The Canberra Times has published an article today on the growing number of federal public servants that have been classified as “excess” to requirement and are being paid to effectively turn up to work and do nothing:
More than 400 federal public servants are languishing in employment limbo after they lost their jobs but were kept on the government payroll…
The public service’s ”redeployment register”, which has grown three-fold since late last year, now holds the names of 427 departmental staffers cast into bureaucratic purgatory by the wave of cuts sweeping the federal government.
A worker can join the registry, which covers all Australian Public Service departments and agencies, if their department has declared their job excess but the employee refuses to take a redundancy.
Under the government’s public service employment policies, there are no provisions to force a severance agreement on a public servant…
It is unclear what the hundreds of ”displaced persons” are doing when they go to work each day because individual departments are left to manage their own excess workers with no input from the central workplace authority.
Nice work if you can get it. Not so nice for taxpayers, though.
