In 2020, Canberra’s largest IT shops have revealed the extent of their outsourcing, with new data placing renewed attention on the government's heavy reliance on IT contractors. In a series of documents Defence, Home Affairs and the Australian Taxation Office have exposed their external IT workforces.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/canberras-biggest-agencies-reveal-size-of-outsourced-it-workforce-553...
Now in 2023 the Audit of Employment within the Australian Public Service is released by the Department of Finance.
The audit examined the 2021-22 financial year, to analyse how the APS was outsourcing work, and what those arrangements were costing the budget. The conclusion was that roughly 54,000 full time-equivalent roles were being filled by external workers*, on top of the 144,000 staff directly employed in the APS. In other words, 27% of the APS workforce are not permanently employed public servants.
the exposure here is how much the IT contractors get paid too.
ACT senator David Pocock, Services Australia chief information and digital officer Charles McHardie revealed his agency had been paying around $1,300 per day for IT contractors at APS level 5/6 level, roughly the equivalent of $290,000 per annum.
In New Zealand the average salary for an IT worker in the government sector is still $72,000 but contractors do earn much more than that.
The Australian government want to wind this back which is a big task. In New Zealand they should do the same thing, and it would be a smaller task however tasks and service extend to Australian supplied services and so this task becomes more complicated.
Any IT departments outsourcing either side of the ditch needs to factor in this risk when operating their part of the business.
