Remember that reforms conducted in the name of NPM varied from country to country and that in Australia, as elsewhere, ‘the reform program shifted emphases according to political and administrative circumstances’.[44] A critical political circumstance relevant to HRM reforms in the public service was the Government’s ongoing industrial agenda. On this, DEWR’s guidance was very explicit:
The government expects that APS agencies will lead the way in utilising the flexibilities and opportunities for reform available under the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WR Act). The Policy Parameters allow APS agencies the flexibility to develop agreements that are tailored to their particular needs and circumstances and are exemplars of the government's workplace reforms.[45]
The Government presented its industrial agenda to its employees in the same way that it presented that agenda to the workforce generally: as a matter of improving productivity by fostering direct relations between employees and employers that would have the effect of aligning their interests. What the Government delivered in the APS as elsewhere was an increase in employer control that would facilitate such alignment by eliminating ‘third parties’ (such as unions and industrial tribunals) from the workplace and enhancing the flexibility with which workplace relations could be conducted. As the ATO case study considered above suggests, this program had the effect of ratcheting up management prerogative and the systems (considered in Chapters 3 and 4) that make its presence felt. Australian research into private sector management has shown that the Australian experience has not varied significantly from that in the UK: in general, as an organisation’s focus shifts from eliciting the commitment of workers to gaining control over them, ‘soft’ HRM practice hardens, although the rhetoric of ‘soft’ HRM tends to remain in place to ease the transition.[46] In addition to formal agreements and performance management arrangements, this emphasis can also be seen in the APS in the conduct of consultation processes more broadly. Evidence in the 2004–05 State of the Service Report suggests that while managerial prerogative and management systems were being strengthened, the predicted cultural change was lagging behind:
Time series data suggests that there has been a slight downward trend in employee data in a number of indicators that cluster around workplace relationships. Compared to 2003–04, public servants were somewhat less likely to feel that merit processes have been applied; less satisfied with the consultative mechanisms in their workplaces; less satisfied with their overall say in decisions that impacted on their work; and less likely to agree with most of the effectiveness indicators describing the impact of their agency’s performance pay system.
…[In particular] this year employees reported being significantly less satisfied that the meetings they attended provided a forum in which to contribute their views on issues that impact on their work and with the overall say they have in decisions impacting on their work.[47]
The Government ‘started from a fundamental proposition: namely that the industrial and staffing arrangements for the public service should be essentially the same as those of the private sector’,[48] and, like the private sector, it moved on to the (re)assertion of ‘management authority’. This involved a change in the psychological contract between employees, their employers, and, in the case of public servants, their ‘ultimate employer’, the Government.[49]
[44] Glyn Davis and R. A. W. Rhodes, ‘From Hierarchy to Contracts and Back Again: Reforming the Australian Public Service’, in Michael Keating, John Wanna and Patrick Weller (eds), Institutions on the Edge? Capacity for Governance (Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 2000), 76ff.
[45] Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, ‘APS—Supporting Guidance for the Workplace Relations Policy Parameters for Agreement Making in the Australian Public Service’ (June 2004), 4.
[46] Carol Gill, ‘Use of Hard and Soft Models of HRM to Illustrate the Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in Workforce Management’, RMIT School of Management Working Paper no. 99/13 (Nov. 1999), 41–2.
[47] Public Service Commissioner, 2004–05 State of the Service Report, 5, 178. Note that employee satisfaction in their overall say returned to 2003 levels in 2006 while responses relating to performance pay were somewhat more positive than those in 2005. See Australian Public Service Commission, 2005–06 State of the Service Employee Survey Results, 21, question 27, and 50, question 70.
[48] Reith, Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service, 5, cited above.
[49] For an extended discussion, see M. O’Donnell and J. Shields, ‘Performance Management and the Psychological Contract in the Australian Federal Public Sector’, Journal of Industrial Relations 44(3) (2002), 435–57.