More than 2000 federal public servants have volunteered to join a new reserve of staff available for redeployment to agencies in need of support for critical tasks.
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Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott announced the figure on Friday while also flagging census results showing fewer bureaucrats reported seeing corruption in 2020.
Senior bureaucrats last year announced the public service would create a permanent "surge reserve", signalling more public servants could be redeployed after thousands were seconded to help Services Australia amid the COVID-19 economic downturn.
Mr Woolcott said public servants had shown willingness to join the surge reserve.
Speaking at an APS event at Old Parliament House, Mr Woolcott said the permanent surge reserve would draw on the lessons from 2020, when more than 2000 bureaucrats from across the public service were redeployed to Services Australia.
The agency was inundated with JobSeeker claims and processed 1.3 million in 55 days, a volume it would normally process in two and a half years.
At the peak, Services Australia employees and deployed volunteers processed more than 53,000 claims in a day.
The mass redeployments are said to have helped overturn traditional silo mentalities inside the public service and accelerate reforms outlined in the 2019 Thodey review of the bureaucracy encouraging agencies work as "one APS".
Nearly 9000 federal public servants were also redeployed to critical tasks within their own agencies during the coronavirus crisis last year.
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Mr Woolcott on Friday said the latest public service census results showed 85 per cent of respondents said they believed strongly in the purpose and objectives of the APS.
APS employees also said they had witnessed less corruption in 2020 than in 2019 - dropping from 4.4 per cent to 3.5 per cent.
"These figures have always been relatively low but our focus on these matters must stay sharp," Mr Woolcott said.
More than 90 per cent of census survey respondents said they understood how their role contributed to achieving an outcome for the Australian public.
Almost half said their productivity improved, and 65 per cent of employees said their team had used the pandemic to improve the way it worked, Mr Woolcott said.