I'll give you some of my thoughts on this, and members may want to pose other questions.
If we take the current size of the public service--we accept that, and that's subject to debate obviously--at the rate of retirements we have to have an inflow of about 8,500 to 9,000 people to maintain its current size. That is because we had a big expansion in the public service during the seventies, and those people are now the baby boomers, are now coming to retirement age, and retiring.
The public service has traditionally not had a high level of departures. The level of departures for all reasons, including being relieved of your duties, retirement, going to other jobs, has always run around 2%, less than 2% sometimes, and now we're seeing departures that are around 5%. For any private sector organization this is still extremely low. The public service is not used to that, so there's been a significant increase in departures.
We have an aging workforce. We have more departures than we've seen, and if we maintain the size, we have to bring people in. A number of issues arise from that. Obviously the people who are intending to leave at the end of their careers are at the senior levels. We bring them in at the bottom. So have we got the training and development to get people to the right place quickly enough? Big set of questions.
We also have a lot of interest in the public service, so I disagree with the comment that it's not attractive. When you have a million applications for 5,000 postings, a lot of people are interested. The real issue is have we got the right set of skills for the people we're looking for? This is where I think there is also a significant challenge. We have some areas of shortage, so we know what they are, but we also have developed some very bad habits in the public service.
Hiring people from casual employment into the indeterminate workforce, the permanent workforce, is not the best way to get talent. You have to be prepared to hire people directly into your permanent workforce. You don't bring them on as casual; you don't bring them on as terms, because you're not then going to get that pool of people. So a number of bad habits have been created. We have to bring in the numbers. We have to train them and we have to make sure we do the proper matching. So it is a set of challenges, given the size of the public service.