Public service expanded middle executives then paid millions for them to leave
Before they started paying them to leave, the federal government embarked on a spree to expand the bureaucratic middle.
A Canberra Times analysis of Australian Public Service Commission's employment data between June 2023 and June 2026 revealed the public service expanded its Executive Level (EL) cohort by nearly 21 per cent, outpacing the growth of the APS 1 to 6 and Senior Executive Service (SES) bands.
Australian Public Service Commissioner Jacqui Curtis. Picture by Sitthixay Ditthavong
It meant the federal government added more than 10,000 new EL staff to the wage bill during the four-financial-year period.
Between June 2025 and June 2026, the total number operational staff (APS 1 to 4) fell by about 5000 and the number of SES staff dropped by 33 while the EL ranks continued to increase with more than 1100 staff added.
The employment data showed a difference in executive-level density between front-line and policy-focused areas.
For example, Services Australia operated with about 25 APS 1 to 6 staff for every EL 2 manager. However, specialised intelligence and defence agencies had a higher concentration of senior roles.
Upper management made up nearly 41 per cent of the workforce at the Office of National Intelligence while the Australian Submarine Agency had about three APS 1 to 6 staff for every EL 2 manager.
Former finance deputy secretary Stephen Bartos said that within the public service, there was a longstanding view that policy work was more prestigious than front-line service delivery work, which drove up classification levels and inflated the middle-management ranks of those agencies.
"You are getting these days EL 2s doing jobs that used to be done by EL 1s, SES 1s doing jobs that used to be done by EL 2s, and what that means is that your salary bill keeps going up," he said.
In those agencies, the structural incentives for leadership skewed towards adding more senior managers rather than maintaining a broader operational staff base, Mr Bartos said.
"Typically agencies don't reduce their senior levels ... the incentives go the other way round," he said.
"The more deputy secretaries they have reporting to them, the more important they feel, and it's something where there's incentives for senior people to surround themselves with other senior people."
Mr Bartos said extensive redundancy programs could create capability gaps if they removed junior staff who would otherwise gain the experience needed for senior roles.
"If you create gaps where there aren't that pool of people at more junior levels who've become trained up so that they can take on more senior jobs, you can end up getting inexperienced people being pushed into jobs that they're not really suited for," Mr Bartos said.
In 2026, a number of departments and agencies offered voluntary redundancy rounds explicitly targeting executive-level positions with individual payouts reaching comfortably upwards of $100,000.
The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) opened redundancies to its EL ranks, getting rid of 56 staff from that level as its senior positions reduced by more than 7.5 per cent. The agency's latest annual report showed it paid out about $9.7 million in staff exits, up from about $1.3 million in 2024-25.
The Fair Work Ombudsman also specifically targeted its EL ranks for redundancies, which resulted in 13 exits and a total payout of about $2.2 million, an average of about $166,000. The agency forked out $922,000 in staff exit payments in 2024-25.
EL 1 and EL 2 workers at the Social Services department made up nearly half of its finalised 302 departures following its redundancy rollout, where one employee was paid out at $188,000 while others were paid upwards of $170,000.
The payouts were due to the longevity of EL staff in the public service. The APSED also showed that EL 1 and EL 2 positions have a median service length of 13 years and 17 years respectively.
During Senate estimates, the Employment department revealed five of its executives left and it needed to rebalance its workforce as it was actively recruiting more front-line employees. The department had also accepted 91 redundancies so far in 2026-27.
The massive redundancy wave in the public service led to the departures of thousands of staff with the Home Affairs department racking up the highest bill of nearly $75 million spent on staff exits.
UNSW Canberra public sector management expert David Schmidtchen cautioned the data captured only part of the workforce trend. He said the initial EL workforce expansion might have been necessary because of government policy demands.
"The level of EL 1 and EL 2 is ... the engine room of management at the APS," Mr Schmidtchen said. "That cohort of middle managers is very important for the delivery of outcomes for departments and agencies. So their growth is in line with the demand most of the time."
Mr Schmidtchen said the wave of redundancies was an inevitable response to economic pressures forcing the government to find savings, but warned the cuts risked losing critical institutional knowledge from departments.
"It's very difficult to capture [and] to know what's leaving the building," he said.
The public service might not be at the end of its redundancy wave as the Albanese government has warned that a lot of difficult decisions need to be made.
Finance and Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher warned there would be more spending cuts in the public service as the mid-year budget update approached and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government was always looking for efficiencies in the public service.
Ray Athwal
Data Journalist
Ray Athwal is a data journalist interested in data-driven stories. Got a tip or an idea to share? Email him at ray.athwal@austcommunitymedia.com.au or on Signal @rayathwal.10