In her Budget column today, Janet Albrechtsen makes the following claim:
NSW has about 380,000 state and local public servants servicing a population of 6.7 million people. And that’s not counting more than 40,000 public servants working in government-owned businesses. With a population of about four million, that should mean that New Zealand should have about 225,000 public servants. Right?
Wrong. According to Statistics New Zealand, our cousins across the Tasman have fewer than 69,000 public servants. That’s one public servant for every 58 New Zealanders, compared with one NSW public servant for every 17.5 NSW residents. The comparison only gets worse when you realise the NZ figure includes almost 12,000 defence force personnel and other public servants who, in Australia, would be working for the federal Government.
I’m too busy to check myself, but this seems highly implausible to me. NZ seems to have much the same mix of public and private schools and hospitals as Australia, and presumably local councils perform much the same range of tasks (maybe with a bit more contracting out). Can anyone do a factoid check here?
Update 2:31 pm An amazing team of unpaid factoid checkers has solved the puzzle almost immediately and the answer is “The number you first thought of”. According to the NZ government,
The public service makes up a small proportion of total state sector employment, as measured by Statistics NZ. In 2004 the Public Service made up only 14 per cent of the 275,000 state sector jobs
suggesting that, after netting out people doing federal government jobs, the NZ and NSW public sectors are almost identical in size, relative to the population. Albrechtsen’s entire piece is based on a difference in statistical classifications. Thanks to everyone who helped dig out the facts.
The obvious question is, if readers of this blog can find this kind of thing out for free, and in a matter of minutes, why is Albrechtsen getting paid for not bothering to make such obvious checks?
A couple of commenters have suggested emailing and asking for a retraction, and anyone who wants to do so is welcome to. My past experience with such things is that any correction is so grudging and qualified as to be worthless, but maybe Albrechtsen will surprise us.
John Quiggin 
Remember, we have an extra level of Government than NZ
That would go the other way, but Albrechtsen’s figures (if accurate) let us net out those NZers performing national government functions.
A brazen Albrechtsen half-truth.
Here’s a 2004 speech by Jane Diplock, Chairman, New Zealand Securities Commission.
http://www.sec-com.govt.nz/speeches/jds300804.shtml
The speech does talk about some quite major public sector reforms in NZ. But here’s the important information:
“There is also new focus on ensuring proper control and accountability right across the state sector, the landscape of which has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Large components have moved outside the core public service ? the 37 government departments that account for only around a third of the State’s total expenditure. The public service accounts for only 13% of all public sector employment (which, in this instance, includes local government organisations as well).”
So multiply Albrechtsen’s 69,000 by 100 and divide it by 13. You get, (wait for) it 530769!
That, I need hardly add, is more than TWICE the expected number of public sector workers predicted by JQ above.
Sprung Janet.
Surely NSW has a similar breakdown. So apples for apples she may still be correct.
For instance are nurses and police part of the “public service”? And if not then are they “public servants”?
NSW Labour MP Michael Costa has indicated previously that he thinks large slabs of the public service could be sacked without any impact on service levels. However he does not seem to have convinced his colleges that it is a good thing to do.
Another source for the 13% figure gives some more numbers:
Terje (say TAY-A) Says: May 10th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
No. JA’s calculations seem to be inclusive of all public sector employees at local, state and enterprise level. The public employees working in NSW state utiliites and community services would fall under this classification.
She is playing silly buggers with a misleading definition of NZ’s public sector employment. Not the first time she has been caught out trying to deceive her readers.
Not likely. Contracting out and privatising look good on paper. But wait till you read the fine print. These reforms are more about the distribution of spoils rather than the production of services. Think Cross City Tunnel.
Fancy trying to con people by smearing up the notional distinction between “public servants” and “state sector”! On the internet you can spin, but you can’t hide.
Can somebody in the know send her an email and ask for a retraction.
Just a bit more to clarify
From http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=21492
“How many people make up the state sector?
The public service makes up a small proportion of total state sector employment, as measured by Statistics NZ. In 2004 the Public Service made up only 14 per cent of the 275,000 state sector jobs.
The state sector includes all organisations owned by the government, including schools, hospitals, public service departments, and state-owned enterprises. ”
In other words, JA is being blatantly misleading.
