and funding a bloated trougher class is ‘frontline services’. Which is a crock.
At least one-quarter of the public service are nothing more than clipboard-tickers, whose only job is to pretend to make sure the rest are actually working.
APS data shows that over five years to December 2024, the number of service delivery, administration, compliance and regulation, program and project management, policy, HR, communications and marketing jobs have jumped by almost 41,000.
Actual ‘service delivery’ jobs are outnumbered five to one by the clipboard-tickers.
Labor makes sure to buy their loyalty with eye-watering salaries. Even as public service productivity has declined, public service wage rises have outstripped those of people who really do work. Top bureaucrats in Australia are paid four times as much as their counterparts in the USA or UK.
Australia’s 17 highest-ranking public service mandarins will be paid combined remuneration packages valued at up to $16.3m in addition to travel expenses and other perks, as Anthony Albanese directs them to get more out of Labor’s ballooning bureaucracy.
It’s a cosy little club – and you’re not in it.
