This chart highlights just how extreme Australia’s bureaucracy has actually become. According to the ABS, as of mid-2024, around 1 in 9 Australians works in the public sector. That makes us the most bureaucrat-heavy nation in the world per capita. We are even worse than Israel, France, or the UK.
This means that a disproportionate share of our productive labor is absorbed into regulation, compliance, and paperwork, rather than innovation, entrepreneurship, or value creation. Instead of making our lives easier, Australians are paying more in taxes for overlapping departments, compliance bottlenecks, and slow service delivery.
This is a textbook case of a bloated government that exists to perpetuate itself rather than to serve the people.
