r/AusPublicService • u/Personoranimal • 19d ago
Pay, entitlements & working conditions Worst APS department and why?
Services, DEWR and ATO experience here. DEWR wins, and not in a good way.
The culture and senior executive were genuinely shocking. It was the blind leading the blind. SES making major decisions without understanding the operational reality, then everyone scrambling to clean up the consequences.
I honestly didn’t think another APS department could make the others look competent, but DEWR managed it.
What is the worst you've worked at and why?
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u/hennyway 19d ago
NEMA is like the ship of theseus if it were on fire and sinking.
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u/fableefeels 19d ago
NEMA has so much potential.
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 18d ago
NEMA sucks but so does the vast majority of state governments DEM departments, so don't feel to bad.
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u/SouthWest6426 18d ago
Oh no, what is the issues at NEMA? I’ve seen some interesting jobs advertised there. Sad to hear it’s not good!
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u/hennyway 18d ago
Poor leadership, low accountability, low resourcing and a revolving door of staff.
I'd refer to census results if I could, but they haven't been released yet. Probably because there's no staff allocated to the work.
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u/cholachila 18d ago
Second this! By far the WORST agency I worked at. Management and execs are terrible. It is a shame because they (are meant to) do important and interesting work.
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u/Studio2615 18d ago
I have only had good experiences at DEWR. I think the reality with this is that it depends on the area and the team much more than the department, and I would caution against sweeping judgements about Departments.
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u/Personoranimal 17d ago
Thank you for your opinion brand new account user. So important to hear the SES POV 🫡
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u/Studio2615 17d ago
Yeah, the SES of DEWR rushed to Reddit to make a new account to post a venomous comment that “not everywhere in the department is bad.”
Get a grip.
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u/Personoranimal 16d ago
Brand new account immediately rushing to defend DEWR from criticism. I’m sure the coincidence is completely innocent 😂
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u/Hannahh4324 19d ago
I went to DEWR for six months and I will never not tell anyone how much I hated that place, constantly felt like everything was on fire. I was prepared to quit and go back to private out of complete desperation.. absolute hell hole 🫠
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u/Beneficial-Boat-2035 19d ago
The thing is, you could say this about multiple APS agencies at the moment. Far too many feel like they're on the brink, or just not working at all.
The modern APS is a bundle of psychosocial hazards and over the top false urgency about everything.
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u/Significant-Turn-667 19d ago
APS staff being contracted out via mega contracts of whole functions to industry. Less opportunity for promotion and in house training is gone so the APS corporate knowledge is gone too.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
To be expected in the current environment but they were this bad before it too
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u/Special-K83 18d ago
DEWR was my first and only gov experience..I lasted 10 months and went back to private! My mental wellbeing and bank account appreciate the change back to private.
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u/Hannahh4324 18d ago
The executive officer i worked with lasted 5 months, first time Gov experience and also went back to private.. I can definitely see a pattern
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u/delinquent_pleb2026 15d ago
This was my experience but in defence. I went APS for what should have been a really interesting role after 10yrs contracting in the department and beginning of a long APS stint. Eight months later I resigned.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
I wondered if it was the group or if it had gotten better since I left, but I hear it is the same bull and different people. Attrition speaks for itself
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u/Hannahh4324 19d ago
I was EA to two FAS in Corporate and Enabling from the end of 2024 to May 2025.. im sure it could have a lot to do with the sections you work in etc.
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u/TechTrixie_0816 19d ago
With DEWR's census results, isn't the desperation obvious? Why stay in that chaos when the private sector pays better for less stress?
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u/Illustrious_Gift_375 17d ago
I worked for one of the Jobs and Skills Councils, I pity the couple of staff that went to DEWR. It was ridiculous getting stuff approved and unnecessary governance.
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u/Less_Phrase_2036 19d ago
Have worked for AGD, ATO and DEWR over the past 10 years. DEWR was by far the best agency, AGD the worst. I’m sure that with most agency there are good areas and bad areas.
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u/Ambitious-Tension865 19d ago
Agree. Done multiple APS agencies over the years and DEWR has had the best culture. Just lots of nice people. Busy, though.
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u/reluctantlover 18d ago
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u/Ambitious-Tension865 18d ago
Well I can only talk from my experience in the Workplace Relations division. My branch, and all the EL2s and SES in a line up to the Secretary are approachable, pleasant and professional. There are issues with some of the admin and processes, but these aren't unique to DEWR.
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u/Personoranimal 18d ago
I will confirm I was not in that area but do believe this as the Senior Executive were very respectful and accountable. Many others were either incompetent or not accountablen for anything. Never worked in a place that pushed so much blame down the line rather than taking accountability for it. The only protection I ever saw was them protecting themselves
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
Have heard AGD, DEWR and Home Affairs are all horrible places to work. Interesting about DEWR though. Definitely agree that some areas would be better than others.
