Has the public service swelled?
New Prime Minister Chris Hipkins recently told media that the public service had ‘‘stayed the same [size] or is even slightly smaller’’ as a proportion of the total workforce, compared to the past.
ACT leader David Seymour took issue, saying the public service had grown at a faster rate than the total workforce, and now represented a larger proportion of the overall number of workers. Who’s right?
WHAT WE FOUND
The size of the public service is a perennial battleground for politicians, especially in an election year.
The claim that Hipkins made to The AM Show was this: ‘‘The overall number of public servants as a proportion of the workforce, it’s actually stayed the same or is even slightly smaller than it was when we became a government.’’
Seconds later, he corrected himself: ‘‘Actually, it’s not since we became government, it’s over the longer time period.’’
Seymour retorted that, by the Public Service Commission’s own data, the public service was 27.8% bigger in 2022 than it was in 2017, while the total wage and salary earner workforce grew by only 9.4% in the same period.
Even taking a longer-term picture, Seymour claimed, public servant numbers were still up as a proportion of the workforce.
Stuff has tried to replicate both politicians’ claims, using data from the State Services Commission and workforce data from Stats NZ.
Seymour’s figure of 27.8% growth in the public service since 2017 is correct, using fulltime equivalent (FTE) figures. But instead of using that same measure for wage and salary earners, he’s used raw headcount, which doesn’t distinguish between part-time and fulltime workers.
If you use FTE numbers for the total workforce, growth between 2017 and 2022 was 11.8%, not 9.4%. It’s still a much smaller number than nearly 28% growth in the public service – but it’s not helpful to just present the two percentage increases. So we calculated the change in proportion, using both raw headcount and FTE staff. Here are both sets of figures, going back to 2000. If you use the FTE figures (a better statistical measure), Hipkins is, strictly speaking, correct. The current proportion is 3.3%, which is also what it was in 2009 – within the ‘‘longer time period’’ that Hipkins mentioned.
But it’s much more meaningful to look at the overall trend, which shows the public service increasing as a proportion of the workforce in Labour government years, and decreasing during National years, all within a relatively small range.
However, when Stuff sought clarification from Hipkins’ office on which dataset he was referring to when making his claim, a spokesperson responded that (despite using the phrase ‘‘public service’’) he was talking about the overall public sector, which includes groups such as teachers, nurses, and council workers.
Using these numbers (Stuff has chosen to use FTE workers again), the proportion of public sector workers has remained between 20% and 21% of the workforce since 2000, and is currently at the lower end of this range.
It’s unclear why both men have chosen to focus on the size of the public service in relation to the workforce, rather than the total population, though it is in keeping with a comparison used by the Public Service Association.
IN SUMMARY
There’s been an increase between 2017 and 2022 in both the size of the core public service, and the proportion of the workforce who are public servants. Looking at the longerterm trend, both have also increased since 2000. The overall public sector – which includes many frontline workers – has maintained its share of the workforce.
The real issue driving the debate over numbers is harder to fact-check: it boils down to whether you consider a big public sector to be inherently bad or unproductive. Independent measures of public service productivity are scant, but that’s the argument Hipkins, Seymour and others will be trying to win this election year.