Australian Public Policy Data Blog

Updated Interactive Graph: Public Service Wage Comparison

noreply@blogger.com (Tom McMahon) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:07:00 +0000

Colourful Sydney Racing Identity over at the Riot-ACT helpfully posted a link to a CPSU wage data PDF file that contains the top salary increment for every public service agency in the country.

After going through the ever painful process of getting data out of PDF tables I've extracted all that data out into a table. As an aside, my next post will include some tips on getting data out of PDF tables.

So now I have every public service department's wages in the graph below. Explore it to see how your department stacks up.

Interactive Graph: Exploring Public Service Salary Levels

Data:

You can find a copy of the data in spreadsheet from here:

http://bit.ly/cpsudata

Notes:

Unlike my first graph the CPSU data is for the top increment in each classification. I'm fairly sure that the CPSU chose the top increment as there is more variance between departments at this level. This hammers there point home about the difference in wages across the public service. I think it is slightly misleading as most people are not employed on the top increment, particularly if you are thinking about changing departments, or joining the public service.

Australian Public Service Wage Comparison

noreply@blogger.com (Tom McMahon) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:35:00 +0000

With the CPSU's recent announcement of a public service wide bargaining claim I thought I would examine pay levels of some of the big public service department's.

I chose to select the first salary point of four classification levels Graduate (APS3), APS5, APS6 and EL1. These classifications make up 66 per cent of the APS according to the APSC's most recent State of the Service Report.

Use the interactive graph below to see how the pay of your department stacks up:

Sources:
The individual departments' collective/enterprise agreements. You can find agreements through the Fair Work Australia Agreement Search

Notes:
I didn't include all Category A departments as I was having trouble finding some of the collective agreements. If there is a department I've missed that you'd like to see included in the interactive graph, post in the comments and I'll try to hunt it down.

Four Corners: Oxycodone abuse in Australia

noreply@blogger.com (Tom McMahon) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:40:00 +0000

Four Corners this week dealt with the topic of prescription drug addiction in Australia. As per usual with Four Corners, it was an interesting documentary and I recommend that you have a look. It will be available on iView for a couple of weeks at least.

The show included some alarming graphs showing a significant increase in the prescription of the synthetic opioid Oxycordone Hydrochloride in Australia over the last ten years. A pharmacist was quoted as saying that it is the most prescribed drug under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

I was interested in having a look at what data is available for PBS use rates and drug abuse, as well as having a play with Tableau which is a great data visualisation product.

Interestingly from the data that I examined the rate of narcotics related deaths has dropped, despite a massive increase in Oxycodone prescriptions. Why do you think this might be?

Data sources:

Notes:

I have been overly generous in assigning categories of death to Narcotics. If you know of more accurate public data, then let me know.