It is not hard to find the right numbers. Look up ABS Cat 6248, Table 7 for disaggregated public sector employment by State. I don’t have time to analyse it now, someone want to look?
Sorry, my last comment seems redundant – took me too long to write.
Anyway, second what Terje said – someone needs to crunch the right numbers and request a retraction
I sent her an email and pointed her to this discussion. Perhaps she will offer to clarify things.
Besides the one misleading statistic, for me the main point still stands. Our public sector is enormous and bloated, and comparing it to socialist New Zealand doesn’t make a difference to me.
Add Jono to the list of Rightists who think that lying in a good cause is quite acceptable.
Bush, Howard, Downer, Rumsfeld, Powell … that list is getting mighty long.
Perhaps it’s time to use the term “albrechtsen” as a verb.
It already is, Jim.
Mark Latham’s description seems appropriate.
No, Mark Latham’s description was never appropriate. That is the problem with bully boys like Latham. His general misogyny means that when ever he takes aim he shoots himself in the foot.
Albrechtson is nothing more than a wannabe Anne Coulter, only not quite as clever or as vulgar. She knows very well which side butters her bread, and she never misses a chance to advertise to the ‘right’ people, who she is and what she is about. Fortunately in the process of advertising her stale wares, retailing the tired, boring and utterly predictable cliches of the authoritarian, mad dog Right, she also informs the rest of us of her utter lack of seriousness, her general penchant for deception, and her complete irrelevance to the task of advancing rational, serious and proper democratic debate.
She is a Tool.
Thanks for the update Prof Q.
Another question that this raises is why is JA writing on this topic if she can’t even do a quick reality check on her arguments. As you said, it sounds implausible right off the bat. If you’re going to write on it, you should at least think “hmm… public sectors might be different sizes across countries, but that sounds a bit big”, or “I didn’t think NZ had taxes much different from other countries – is their public sector really that small?”
It’s fair enough to argue that the size of govt should be kept small and that public sectors bloat if governments don’t keep on the case, but I don’t think JA could really think that NZ could have a public service a quarter of the size of NSW (in proportional terms) unless she’s quite clueless, or someone else fed her the numbers together and she didn’t question them as they fitted her prejudices.
“she never misses a chance to advertise to the ‘rightÂ’ people, who she is and what she is about”
It got her appointed to the ABC Board, which goes to show it really does pay to advertise.
Imagine if an ABC broadcaster was as sloppy or misleading with the facts. We’d never hear the end of it from the right.
JQ says that the figures suggest that “…that, after netting out people doing federal government jobs, the NZ and NSW public sectors are almost identical in size, relative to the population”.
If this is in fact correct, what does this say about twenty years of NZ economic reform? During the 80s and the 90s so right wing columnists and think tanks hailed New Zealands bold deregulationist reforms as creating some form of free market utopia. If reformist New Zealand and laggard NSW have public sectors sectorsthat are comparable in size on a per capita basis it would seem that the said reforms have failed to reduce the size of the NZ government sector. Does this mean the reform process per se was a failure. Has it not been applied with enough vigour? Have a few years of revisionist Helen Clarke backsliding undone the good work of the past two decades? Has the New Zealand eloctorate failed the cause of permanent free market revolution by electing wicked socialist governments ? Perthaps JA can provide us with a definitive answer.
It’s called truthiness!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Terje, any response yet from JA ?
John,
No reply as yet.
Regards,
Terje.
Spiros: “Imagine if an ABC broadcaster was as sloppy or misleading with the facts. We’d never hear the end of it from the right.”
That’s a very good point, among numerous others above.
And John – the phrase “until Hell freezes over” comes to mind in relation to how long Terje might be waiting for a reply from Her Albrechtness.
Anyone remember the television program “Babylon 5”?
If people can remember the episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars”, I’m sure the terms “truefact” and “goodfact” come to mind when reading jono’s post.
For those that feel confident than Janet Albrechtsen is wrong about this they might like to try the following email address:-
mediawatch@your.abc.net.au
Stoptherubbish, The fact that Latham made the statement was inappropriate considering his then position. That doesn’t alter the fact that the statement itself is an appropriate description.
Crocodile, please drop this line of discussion. I’d prefer that we stick to the issue at hand.
