Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Popular Information: “This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announcedit had struck a deal with Meta.
Weaponization of Institutions
NPR: “These 6 charts show how NIH research funding has been reshaped under Trump. Trump officials have delayed or redirected billions of dollars in NIH funding, disrupting grants for universities, scientists and medical research. The NIH still has a $47.5 billion budget, but major changes have been made to which research receives funding and when
A couple of dozen public servants were forced out of their jobs during the massive redundancy wave in the past financial year, The Canberra Times can reveal.
While the vast majority of departures were voluntary, 20 public servants were subjected to an involuntary redundancy across federal agencies in 2025-26.
A further 95 Senior Executive Service (SES) staff departed under formal "incentive to retire" arrangements, while 1193 ongoing employees accepted voluntary redundancy packages and 20 retrenchments were recorded as an unclassified redundancy.
Under Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) reporting, total retrenchments capture all formal separations where an employee is excess to requirements, including voluntary redundancies, involuntary retrenchments, SES incentive-to-retire packages, and unclassified exits.
The figures from the latest Australian Public Service (APS) employment data shed light on a record-breaking year under the Albanese government where overall retrenchments nearly quadrupled from 352 in 2024-25 to 1328 in 2025-26.
It meant more public servants were retrenched in 2025-26 alone than in the previous three years combined. There were a total of 1198 retrenchments between 2022-23 and 2024-25.
The executive and senior executive levels made up the majority of staff who accepted the redundancy packages.
Executive level (EL 1 and EL 2) and Senior Executive Service (SES) staff made up k832 of the total retrenchments accounting for 62.7 per cent in the public service. There were 435 retrenchments at EL 1, 292 at EL 2 and 105 across the SES ranks.
In the non-executive ranks, APS 6 officers had 271 retrenchments, while APS 5 recorded 142.
The Social Services department led the way with 319 retrenchments in 2025-26. It had paid out more than $26 million in voluntary redundancies across 302 staff, of which nearly 150 were middle managers, in the financial year.
The Climate Change department carried out 177 retrenchments while the Home Affairs and Employment departments recorded 110 and 107 retrenchments respectively.
The retrenchments in these departments accounted for 53.7 per cent, more than half, of all retrenchments in 2025-26.
An APSC spokesperson said, "Redundancy processes in the APS are governed by the Public Service Act 1999, the Australian Public Service Commissioner's Directions 2022, the Fair Work Act 2009, and individual agency enterprise agreements."
"Within this framework, individual Agency Heads are accountable for workforce decisions, including whether to offer redundancies, as part of broader workforce strategies. Maintaining capability and corporate knowledge are factors considered in retrenchment decisions.
Loss of experience
The data also revealed what appeared to be a loss of experience and institutional memory, with the redundancy wave that swept the public service in 2026 affecting older public servants and those with decades of service.
Staff aged 50 and over accounted for about 70.6 per cent of retrenchments. The 55 to 59 age group had the highest volume of retrenchments at 333, more than three times the total of 102 in 2024-25. The next highest group was public servants aged 60 to 64 with 279.
Public servants with 15 or more years of experience made up 950 retrenchments, 71.5 per cent, with 431 packages handed to officers who served between 20 and 30 years in the bureaucracy.
The surge in redundancies came amid a shift in exits across the federal bureaucracy, as the number of voluntary resignations fell by 13 per cent during the same period, dropping from 6927 to 6023.
Fewer younger redundancies
The employment data also showed a reduction in early career turnover, which had increased in 2024-25.
The number of resignations among new recruits in their first year of service fell to 1181 in 2025-26, while the total separations for first-year staff were 1424.
Voluntary departures among the youngest public servants also dropped with resignations for staff under 20 years old falling from 89 in 2024-25 to 55 in 2025-26, a fall of 38.2 per cent.
The number of separations at the APS 4 level also dropped from 2664 to 2332, bucking a three-year upward trend at that level.
The overall headcount of ongoing employees in the public service grew by about 1 per cent as it reached a total workforce of 186,259.
The Treasury's Final Budget Outcome for 2025-26 showed the cost of public service redundancies came in at double official expectations. The federal government spent $305 million on separations and redundancies over the past financial year.
It was more than double the $137 million 2025-26 estimate published just months earlier in the 2026-27 budget, representing a $168 million budget blowout.
