ABSTRACT
Like most modern governments, the Australian Commonwealth (that is, the federal) Government is now a big employer of some scattered and some concentrated groups of variegated but predominantly white-collar workers. Its overall employment is now over 300,000, as a result of increases which had already begun to show before the Second World War, but which have been more important during and since then. Federation began with the century. The first functions of the Commonwealth Government were limited by an international situation in which it could rely on the U.K. to provide its defence and much of its foreign policy. Its functions also seemed to be limited by an apparently restrictive constitutional allocation of powers and finance between the federal and the states’ authorities, outside of certain judicial rather than administrative processes and activities. Hence the Postmaster General’s Department and the Customs were very much the dominant original Commonwealth employers. That has not been unimportant for the whole tradition and development of the Commonwealth public service. However, a degree of change from that starting point occurred rapidly and the radical alteration of that first simple and desirable state of affairs has been statistically very impressive. The gross total of Commonwealth employment has increased from 25,000 in 1903 to 70,000 before the war, 250,000 by the 1950s and so to the present figure. As a part of the whole Australian population it has increased from https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> 1 2 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003476610/cc15b678-0df9-42a6-a014-f502ff27040f/content/math_phanhai_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> per cent to 1 per cent before the war to 3 per cent today while the population itself has increased rapidly enough, although only at half that rate.
