Economy
Tas PS job growth tops nation
TASMANIA has the most bloated state public service in Australia.
New figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday show 40,900 Tasmanians were employed by the State Government in June, more than 17 per cent of the entire state workforce.
The wages bill for state public servants also leapt by nearly 19 per cent in the past year, gobbling up 53 per cent of the state’s limited Budget in salaries.
The State Government now provides more than one in six of all jobs in Tasmania, compared to an average of one in eight jobs being state government-reliant across the rest of Australia.
But when all public servants over three tiers of government federal, state and local government are taken into account more than one in five workers are employed by a government of some kind in Tasmania, compared to one in eight nationally.
And the dependency on government employment is growing.
Despite pledges made in 2009 by the State Government during the global financial crisis that the public sector would be shaved every department was told not to replace public servants who left there is little sign of any shrinkage.
Instead, the ABS data shows that between 2009 and 2010, the state public service ballooned by an extra 2700 employees.
Growth in the scale of the Tasmanian public service averaged 7.2 per cent in the last year, while nationally the trend was for just 2 per cent growth.
But the total wages bill for Tasmania’s state public service mushroomed even faster, growing by 18.8 per cent between June last year and this year.