Nice work JQ and co.
You shouldn’t fudge the figures to get to the truth. Truth is you need to compare public servants’ output with the private sector. A mate does relief payroll in both sectors and reckons the public servants are doing a third to 50% less than their private sector counterparts. They are oblivious to that fact(unless they’ve just come from the private sector) and he generally notes that the less they are doing in comparison, the more overworked, stressed and underpaid they think they are. That makes them the worst people to work with and to be avoided.
Or in other words although it’s nice to do sweet FA occasionally, it’s not with a real bunch of tossers.
Blind Freddie could see that Janet Albrechtsen’s figures are wonky at base. But the point she was making – that NSW is a relatively generous employer of public servants – remains true, at least from my own observations vis a vis Victoria’s scorched-earth public service.
Also, in this age of PPPs etc, I really doubt that definitive, objective stats on this issue could exist. Here, while I’m firmly with John, in that anything that looks like a public servant should be counted as one, it is Albrechtsen’s contrary methodology that ultimately makes the financial wheels go round for all Labor state governments.
Finally, I detect a nasty whiff of inter-generational bullying going on. Where are/were all you people, on your high horse about Albrechtsen’s dodgy figures, when Paul Keating recently uttered a bare-faced lie about preserved superannuation being locked up till age *65*? http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/2006/05/09/draft-keating/#comment-32557
Are all pro-boomer, BIG (this one tacitly involves billions of dollars of Xer-to-boomer subsidies) lies so conveniently ignorable?
PW,
1. An infinite number of statements are ignored. Only so many hours in the day, old chum. And in any case you didn’t ignore Keating’s statement, so it hasn’t been ignored.
2. So what consititutes an “unignorable statement”? Let’s weigh up the importance of crass falsehoods by an influential hit-woman of the radical right who has been favoured with a public post on the Board of the ABC, compared with a retired politician who has been out of public life for more than a decade. There is no debate about whose attitudes, ideas and prejudices have more impact in public life in 2006.
PW’s referenced blog comment carries with it the implication that Keating deliberately misled those sempiternal victims of every dastardly plot of the modern (and post-modern) age, Gen-X:
“So “property prices were running ahead of the inflation rate [in the late 80s]â€?? Um, like they *haven’t* been for most of the last decade? Oh I get it: Hawke/Keating smashed the unions in the 80s, so much so that wage inflation (except at the upper end, of course) would never trouble economic policy-setters again. And as a special bonus, by engineering a “hard-landingâ€? to the late-80s property boom (in contrast to the present-day, to date, soft-landing), Keating was able to spook many young Xers from buying their first homes in the first half of the 1990s, when, in hindsight, this was their first and last chance to do so.”
Gosh, you’ve got us bang to rights PW. You’re clearly smarter than the average Gen-Xer. Yes, we’re all out to get you. And you’re right, Keating is the evil genius of the plot to make the life of every Gen-Xer a misery.
ANY comment or opnion from a rightwinger like Janet Albrechtsen,does not interest me in the least.
There are opinions, views, comments,that are worth a think about,but,any “opinion?”,or comment,from a rightwinger like Janet Abrechtsen,does not interest me in the least.
“Finally, I detect a nasty whiff of inter-generational bullying going on.”
But then, you always do, PW.
The Kennett Government sacked 45,000 public servants over 3 years with no discernible or significant reductions in service to the public which is presumably what public service is about. Every time I look at the size of the public service in Queensland and Federally, I get itchy fingers again.
TW:
I think it’s worthwhile discussing what appears in newspapers, and refusing point-blank to read anything written by somebody with opposing political views is very unwise.
Jade,
There’s a mountain of research in cognitive psychology showing that reading falsehood leads people to adjust their views in the direction of the falsehood. The effect is quite strong when the person judges that the view is false; it’s smaller, but still detectable when they’re even told that it’s false. Eg. telling people “John Quiggin is a member of the mafia. Actually he’s not: that a total lie” will lead to people having more negative views of JQ than telling them neutral statements. Caveat lector.
“The Kennett Government sacked 45,000 public servants over 3 years with no discernible or significant reductions in service to the public’
Umm, which is why the public threw Kennett out and looks like re-electing Bracks for a third term?