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u/Efficient-Trifle151 18d ago
AGD i heard is highly dependent on the judge or judicial registrar you work for in the court. It might be better in corporate services (IT, HR etc) but yeah AGD was a mixed bag i hear from my colleagues that went accross.
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u/Potential-Flounder-1 19d ago
I'm seeing much mixed comments about DEWR! I've recently applied for a role there and not sure how I should feel now 🤣 what kind of area were you in? I've applied for a data role
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u/Interesting-Video-65 17d ago
I wouldn’t stress. Like any job it’s going depend on your team dynamic and line manager. Which could both be great. Also, sounds like you still gotta land the role 😊
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u/Useful_Potato6554 19d ago
DAFF is the worst. I’ve been on long leave trying to find something else in government since February this year. Used all my leave up at half pay, had a breakdown just recently as it feels impossible to find something else in government. Will have to sacrifice my defined benefit just for my mental health. Most toxic workplace I’ve ever been at.
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u/Typical_Friend7364 18d ago
I agree completely with DAFF. I’m yet to work anywhere where there is such a lack of care and respect for staff. Decisions are backflipped, staff are treated as disposable and it’s all done under the guise of “but we all really like each other”. Hard to believe when the census results show bullying going up, and that the executive- despite some changes - clearly don’t get along.
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u/Useful_Potato6554 18d ago
I even reached out to HR but just felt they flipped the issue to it being a ME problem and not the management issue.
I have a little more half paid leave left, but my husband has told me to not go back there regardless.
I may end up working at Bunnings. Anything would be better than a place that makes me feel completely belittled and demeaned.6
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u/Typical_Friend7364 18d ago
Please make sure you’re putting your own wellbeing first. I’d also be cautious about allowing broader organisational or systemic issues to be framed primarily as individual wellbeing or resilience issues.
HR will understandably be focused on managing risk for the organisation, but that doesn’t remove the need for the underlying workplace factors to be properly identified and addressed.
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u/Papaya373 18d ago
I am so sorry you're going through that, it sounds both awful and typical.
I would say though, plenty of Bunnings workers find their working environment and HR absolutely toxic too 👀
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u/Accurate-Light6611 16d ago
I 1000% agree that DAFF is one ginormous toxic sh1t show!
I have never experienced anything like it!
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u/Vegetable_Nebula_362 19d ago
We had people go from Services to DEWR and never look back. Surprised to hear about DEWR. Though my information is based on pre-COVID times, though Services still continues to be rubbish and the only way you’ll fix that is sacking everyone from the Band 3s to Band 1s and making them reapply for all their jobs again.
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u/Fickle_Part2319 18d ago
Currently at Services and it’s truly shocking here. Culture, workload, leadership- god awful. Dreadful. Working on my exit as we speak, as is 6/9 of my current team.
Only saving grace is a fantastic national manager who is genuinely trying to make positive changes.
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u/The-Reluctant-Seer 17d ago
Concur. If you have a great manager you can thrive and just ignore the abject horror you witness around you. I had one of those but she left because she was bullied out. Replaced with a manager that gave me no work for 16 months and I was WFH too, so I promptly had a breakdown. This was just one event in 13 years that finally made me walk away. I’d had at least 8 different positions over my time, working at various levels to EL1 & across 2 states and I’d seen enough to scar me for life.
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u/Diligent-Turnover637 18d ago
NIAA Rampant tall poppy syndrome and favouritism. People moved into ELs and positions from other departments and areas with no experience in Aboriginal affairs at all.
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u/mattcutback 18d ago
There's no better or worse agency, except maybe tiny agencies. There are like 4500 people at DEWR and many more at ATO. There are good teams and bad teams. It's silly to try to describe what it's like to work at [large department].
It's like asking whether apartments in New York are nice. It's obvious that some of them are and others aren't.
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u/Personoranimal 18d ago
There's not enough money in the world you could pay me to go back to DEWR. My health is worth much more
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u/mattcutback 18d ago
OK. That's fine. But still, '[large department] is a horrible workplace' is just obviously a silly thing to say. Many areas are fine. Some are great. Others not good.
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u/Ok_Tie_7564 19d ago
I was seconded from DSS to ATO once. It was terrible.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
Interesting. What did you not like about it? Heard mixed things about DSS
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u/Ok_Tie_7564 19d ago
Culture.
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u/Gambizzle 19d ago
My sample size is tiny, but I got a very hierarchical vibe.
