The Commonwealth has offered APS employees 9 per cent over three years, but it has not shown whether that will leave public service pay competitive with comparable work outside government.
Negotiations are now well underway for a new pay and conditions deal for staff in the Australian Public Service (APS).
It’s a big deal too that will provide the backbone of personnel management for some 200,000 staff for the next three years.
The relatively new Public Service Commissioner, Jacqui Curtis, has brought in one of her former colleagues, Alison Stott, from the Tax Office to run the negotiations. That’s not a great vote of confidence in the condition of the organisation which Curtis now heads. She must have been disappointed to find that the Public Service Commission, the central personnel authority in the public service, was left without the capability to undertake one of its main responsibilities off its own bat.
Anyway, in recent weeks Stott has been running negotiations for a new public service-wide agreement on pay and conditions under the burden of a government remuneration policy that makes no sense. That policy is a mish-mash about ‘model employer’, ‘unified and capable’, ‘attraction and retention’, ‘fairness and equity’ and, of course, that reliable old standby ‘sustainability’, which as ever is expected to carry immense burdens when comprehensible explanations are not available.
In short, the policy does not provide a satisfactory basis upon which judgements about adjustments to pay and conditions can be made, still less justified to staff and taxpayers.
Rational, model employers who want to be able to recruit, retain and motivate staff try to set staff remuneration at competitive levels in relation to outside labour markets for comparable work. That consideration is absent from pay policy for Commonwealth public servants. It’s a significant burden for Stott to carry into her negotiations.
Yet while she’s been battling away against the tide, some progress may have been made in removing differences in conditions of employment that have been damaging personnel management. But unless the evening up is to the more generous standard this can be difficult, as was discovered when proposals for a common working week raised the ire of some who would have to put in a few minutes more a week. That is, in evening up pay and conditions, pressures to take the highest common denominator are inevitable.
On 13 October, Stott tabled the government offer on pay. Essentially, it was for a 9 per cent increase over three years. Surprise, it’s the same as has been reportedly offered to the Defence Forces. Yet while the details of the offer on pay have been explained, no justification has been provided for it.
In faint hope, the Public Service Commission was asked about the reasons and rationale for the 9 per cent and whether it was based on any comparisons with levels of remuneration in outside labour markets including state public services.
The commission said that the offer was “informed by a range of factors including but not limited to claims put forward by the bargaining parties, discussions and feedback from the bargaining room, feedback from the 2026 employment conditions survey, input from APS agencies, workforce needs across the public service, broader economic conditions and indicators, and affordability and the need for sustainable outcomes”.
That is to say, the 9 per cent is a figure plucked from the air without any consideration about how that will place public service remuneration in relation to the labour market. So there can be no assurance that levels of remuneration are too little and so imperil recruitment and retention, or are too much and so require staff with other employers to subsidise better remuneration than they have.
Mind you, it’s not as if this sort of nonsense is new. It’s consistent with habits that have gone on for far too long and any number of governments have been unwilling to snap out of it. Curtis and Stott are, to an extent, caught in a tradition that is not of their making and which is now likely to be sealed up for another three years. It’s to be hoped they will be able to use that time to reflect upon the bind they’re in and convince whatever government they’re serving in 2029 to do the right, proper and fair thing by departments, their staff, other employers and taxpayers, because the present policy and its expression lacks all integrity.
When it comes to the crudity of mere cash, the new public service pay and conditions deal is big beer. At this point it’s not easy to calculate the cost precisely, although there probably won’t be much change left out of $4 billion in the public service alone, not to mention the Defence Forces and other government agencies like the ABC, CSIRO and others.
Sure, public service remuneration needs to be adjusted, but when billions are being spent, taxpayers should be favoured with an explanation of the reasons for doing so that gets above generalised waffle about affordability, sustainability and feedback from the bargaining room, none of which provide the faintest assurance that their money is being well spent.
Model employer? When it comes to industrial relations bargaining and the adjustment of pay and conditions, the Commonwealth is more like a muddle-headed one.
Paddy Gourley is a superannuated Commonwealth public servant.