While organisational goals were meant to cascade down the direct line between employers and employees, as discussed in Chapter 3, ‘soft’ HRM expected day-to-day work to be organised from the ‘bottom up’. ‘Soft’ HRM theorists envisaged committed, highly skilled employees with a capacity for teamwork and the flexibility to work out what needed to be done and to organise themselves to do it as well as it could be done—in return for ongoing high levels of job security, remuneration and skills investment. The new vision set out by the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in 2005, was as follows:

It may be that the public servants concerned would find it almost as difficult as casual observers to distinguish who was or was not a public servant. This is devolution taken to extremes, resulting in a workplace without a common history or culture, supporting only the most impersonal and operational of interactions. Its organising principle is neither organic nor bottom up, as envisaged by ‘soft’ HRM, but top down like ‘hard’ HRM, reliant to a significant extent on management-initiated contracts with casuals, contractors and consultants. Any differences between ongoing staff and the rest would not, apparently, reflect any differences in the nature of ‘the work they do’. This is not where ‘soft’ HRM was meant to be taking the APS—towards the Minister’s 1996 vision of ‘a quality job within a learning organisation, in which their creativity is actively sought [and they] have more autonomy over their work practices’.^[43] Did something happen, or was it always just spin?