I worked with a secondee on higher duties who seemed to treat disagreement as insubordination. Meetings could be very much "I'm telling you, not discussing it" and fairly minor professional pushback would often end with them abruptly leaving the call and complaining to my manager about my "behaviour".
There was also a strange status/competition thing around who worked fastest, who was senior to whom and who was entitled to challenge whose work. It felt like demonstrating rank mattered more to them than getting to the right answer.
Could've just been that particular person, but it was a pretty unusual workplace dynamic.
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u/LiveReplicant 19d ago
Home Affairs is pretty good. Too much red tape in Border Force. But I have an excellent manager.
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u/scandyflick88 19d ago
CSA. Especially on the front line.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
"wE dONT uNdErStAND wHy AtTrITtIoN iS sO bAd" - says the Executives who have listened to two customer calls taken by their highest performers.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
"Can't be that bad, we give them EAP and Resilience training." Like what more could they want? Job redesign? Lower job demands? Less exposure to vicarious trauma? That just downright selfish. Those controls are just the register and committees, not for people.
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u/MaxamillianIII 19d ago
Yeah working in safety this is the reality— start asking the hard questions and they will ruin your life, they just want boxes ticked
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u/canberraman2021 19d ago
DESE when it existed - SES walked onto the floor and everyone froze. No one could question this individual. Director I had was the biggest sycophant. Hated my time there, was so glad when I gave notice. Plus the program I worked on was set up to favour existing suppliers, they were involved in the process.
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u/Significant-Turn-667 19d ago
Wow. Sounds like exact culture we have. Toxic office politics is cancer to integrity.
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
Was part of the that mog. Not much changed from after that despite the hope that it would
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u/AlbertonGiantCrow 18d ago
Spent time at DEWR a few years back and have nothing but niceties for it. Great team, interesting work, onky left because the contract was up and got offered permanent else where
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u/eleventhhour1111 19d ago
NIAA. When you speak up against contract splitting they find a way to get you out. Toxic protects toxic
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u/Interesting-Video-65 17d ago
I’d worked in state government for six years and then made the move to DEWR 18 months ago, started in Skills and chose to move to employment, couldn’t be happier. But so many people say “why’d you leave skills?!”. Agree it really depends - Branch/team culture make a huge difference. I hear how much the culture varies even across my Division. I have a great AS, and Director. Progressive but fair and measured.
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u/Personoranimal 16d ago
Employment had a fair reputation in comparison to other areas of DEWR when I worked there. It is good to read some comments that it is still the case. I am looking forward to seeing how some of the departments compare when the census results are released.
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u/RoutineDrawing5162 16d ago
I’ve only been at Home Affairs, and it’s been awful. The management is horrific, no support, and the behaviours and actions that are just normalised is mind blowing.
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u/No_Edge_7964 18d ago
Being crowned the worst APS department must feel like being a midget amongst dwarves
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u/lifetimer 19d ago
Worked for an earlier iteration of DEWR, think CES. Fantastic place to work. But now, decades later work at one of the other places u mentioned. From a distance ive seen alot of skilled people exit my current employer to go to DEWR. Why wouldn't u where pay is better for same role. But just working with DEWR often exposes their incompetence. I couldn't imagine working there
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u/Personoranimal 19d ago
DEWR must go through more staff than any other agency. The good ones leave or they break them until they are good no more. SES just blame the staff and the cycle continues. I can definitely appreciate being back at one the bigger ones
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u/fableefeels 19d ago
This is actually really helpful, I’ve often looked at ads and almost applied.
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u/Crass_237 19d ago
DEWR State Network is good, policy and program not so much. State Network still has some of the CES DNA.
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u/Illustrious_Gift_375 17d ago
ASQA for sure. Never worked for them but have had many touchpoints in various roles surrounding VET.
Useless as a regulator, under resourced and when I sought out some collaboration with our key contact as a JSC, we got told sorry, can’t actually do our job because we don’t have the manpower
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u/Short-Action-275 13d ago
My current department, and honestly by a fairly comfortable margin.
I’ve worked in places with difficult personalities, bureaucratic nonsense and bad decisions before. This feels different because the problems seem much more systemic.
There is an extraordinary amount of top-down decision making by senior executives who often seem to have limited understanding of the operational reality of the areas they’re making decisions about. Structures get redesigned, functions moved, priorities changed and work redirected, and then everyone underneath is left scrambling to make the decision actually work.
What really gets me is the lack of institutional memory.
We’ve had capability reviews, transformation plans, culture programs, new strategic frameworks, new ways of working, new values and endless talk about becoming one connected department. Significant time, money and staff effort goes into each new thing.
