Monday, April 13, 2015

Making it up as she goes along?

I just noticed Judith Sloan making a comment in a Catallaxy thread that didn't sound right:


Could that line about Tasmania be true?

In 2013, the Premier was claiming 27,000 public servants, but the person who wrote this post said that if you add in employment in Tasmanian government owned bodies, it's more like 33,000.   Then someone in comments points to a 2010 report which said this:
New figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday show 40,900 Tasmanians were employed by the State Government in June, more than 17 per cent of the entire state workforce.
The wages bill for state public servants also leapt by nearly 19 per cent in the past year, gobbling up 53 per cent of the state’s limited Budget in salaries.
The State Government now provides more than one in six of all jobs in Tasmania, compared to an average of one in eight jobs being state government-reliant across the rest of Australia.
But when all public servants over three tiers of government federal, state and local government are taken into account more than one in five workers are employed by a government of some kind in Tasmania, compared to one in eight nationally.
And, by the way, this report from Tasmanian Treasury in February this year says there are about 241,000 employed workers in the State.

Seems to me that for Judith's claim to be correct, there would need to be at least 3 times more public servants there than there actually are.

Quite the gaff from an economist who is routinely rudely dismissive of all economics commentators she disagrees with. 

Update:  more facts and figures on Tasmanian workforce here.  Seems to me that, even if you were talking full time employees (about 145- 150,000), and also treating every public servant  as such, there is still no way her quip could be true.

I am failing to see how the mistake could even have been made...

1 comment:

Not Trampis said...

Sloan makes it up as she goes. She is as mad as Kates and has as much credibility.