The bureaucracy bug

Covid was the excuse to grow the public service

There's nothing quite like a good crisis to expand the size of government. In 1939, on the eve of World War 2, there were 68,000 Commonwealth public servants. A decade later, their ranks had almost tripled in size to 182,000[1].

The sombre lesson of history is that there is no such thing as a temporary increase in government spending, any more than anyon…