The latest figures brought the Albanese government's total spending on public service redundancies and exit packages to more than $700 million across the past four financial years.
Importantly, she must realise that the backing of her Minister and, indeed, the Cabinet is essential if significant improvements are to be made to the public service. If that is not forthcoming, she might as well forget about it, put her feet up on her and fall back on the feckless optimism of Charles Dickens’s Wilkins Micawber who ran his life in the hope that “something will turn up”. Although Micawber was rewarded with a ticket to Australia, that would be a worthless consolation for Curtis as she is already here.
THE REAL COST OF A TOXIC WORKPLACE
1. The best employees keep leaving.
2. Everyone else inherits their workload.
3. Speaking up gets you labeled “difficult.”
4. Favoritism matters more than effort.
5. Burnout becomes part of the culture.
6. Management calls understaffing “teamwork.”
7. Your days off become recovery days.
8. You stop caring like you used to.
9. The paycheck no longer feels worth it.
10. You realize surviving the job is costing you your peace.
Jacqui Curtis is trying to fix the HR problems in the federal public service. She is investigating staff swapping, working from home and why so many promotions are internal.
Jacqui Curtis: “When it comes to the APS, there has been no burning platform that requires us to be different, until recently.” Sitthixay Ditthavong
Jacqui Curtis is not the first person to observe the public service is only as good as its people. But as head of human resource professionals for the 150,000-strong Australian Public Service she is now in a position to do something about it.
In her day job, Curtis is the chief operating officer for the Australian Tax Office, having come through the public service ranks as an HR and change specialist.
Curtis was tapped to help fix what many observers considered the elephant in the room, the inability of the service to adapt to the modern world by increasing the skills of the HR workforce.
Thodey found there had been a hollowing out of strategic policy skills, “the ability to understand the forces at play in the world, what is needed to position the nation to meet challenges and opportunities, and to develop, analyse and provide incisive advice to the government”.
Thodey blamed a mix of reasons, notably prioritising short-term responsiveness at the expense of long-term thinking, a risk-averse culture that stifled employee potential, staffing caps and retention policies that arbitrarily led to longer-term gaps in capability, and a large increase in outside contractors and consultants.
Virus a game changer
The finding sadly was not new, with capability gaps having been identified 10 years earlier in a similar report titled Ahead of the Game. Curtis is clear about why change has not occurred.
“When it comes to the APS, there has been no burning platform that requires us to be different until recently. The combination of the Thodey review and the COVID-19 crisis has given us that impetus to make real change” Curtis said in an interview.
“You need something concrete to drive that change.
“You can only drive your people to change their behaviour and mindset if you can show them change visibly taking place in their department or agency, or more broadly across the APS.
Jacqui Curtis is now keen to build on the sudden embrace of flexibility after the federal response to COVID-19.
“It’s that visible change that will drive that shift. I always say to people, you can change any policy, any procedure, any technology, but it is people that have to embrace that and put it into practice.
“Otherwise, you don’t get real change. You’re simply shuffling priorities at a high level, which then fails to flow through with the necessary change of mindset and actions that create long-term, organisational transformation.”
Start small and scale up
For Curtis, this practical approach to change needs to come from the bottom up. The centre needs to set the direction, but the agencies need to bring it to life.
“A lot of the time, we get caught up in HR theory and best practice, instead of stripping it back to the basic principles of having an idea, starting small and scaling it up if it works.
“It is vital that you make it really simple and tangible for people. And in doing so, people realise that they can make a difference. They get on board, they tell others and it snowballs through the organisation.”
Curtis cites the mobility challenge as an example.
Thodey noted the APS inter-agency mobility rate, which measures movement of employees between agencies in a year, has been stuck for decades at a dismal 2.5 per cent.
This explains why nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of the APS has only ever worked in one agency, driving the infamous insularity that is readily apparent to anyone who has worked in the federal public service.
At the ATO, Curtis’ approach had been to drive this through a staff-swapping arrangement.
COVID-19 saw us change everything we knew about our traditional ways of doing business.
With her senior executives, she “sat around the table and did some horse-trading and moving some people around” with executives seconded from different agencies.
Like many like-minded reformers, Curtis is now keen to build on the sudden embrace of flexibility after the federal response to COVID-19 that led to more than 2100 staff seconded to Services Australia.
