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........

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