Devolution of the industrial framework for public service employment was meant to focus employees’ attention on the government’s goals for their agency and their own roles in enabling the agency to reach those goals. It localised power, making the agency head an employer and creating a direct line of sight between the manager and the managed. It was part of a broader system involving organisational performance targets and individual performance management and assessment that was intended to increase productivity and responsiveness.

In practice, however, APS agency heads have never had all of the powers of a private sector employer over their human resources. They are in fact ‘responsible for ensuring that all of their agency agreements are consistent with the … policy requirements’ articulated by DEWR, requirements which in turn ‘promote the Government's interests as the ultimate employer of APS employees’.^[13] Before the WorkChoices amendments, DEWR’s policy parameters for agreement making in the APS focused on the Government's interests in shifting the locus of control to exclude third parties from the workplace and in supporting individualised bargaining. They recommended:

DEWR would vet all agency agreements and where it identified deficiencies from the point of view of the Government’s interests, agency heads were required to draw those concerns to the attention of their minister when seeking ministerial approval of any agreements they may have reached. As early as 1998 it had been observed that ‘the current watchdog role of the Department of Workplace Relations and Small Business (DWR&SB) appears to be a highly interventionist one that is obviously attempting to ensure high degrees of procedural, if not substantive, uniformity across all federal government employment’.^[15] In theory, the DEWR parameters call for a shift in the locus of control from outside to inside the workplace. In practice, they represent yet another of the ‘brace of instruments for working the system strategically and at several levels’ described in Chapter 4, which have the effect of asserting vertical political control over the operations of devolved agencies.

From an HRM perspective, this leaves the locus of control for human resources vexed. The model calls for control to be established by management and internalised by employees. In fact, employees are presented with a compliance-based framework based on ‘the Government's interests as the ultimate employer’ transmitted to them through the agency head in the shape of an individual or collective agreement. The agency head’s interests (as the less-than-ultimate employer) are well down the pecking order, after the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations (also, usually, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service), the Secretary and relevant staff of DEWR, and the agency head’s own minister. It would appear that some things just cannot be devolved, and that as a consequence ‘[t]o some extent a command and control process has been reinvented but in a very new guise, one in which employees are expected to take control of their work and achieve outcomes, but what is achieved and how it is achieved is centrally determined and structurally imposed’.^[16] Employees are well aware of these arrangements and know also that when terms and conditions of employment are at issue the devolved framework applies only as long as it is consistent with a centralised locus of control.