There are statistics and damn statistics, and the truth may lie somewhere between the two. The Economist recently touted that Australia has the biggest public sector per capita in the world. The unions shall cheer. The socialists shall clap. And the taxpayers shall feel forlorn. One can only wonder what all these people are doing. Some, no doubt, are doing great work. Others, we may never know despite data collection being a great pastime of The Blob.

At the very least, information gathering is what these bureaucracies love to do. Their knowledge is superb up until a Senate Estimates hearing or a royal commission – and like a hospital dementia ward – they suddenly can’t recall, Your Honour.

The 2024-2025 Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that there were 2.6 million people employed in the public sector. Nearly 386,000 were in Commonwealth employment. Five times that figure, almost two million people, were employed by the states and 218,000 in local government.

The biggest government sector nationwide is that of public administration and safety with 849,000 employees. They busy themselves with multiple Welcomes to Country at every meeting, largely ignorant of the realities of that culture. And every day they all bring their ‘authentic selves’ to work. Not one of these jobs creates wealth.

What is increasingly important to understand about the public sector is its dutiful servitude to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mantra. Take for example, the government entities that have signed up to groups such as Acon, previously known as the Aids Council of NSW, and its regime of transgender protocols. With taxpayers’ money, they pay to be publicly judged on how deeply they can kowtow to the ‘Masters’ of Woke. They are rated on a scale referred to as the Australian Workplace Equity Index, AWEI.

Heavy criticism of the ABC’s Platinum status with Acon recently resulted in the public broadcaster dropping its membership. It quite rightly brought into question the ABC’s ability to be independent, a central requirement of its charter. It’s not like the ABC was also signed up to Giggle, the female-only app.

Other federal government departments and business enterprises paying the Acon bill include the Attorney-General’s Department, Australia Post, the Australian Federal Police, Asio and Asis – the Australian Secret Intelligence Services. One can only assume most taxpayers don’t care what these authorities look like, or their gender balance, but rather they care that the nation is well cared for, kept safe and that the mail arrives on time.

But DEI and the likes of Acon demand more. For example, consider the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts. It is a DEI devotee, arm in arm with Acon’s Pride in Diversity. It has time to do this, of course, because it is on top of its work: Australian roads are without potholes, vital highways are in place, intermodal freight hubs are on budget and ahead of schedule and there are oil refineries aplenty. Arts grant recipients are usually uncontroversial. And so on.

Cough, splutter, sigh.

The Department is layered with ‘diversity networks’, ‘diversity co-chairs’, ‘diversity champions’, ‘diversity and leadership committees’, and the ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team’. The networks include the Gender Equality Network and the Pride and Allies Network. But best of all, the Department says it actively encourages all of its staff to ‘join these networks and participation is recognised as work time’. So, taxpayers are paying for people to attend ideology-inspired meetings. Next time you hit a pothole, don’t wonder why.

This Department even boasts in its DEI Inclusion Strategy 2025-2028 that it has ‘exceeded national averages’. And indeed, it has. Via a census of its own employees, 57 per cent of its workforce are ‘people who identify as women’. What would the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, WGEA, think of that? It is probably delighted given it also excels in gender maths, with 83 per cent of its senior roles taken by women, and women hold 77 per cent of all jobs in the agency.

Further, 14 per cent of the Department of Infrastructure workforce identifies as LGBTQIA+, well ahead of the benchmark 10-per-cent figure it purports for the national population. It’s an interesting figure given the 4.5 per cent counted in the last census of 2021.

It is worth noting that the word ‘merit’ does not appear once in the Department’s DEI Inclusion Strategy.

In a paper titled The Lost Generation, Jacob Savage last year wrote of the demise of competent white men from the US film and television industry. He wrote of young men giving up in their chosen field to make way for women, those of colour and the LGBTIQA+ line-up. The ‘diversity complex’ as he describe it, had whittled away a place for competent white men: ‘No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.’

This is not to be insensitive about our differences whatever they might be. But surely government funds in times of financial devastation and decreasing productivity must go to vital matters, targeted workplace outcomes and reducing the cost of Government?

Figures now show that federally four-fifths of all new jobs are in the government or de facto government. In Victoria, that figure is closer to nine out of ten.

On 21 April, 2026, we celebrated what would have been Queen Elizabeth II’s 100th birthday. It also marked the twentieth anniversary of the Howard-Costello government’s achievement of zero national debt.

Net zero debt: the only net zero worth chasing. Today, debt sits at one thousand billion dollars.

Rather than over-shooting DEI targets, what would happen if merit and integrity were the integral measures for public service employment?  Could we simultaneously lose our crown for having the biggest per capita public sector in the world, save money and get better outcomes?

How much of the government’s budget is going not only towards a growing public sector, but on a sector that clearly spends significant time on tasks they’re not employed to do?

If we can’t ask that question now, then when?