Working with us

People

Jeremy Kamil, Senior Research Economist, Melbourne

[Jeremy speaking] The best part about working here is the people.

They're smart, they're fun, and they love to engage in in good economic debate. We work together and we can turn some good ideas into great ideas.

Visits

Sally Harvey, Senior Research Economist, Melbourne

[Sally speaking] The most rewarding part of my job is the visits that we do with people over the course of an inquiry or a study, having people generously contribute their views and experiences and hearing how policy affects their lives.

Policy

Lachlan O'Neil, Public Policy Analysis / Research Economist, Melbourne

[Lachlan speaking] Sometimes when you're working on one of these projects, you find out some really interesting or unexpected things.

For example, when I was working on the National School Reform Agreement Review, I was really surprised by the lack of publicly available data on students with disability.

This was a good project to work on because it's a really interesting area of public policy and we got to talk to quite a lot of different stakeholder groups and hear about what they want to see changed in schooling in Australia and I really enjoyed that experience.

Variety

Anna Law, Senior Research Economist, Canberra

[Anna speaking] I really enjoy the challenge of working out a new policy area every 12 to 18 months.

It's one of the only places that you get the time to be able to do in-depth research and analysis on the problem areas that are affecting the Australian economy and people.

[Smiling and laughing staff]

pc.gov.au/careers

Sara Collard, Inquiry/Research Manager, Melbourne

[Sara speaking] So there's a really diverse range of tasks that go into a project at the Commission.

At the start of the project, there'll be a lot of brainstorming and scoping and working together as a team to have a think about what are the key questions that we need to answer as a group to, to deliver a coherent set of findings and recommendations.

And then as we go on, there's a lot of analysis, so a lot of desktop research and gathering of evidence.

There's quantitative work, so there might be a modelling component depending on the type of questions that we're looking at and also a really big part of what we do at the Commission is Stakeholder engagements, talking to people, having meetings, roundtables, public hearings and and getting submissions from the public.

[Map of Australia with text appearing and disappearing] Stakeholders, meetings, roundtables, public hearings, submissions

[Sara continues] And then there's a big writing component because we deliver our findings and recommendations as a report to the government and to and to the public.

[Quick demonstration of someone clicking on a link on the Productivity Commission's website]

[Sara continues] So that's all part of our normal project work. But in addition to that, we have a lot of extracurricular activities in the office as well.

So we'll often have seminars where we bring in external speakers to talk about policy issues that are relevant to what we're looking at at the time.

And a lot of morning teas and lunches and happy hours and things like that, and also a lot of training and learning development opportunities.

[Smiling and laughing staff]

pc.gov.au/careers