APS Restructuring - Your Taxpayer Dollar at Work

To be fair to the APS, a lot of the restructures are driven by political reasons, either areas moved or legislation changing reporting requirements, or legislation changing priorities.

On the other hand, sometimes its just power games or to avoid someone higher up who has proven to be incompetent.

I reckon I work in the same federal agency as your partner.

I’m pretty sure removalists in Canberra have been solely employed on the basis of permanent restructuring. I know colleagues who were moved from one location to another, only to be moved back, to their original location, no less than 4 months after initally moving. And that’s not even taking into account the machinery changes of the last year.

Each move requires the hire of equipment, removalists and the time off work, and then time is lost when the staff have to set up their equipment etc on the first day in their new location .. so it really is a very tangible waste of money. A lot of it too.

Almost sounds like your MRS works where I do.

My area went through 3 restructures last year including 2 moves around the floor (one right before shutdown too). However we never moved floors in that time. I’ve also since transferred into another area, which is expecting to be restructured in a few weeks time. It’s a little too much.

Esp when in 2011 we also had 2 restructures including 1 floor move and 1 building relocation.

Wow how primitive, I didn’t know people still physically moved during re-orgs. My state department has re-orged countless times (the shortest time between them being six weeks) but no-one ever moves desks; you just change reporting arrangements and email signature blocks and keep on working.