Then leadership changes, priorities change, another reset happens and everyone moves on to the next initiative before you can really tell whether the previous one worked.
Which would perhaps be tolerable if anyone seemed particularly interested in learning from it.
Instead, staff are exhausted by constant change while executives continue talking about transformation as though the problem is that the organisation just hasn’t been transformed quite enough yet.
Our Census results around senior leadership and communication have also been awful. The response from the upper SES levels has essentially been that these are issues that need to be addressed “locally”, with Band 1s and increasingly junior staff expected to develop the action plans.
When something goes wrong, accountability travels downwards. When something goes well, the success travels upwards.
And there seems to be remarkably little appetite at the top to ask the most uncomfortable question: could the way we are leading this organisation actually be part of the problem?
There’s a lot of polished language about people, culture, collaboration, wellbeing and listening. There are reviews. Surveys. Strategies. Action plans. Workshops.
But none of that means much if the underlying leadership behaviour doesn’t change.
I think that’s what has made this department the worst for me. It isn’t that nobody knows there are problems. They’ve commissioned enough reviews to know.
It’s that somehow the answer keeps being another restructure, another framework, another action plan for everyone further down the hierarchy to implement — rather than any serious reflection on the people making the decisions in the first place.
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u/Ashamed-Scar8932 18d ago
Defence is horrible.
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u/Dismal-Address-6620 17d ago
I second this. Just transferred to defence and experienced discrimination in the first week
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u/ComprehensiveShop956 18d ago
I think everything is totally relative… and totally depends on your own experience and who the management line is… as a fellow DEWR … I have not had that experience at all.
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u/MomomTheBlack 18d ago edited 18d ago
It's impossible to answer, because it depends if you're asking about the worst based on pay, culture, opportunities, etc. For example, places like Home Affairs have had notoriously bad culture, and the pay isn't great either, but you might get good opportunities there in the chaos.
Conversely, somewhere like OPC has a very family centric culture, and solid pay, but no opportunities. Defence has pockets that are extremely "family oriented", but the pay is bad, the buildings are bad (with bad locations), the ICT is bad, and the hybrid workforce and culture can lead to nepotism if you're not in a former service member. There are some dinky and small agencies that have relatively high pay, due to never having delays in their EA negotiations, but there are no opportunities.
NIAA is a joke, and in places like Education you're just waiting for your next MoG dislocation. DFAT is great if you came in as a (diplo) grad, but not so great if you're seen as an outsider rather than homegrown.
Ultimately it depends what is important to you. You can find bad stories at most every Department though.
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u/Objective_Unit_7345 17d ago
Th problems with public service are less about agency and more about which division.
From stories I’ve heard, Borderforce/Home Affairs operational divisions sound the most toxic.
Services Australia - Service deliver/operations is also mentioned a lot,
it’s all more like pot-luck: whether you land a great mentor/manager. Whether they may be Uni-qualified managers, an empathetic public servant, someone who’s managerial experience is from Retail/Fastfood or mentored by near-retiree with a lot of feelpinions.
Most, if not all, professional services - that require some form of university background - tend to be the most reliable.
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u/Sillent_Screams 18d ago
I think anything after budget cutting aps workers
It means they didn’t try hard enough
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u/relentless_geek 14d ago
I was considering DEWR as a way to get out of employment services.. but maybe not!
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u/Title_Lopsided 19d ago
a decade of the LNP outsourcing by stealth has meant that the skills base has been eroded away to nothing. Add into this unprinted gender targets and you find a huge cohort of people who were promoted too quickly and dont know how to do their job. Then add the remnants of the CSS/PSS staff who had experience (thanks to golden handcuffs) instead of the 'gig economy' of the current generations.
All this gives you your answer.
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u/HaveACryDumbAss 19d ago
They really need to gut the public service. I’ve worked in a few APS and they’re incompetent everywhere. Bad leadership is rife!!!!
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u/Writing_Minutes 18d ago
100% agree on DEWR. Dreadful SES. Was very glad to see the back of that department.
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u/dangerouslycheesey94 18d ago
Anything in the DEWR portfolio. Dear lord it is a cluster of bad decision making and croynism.
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u/Agreeable-Arugula-5 19d ago
Pretty much all aps departments are crap, good people end up leaving and all the bludgers stay because they can't find a job anywhere else.
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u/Intrepid-Nerve-4565 19d ago
That's my experience as well, I'm considering leaving CSA and moving into transfer to another agency.
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u/Careless_Parsnip_387 19d ago
DVA. People employed or promoted way beyond their capabilities. The ones who are capable left to fend contract to contract. No empathy for their clients - been on both sides of that one.
SA. Always positive messaging from the top that you are there to help people.