This goes particularly to the whole remote-working phenomena COVID-19 unleashed.
While some state governments see flexible working as a game changer for attracting talent and diversity, the political signals from Canberra have been far more tepid, after the Prime Minister Scott Morrison told APS leaders before Christmas that he wanted to see them face-to-face.
Seeking hard evidence on WFH
In the meantime, the ATO is piloting a six-month program to really understand the implications of embracing remote working.
“We need our approach to be based on the evidence, so we’re going to see if we can get some hard data,” says Curtis, noting the significant people management issues that will need to be addressed if flexible working is to be fully implemented.
It is this trial and scale approach across multiple agencies that Curtis believes will be most effective in driving the larger strategic goal of trying to build long-term innovation and change in capability.
“Our response when COVID-19 hit is a great example of innovation and change in action,” Curtis said.
“All of a sudden, the Tax Office had to completely pivot from being an agency that was focused on collecting money, auditing businesses and being a regulator, to suddenly pushing money out the door. We were called on to meet the urgent needs of the community and the government, and we responded rapidly.
“To be able to do that required us to think completely differently about how we operate.
“COVID-19 saw us change everything we knew about our traditional ways of doing business. It saw us encourage our people to look outside their usual position and support them to think more broadly about what serving Australians truly means.
“For example, through our change programs, we had already begun to recognise that instead of having rigid policies that are inflexible, you need principle-based policies you can adapt to the needs of the clients. You need governance mechanisms and procedures that allow you to be able to flexibly shift and pivot to meet changing demands.”
Too many internal promotions
Recruitment is another area where Curtis sees significant gains by simply applying modern techniques to driving diversity and a culture that embraces change rather than one far too comfortable with the status quo (my observation).
“I think we still have too many recruitment practices that are out of date and restrictive, which can mean we’re not getting the right people in the right roles.
“And we still place too much emphasis on academic record; not just in our graduate program, but in quite a lot of our recruitment processes. My priority now is thinking of ways of getting more diversity, so we’re more representative of the community.”
A common theme for Curtis is the need for leadership to take ownership of the changes they want and to demonstrate that in a visible way to their agency.
“Leadership is essential here. We can say all the time that we want people that are innovative and courageous, but in many cases, we’re still not seeing that reflected in who we actually recruit.
“If you look at the State of the Service report and any of the stats from the APSC, you’ll still see lots of promotions from within an agency. This doesn’t always reflect the mobility and diversity that I’d expect to see in the APS.
“Leaders need to realise there can be a disconnect between their wishes and their actions. They need to understand that their people notice if they say one thing, but then do another.”
This is particularly so around the need for diversity, where in the senior executive level it remains white with the vast majority hired from within.
“We need to see more of our leaders taking diversity seriously. We need leaders who show their focus on diversity in their actions and not just by getting out there and saying it’s important,” Curtis observes.
The leadership theme goes to the recognition that human resources needs to be rethought in the public service, an observation equally relevant to many private sector organisations navigating the massive disruption fuelled by technology and the rapidly changing geopolitical environment.
“Leaders knew they needed a really strong HR capability, and they weren’t getting what they wanted, but I don’t think there was a real understanding of what that might need to look like going forward.”
“I think there’s still a bit of a mindset that HR is still that traditional attract, recruit, build capability. Obviously, this is part of the job, but HR is so much more than just those tasks.
“In the future, HR needs to be innovative and creative if it’s going to be able to deliver on that trusted adviser role that it needs to be.”
That of course implies a higher-level capability within the HR professional stream, which is exactly what Curtis is seeking to build.
It will be a long road.
HR has long been bracketed among a group of corporate services that in a typical mid-size agency will include technology, finance, security, ministerial and procurement functions.
In old-school organisations, the corporate function also includes communications and stakeholder engagement, and is often run by junior corporate executives who report up through a nightmare of authorising levels.
Elevating human resources to the C-suite will be a sure sign APS agencies are finally taking their people and capability challenge seriously.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has promoted five assistant commissioners.
Jarred Needham for the Phoenix Program, Alexander Nicopoulos for engagement and assurance (Adelaide), Andrew Fenn for strategic case leadership, Emma Butler for complex arrangement and assurance, and Emma Chamberlain for risk strategy intermediaries.
