Bureaucrat boom time

It has been a great decade so far for bureaucrats.

Governments of all levels have increased their bureaucrat workforce by over 90,000 positions or by 30 per cent over the six years to November 2005.

The largest increase has taken place in Victoria where the numbers of bureaucrats employed, by all levels of government, increased by a 39 per cent -- driven primarily by the State Government.

Bureaucrats have also done very well on the wages front.  Over the past six years, the hourly equivalent rates of pay of bureaucrats increased by 24.1 per cent in inflation adjusted terms.

This is three percentage points greater than comparable jobs in the private sector and is greater than the wage increases gained by all other public sector employees other than doctors, nurses, teachers and other professions.

There are a number of factors driving the growth of bureaucrats.

First, governments are awash with money and lax with spending.

Governments of all levels have, so far this decade, received $100 billion more in revenue than they expected at the beginning of the decade.

The easy money has led to lax expenditure control particularly on staffing.

Each year state governments have set wages targets and every year, as their coffers filled with unexpected monies, they breached the targets.

Over the past six years the states have budgeted for wages increases of no more than 3.5 per cent but have agreed to wages increase in often excess of 6 per cent.

Front line professionals have been the battering ram to breaching wage targets, but once breached the increases have flowed to the bureaucrats.

Second, government spending is subject to the flypaper effect.  That is, the bureaucracy tends to capture for itself a share of all money passing through it.

Take the recent federal budget.

A key set of initiatives were the provision of additional child support services.

Given that this largely entails writing bigger cheques, its impact on bureaucracy should have been minimal.  Yet it, along with similar initiatives, is expected to require 3300 more bureaucrats.

Another focus of the budget was defence, with numerous initiatives designed to produce a "hardened and networked army".

However, the budget plans to boost military personnel by 98 positions while increasing the army of defense bureaucrats of 793 positions.

Overall the budget forecasts the Canberra bureaucracy to increase by 7000 positions or by 3 per cent.

Another factor driving the growth of the bureaucracy is our increasingly dysfunctional federals system which results in massive overlap and duplication and buck passing.

The latest federal budget continues this trend with the funding of a range of initiatives agreed at the last COAG meeting.

The Federal Government does not directly train or provide disability services to anyone.  All it does is set policy, supervise and hand over money.

Yet, according to the budget it will need to hire more bureaucrats to meet its enhanced roles.

Naturally this will need to be matched by more bureaucrats by the states.

So much for shrinking government.

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