This account of three agencies with low union presence and an agency with a more significant union presence illustrates the contradictions faced by a government that wished to pursue its overall policy agenda while espousing an industrial relations policy that provides for a significant degree of managerial autonomy. In DoFA, DFAT and the PSMPC, the government’s managerial agents were able to implement a comprehensive performance-related pay system and marginalise unions in the agreement-making process. On the other hand, in the Department of Defence and Centrelink much less progress was made in implementing the government’s agenda.

The public service unions could not impose a template across the APS, although they could modify the impact of management agendas in particular agencies where they had both presence and organisational capacity on the ground. If nothing else, this reinforced the arguments of the proponents of delegate activism that ‘union organisation and bargaining capacity, rather than management style, are decisive elements in maintaining and extending the union membership base’^[106] and, as a consequence, a capacity for effective bargaining. Indeed, the newly elected National Secretary of the CPSU, Stephen Jones, told the governing Council of the union in May 2006 that:

The legitimacy of the government’s industrial relations policy lies in its espousal of creating organisational environments where employers and employees negotiate arrangements that suit the particularities of the organisation. In the APS, however, the government is the ultimate employer: it cannot be indifferent to the outcomes achieved in particular agencies. Moreover, as the financial guardian of the nation it must be mindful of the costs of its own employees. Government control of budgets places considerable constraint on the capacity of any agency to offer generous remuneration. In the end, wage increases contained in agency agreements must fit within the overall budget provision. In the current environment, the government is insisting that any collective agreements be based on statements of principles, rather than setting out detailed entitlements. Their availability of entitlements is likely to be even more at the discretion of management than it has been in the past.^[108]

On matters of employment conditions, the government clearly attempted to constrain the capacity of its agents to negotiate arrangements that fell outside its parameters. Even so, there was a degree of diversity in the performance-based remuneration arrangements from agency to agency, reflecting, in part, both management preference and union organisational capacity. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable sameness about the words used in many APS agreements, although there is clearly some diversity in specific implementation within any given agency.^[109] While there may be some similarity in employment conditions across agencies, a degree of dispersion in salary rates has emerged after nearly ten years of the system’s operation. In July 2006, at the middle range classification APS 6 (or equivalent) the dispersion was between $55,612 and $58,584 at the minimum point and between $63,110 and $67,214 at the highest point in the classification.^[110]

The APS is not the monolith that it may have been when a service-wide employment framework prevailed. On the other hand, it would be misleading to conclude that the APS employment arrangements have been radically altered in the direction of a series of quasi-independent agencies. In the end, public service departments and agencies are instruments of government. The government’s ‘loose-tight’ model of employment arrangements in the APS is tighter in some and looser in others: how loose and how tight is both a product of management preference and union organisational capacity. In the existing bargaining environment management has been endowed with more ‘choices ’albeit within tighter parameters set by government, while the CPSU and other public unions face even more challenges to their capacity to organise their members and to preserve their employment conditions.