Australian Public Service Wage Comparison

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:

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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

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?

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Data sources:

• PBS Stats
• ABS Causes of Death 2008

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.