If 24 hours is a long time in politics, it’s an eternity for the numerologists at the Australian Public Service Commission, which late last week ‘fessed to one of the all-time great statistical stuff-ups of public sector self-examination and record-keeping.
In the space of around 14 hours, the apex administrator for the federal bureaucracy duly divulged that it totally buggered up the headcount for people better known as the cultural ‘other’ at one of Australia’s biggest agencies, Services Australia. It understated the so-called multicultural factor by about 1.5 — or if you want to be cute, 150%.
On Wednesday, the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) percentage of staff at Services Australia apparently sat at a paltry 11%. On first blush, that made it Australia’s whitest agency in the federal top 20. It seems the only people who initially cocked an eyebrow was The Mandarin, followed by Services Australia, the latter scratching its head given previously much higher publicly declared figures of around 25%.
But by Thursday morning, Services Australia was back in the top three most diverse agencies, at 26%, placing third after the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Home Affairs (which absorbed departmental functions for immigration and customs).
How the statistical deviation for Services Australia occurred is still unclear, although it’s probably a transposition error. But it outwardly suggests the APSC’s overall environmental awareness of ethnicity within the services’ ranks may be derived from working meals at Italian & Sons and Portia’s, with a segue to the Fyshwick markets if required.
Now that the real APS CALD breakdowns have been corrected (the author maintains a positive outlook it will remain so), things are actually a lot clearer. Especially in terms of where systemic cultural biases are likely to occur. It is, quite literally, a numbers game.
When you go through the run of the curve, it’s public servants who need well-developed numeracy skills that top out the upper ranks in terms of so-called diversity.
After the ATO (36%) and Home Affairs (30%) the departments of Industry, Science and Resources, then Services Australia, followed by Employment and Workplace Relations and the Treasury all come in at 26% in terms of CALD total headcount.
Thereafter most agencies placed at between 23% and 20% in terms of overall CALD.
However, it is the sub-20% cohort that is the most revealing, and we’ll go from the bottom and head up.
The very bottom diversity rung of 16% was jointly held by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and the Australian Public Service Commission.
The question of why PM&C and the APSC (who calculated all these statistics for its APS Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Employment Strategy and Action Plan) represent so poorly compared to an overall APS average is a whole question on its own, but what is starkly clear is that initial hires based on numerical competency as a core part of a job seems to have failed to translate to a career pathway to the upper echelons of the APS.
It’s also clear that non-Anglo communities are far more heavily represented in skilled professions that could be classed as more ‘technical’ rather than the generalist administration skillset from where leadership is drawn.
Lawyers are an interesting case in point here, because they remain one of the few discrete professions where generalist administrative skills are seen as being directly augmented by the profession — unlike, say, engineers, scientists, technology professionals and accounting and finance professionals. According to the Law Society of NSW’s 2022 Annual Profile of Solicitors in NSW, around a quarter of practising lawyers in that state are from a non-English speaking background, with 22% speaking a language other than English at home. In the same NSW practising lawyer group, 8% identified as Chinese.
One of the more glaring public service promotional barriers increasingly referenced by people from Asian backgrounds is the so-called “bamboo ceiling”, where people from Asian backgrounds are not promoted to senior roles.
There is solid research pointing to systemic racial bias and discrimination, namely the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy 2023 research paper Modelling Australian Public Service Careers by Robert Breunig, Nu Nu Win and David Hansell, which drilled into the same Australian Public Service Employment Database (APSED) files that were used by the APSC.
The APS Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Employment Strategy and Action Plan references its own statistical findings as “consistent” with the findings of Breunig, Win and Hansell, who observed that for “NESB, promotion prospects have stagnated or become worse over time. The promotion penalty for being in the NESB group, relative to non-NESB, grows at higher ranks of the public service.
“NESB staff have much lower promotion prospects at higher ranks despite being less likely to separate from the public service. These lower promotion prospects for NESB staff are only partially explained by language proficiency or cultural assimilation. The unexplained remainder could reflect a penalty for being non-white,” Breunig, Win and Hansell wrote.
That paper also questions whether poorer promotion prospects could be “driven by race” and notes cultural stereotypes.
“There is a stereotype that NESB individuals are often in more ‘technical’ jobs which have lower promotion prospects than more ‘general’ and managerial jobs,” Breunig, Win and Hansell wrote, later observing that “NESB staff make up a relatively high proportion (25 to 30 per cent) of staff in ICT and Digital Services, Accounting and Finance and Legal and Parliamentary.”
That said, Breunig, Win and Hansell reckon that “the distribution of NESB staff across job families do not explain their poor promotion prospects.”
Perhaps not, but what is clear is the APSC’s oppositional defiance to creating any new specific specialist career paths or classification for professions like ICT, where successive governments have forfeited internal capability, and APS wages languish around $100,000 below that of industry. At the same time, there is a parliamentary inquiry into the graveyard of scrapped or botched IT projects that seemingly got away from departments.
The APS’s main union, the Community and Public Sector Union, is also known not to be a fan of introducing new specialist classifications and supports the current government policy of homogenising pay scales across agencies over time to reduce pay disparity between agencies. Many other unions do not support this approach because it does little or nothing for their members, if not sending them backwards by reducing their negotiation power.
A really significant question is where the APS will find all of the IT staff the government says it intends to insource rather than farm out to consultants and outsourcers. The use of skilled migration is one possibility, especially when long-term job security, stability and conditions are prized above unstable highly elevated pay rates. But again, this raises the question as to whether such talent will be given the same opportunity to rise through the APS ranks as other Australians, which they should.
That’s if they can get in through the door. Another worthwhile research read is the Institute of Labor Economics’ 2020 paper Racial Discrimination and White First Name Adoption: Evidence from a Correspondence Study in the Australian Labour Market by Shyamal Chowdhury, Robert Slonim (both University of Sydney) and Evarn Ooi from BOCSAR (NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research).
“We find that there is a large gap in getting interview offers when résumés with first and last Chinese names are used compared to résumés with White first and last names,” the paper says.
But perhaps the most revealing reflection of the way some of the APS still think are comments sent to The Mandarin by a person claiming to be in the APS on our initial story on the APSC’s CALD strategy.
“Thanks for your article, but really — this is woke gone mad. Here in Canberra CALD means Indian. “Diverse” my old socks. There are entire suburbs mushrooming in the west and north that are filling with Indian migrants. People I know joke that the capital of Australia is now named New Delhi,” the person said.
They added “There should be selection-on-merit for new appointments, rather than selection on CALD. People who went to university in Australia, speak Australian so that other Australians can understand and contribute to the whole enterprise creating far more value than people from subcultures of inaction. I want value for Australian taxpayers and imagine that is a majority view.”
Imagine copping that attitude starting out in a public service job.
READ MORE:
Tax Office ranked most culturally diverse APS agency, Services Australia the least