Maybe you didn’t discern it Kevin, but the people whose schools and hospitals were closed obviously thought differently.
Kennett sacked a trainload of public servants and then got himself sacked.
A very welcome win/win situation.
“Umm, which is why the public threw Kennett out and looks like re-electing Bracks for a third term? Maybe you didn’t discern it Kevin, but the people whose schools and hospitals were closed obviously thought differently. ”
I was under the impression that a fair few of Kennett’s reforms were done in his first term, yet he got in for a second anyway, so unless people were getting annoyed a few years later, it is clear that you can get rid of a fair few public service and most people will still be happy, at least in the short term.
In addition, the fact that Bracks got in was not simply because Kennett lost — the Labor party ran an extremely smart vote buying campaign to get in, and they should be credited for this. Given that the Liberal opposition now is exceptionally aweful, the Labor party can now simply get in with a do-nothing campaign (not unlike Bob Carr in NSW for all those years). I doubt this really has very much to do with people’s memories of the Kennett years.
Doesn’t “an extremely smart vote-buying campaign” equate pretty closely to “hiring more public employees”?
A letter to the editor of The Australian (for publication or otherwise) might bear more fruit than an email to JA. Don’t have the time to do it myself, I’m afraid.
I think extremely smart vote-buying can come in different forms, and in some cases, yes, it does equate closely to hiring more public employees. Alternatively I do make a distinction between vote buying and using public funds in a reasonably intelligent manner not simply to win votes.
For example, a really good fast train line between, say, Geelong and Melbourne, fully paid for by the public (including the new public employees) might be a really good idea (or perhaps it isn’t, but at least it has that possibility — it would be easy to have a non-decisive argument over). Similarly, spending more on the school and hospital system that Jeff Kennett and co. ruined to some extent might be a really good idea also. Hence, I wouldn’t use the term vote-buying to describe that either, even if it won the government the next election, and even if the positive aspects occured by accident simply as a correlation with the act of vote buying.
Alternatively, you would find it very hard to convince me (and I presume almost everyone else, excluding those with direct self interest) that a slightly faster than slow train that goes to Bendigo is really good use of public funds, and you would also find it hard to convince me that a train line that goes somewhere through central Australia is a good idea either. Thus I consider this vote buying. Given that a lot of people believe that part of the reason Bracks won was thanks to the promise of large amounts of public funds to construct the Melbourne to where ever it finally gets railway , at least to me, it seems reasonable to call it vote buying.
According to that by now well established principle of journalism, we could describe the figures in Albrechtsen’s column as “fake, but accurate.”
I am not sure about Conrad’s description of the Bracks ascendancy. The way it seemed to me, as a partial resident of rural Victoria at the time, that the Libs really smashed up services in the bush. People didn’t know how to cope with their traditional masters behaving so badly, and it took a while for the implications to sink in.
At the second Kennett election, people were not ready to see the ALP as a viable government, after just a single term on the cross benches. After the next term, they were royally pissed off, and in three seats found the right independents to do the deed.
Even then, the ALP didn’t look much like an alternative government, and were thrust blinking onto the government benches half prepared.
Somewhere in there they formed the sincere belief that good fast trains to Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong would be grouse. Unfortunately the laws of physics, the realities of track and timetable design and the insidious capacity of stupidity to condense into the worst possible decision point, combined to create The Little Fast Train that Isn’t.
Stationmaster’s warning about the previous post: it is a branch line. Please stay on the main track, and do not shunt the discussion into a siding. This train is going to Albrechtson, and passengers for Bracks should have alighted at the last station.
I just checked my email and I have a message from Janet Albrechtsen timestamped 1:05pm today (Thursday).
So as it turns out Janet was wrong on this occasion. New Zealand is in fact also addicted to large government.
The problem with Janet Albrechtson and the reason she is rarely worth reading is that her viewpoints are often based on incorrect data. She constructs straw men in order to make a point which otherwise would not be supported by the facts. She is strong on outrage to cover the poor quality of her work. I have yet to see anything she produces as more than rhetoric dressed up as fact.
That she is able to do this regularly through the pages of the Australian is why as a paper it is failing in its duty as a member of the free press.
The lack of evidence base to her basic argument will not stop her from looking for other “evidence” so that she does not have to change her position.