The federal bureaucracy under Labor copped its largest staff cut since the late 1990s, as years of efficiency dividends finally began to bite into the workforce.
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The latest State of the Service Report shows the job losses were fuelled by redundancy payouts, which reached a 13-year-high in 2012-13, while resignations collapsed to their lowest level since 2000, as public servants clung onto their jobs or held out for a golden handshake.
The report, tabled in Parliament on Monday afternoon, shows the Australian Public Service shrank last financial year for the first time since 2004. It was biggest decline since 1999.
Public Service Commission data shows 2679 staff were retrenched while natural attrition slumped: just 4437 bureaucrats resigned, a 13-year low.
Overall, the workforce decreased by more than 907 employees to 167,257.
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The number of "non-ongoing" staff, who tend to be lower paid and are more vulnerable to losing their jobs, grew slightly but permanent positions declined by almost 2000.
The new Abbott government has already had to walk away from its election commitment to uses "natural attrition" to reduce the public service workforce by 12000, saying Labor’s spending cuts would see 14,500 job losses flow through the system in the next four years.
Public Service Commissioner Stephen Sedgwick said on Monday the relationship between resignations and redundancies was to be expected in times of downsizing.
"Historically, those two are inversely related," he said.
"There was a bit of a tick-up in the resignation until about 2008. The global financial crisis might have changes people's view of the sense of leaving just yet."
Mr Sedgwick noted the higher levels of redundancies as government departments "restructured" to cope with spending cuts.
"You'll have seen over the last year or so that there has been a level of retrenchment across the public service as agencies have restructured their workforces," he said.
"As some of the initiatives that were introduced at the time of the global financial crisis, in response to that crisis, have been unveiled and different programs have come on board.
"You can see from the data, that resignations have been coming down and retrenchments have been reasonably healthy.
"That's not unusual when you have the added overlay of downsizing, remember the peak [in employment numbers] was 2012 so we've started to reduce already and we will continue to do so for some years."
Overall, women make up most of the APS – 57.5 per cent of its workforce – but only four in 10 of the senior executive service.
However, Mr Sedgwick noted this compared very favourably with the private sector: women comprise only 16.4 per cent of board members in ASX 200 companies.
with Markus Mannheim
