Meanwhile, the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the nominal head of the public service, Michael Thawley, so far seems to have had virtually nothing to say to his 150,000 subjects, many of whom may be bemused by his mystic silence.

Anyway, it's good Lloyd has now come out, as it were. Staff in the service should know about the personnel management directions he and the Public Service Commission want to take. They can't be expected to fall into line if they are unsure about where they're supposed to be going.

There's a good deal in Lloyd's speeches for public servants to chew on. For example, he sees workforce planning, managing talent and improving performance management as areas with "the most potential to add value". He's interested in improving staff mobility, including by reviving the former Public Service Board's interchange program between the public service and the private sector. And he's keen for staff to have access to the best of technology.

Those looking for rhetorical uplift will not find it in Lloyd's speeches. That's a good thing, because personnel management language is too often confused by Churchillian flourishes that reduce it to babbling cliche. If Lloyd's dour style might not have done much for the Battle of Britain, it's appropriate to his present responsibilities.

On the other hand, some of what Lloyd has had to say might cause eyebrows to rise in discerning quarters.

Management, he says, "is about using your authority, maintaining order, solving technical problems and being accountable" – a limited, static and rule-bound conception if ever there was one. What about setting directions, specifying desired results, gathering resources and seeing that they work together effectively, learning from experience and making adjustments as you go along, and so on?

Lloyd also reckons that "Australia rates poorly in world rankings measuring regulatory burden". Well, the US Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal don't agree with that. Indeed, they rank Australia near to the top on things like business, labour, trade, fiscal, investment, monetary freedom and like measures.

With a narrow concept of management and what look to be misperceptions about relative regulatory burdens in Australia in his back pocket, Lloyd has ventured views on aspects of personnel, some of which are not reassuring.

For example, he says: "There are a whole range of areas in the public service that require less fettered access to flexible, casual, term and contract employment." He won't specify what these areas are but the commission says the current rules for non-ongoing employment can be "too prescriptive" and that these constraints should be reduced "to support a more agile [could the person who brought this ridiculous word into contemporary management parlance please own up?] and responsive APS workforce".

Well, more non-ongoing employment for its own sake could achieve the very opposite of these noble aims. In many cases, it takes people between six to 18 months to become fully proficient in their jobs – they need time to grow into them. In that period, they typically will move with less agility and responsiveness than more experienced staff. Throw in the significant extra recruitment and training costs inevitably associated with the greater churn of non-ongoing employment and the lower-grade merit tests for their engagement, and you can quickly end up with a less efficient, productive and effective public service.

At present, about 12 per cent of Australian Public Service staff are non-ongoing. While the rules about their recruitment may be too restrictive (although the commission doesn't appear to have made out a case that they are), the proportion of non-ongoing staff should be determined by the nature of the work to be done. That is, they should be used for temporary or fixed-period work but, if work is expected to be ongoing, staff should be employed on that basis. That's the way you'll get an "agile", responsive and well-motivated public service.

Lloyd is also concerned about the efficiency and timeliness of the recruitment (and by implication promotion) of ongoing staff. He says it takes on average 12 weeks for a decision to be made. That is too long but it has little or nothing to do with current procedures and everything to do with an inability or unwillingness of recruiters to get on with it. Putting aside the need for high-level security clearances in what should be a small number of cases, there's no procedural reason why recruitment and promotion decisions cannot be finalised within four to five weeks of vacancies being notified. That's quick enough.

While there's not much on the record, Lloyd has been reported as being no great fan of the use of selection criteria and he appears, as part of an effort to streamline recruitment procedures, to want to remove or lessen their place in the scheme of things. The cause has been taken up by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which has said "no more selection criteria"; it will now concentrate on knowledge, experience and qualifications, as shown in CVs.

These are bad moves. They will make merit selection more risky and, as with any increase in non-ongoing employment for its own sake, will adversely affect efficiency, productivity and effectiveness.

Let's take it slowly:

It's hard to believe Lloyd and Thawley could be so silly. Overnight, they're ditching decades of painstaking work that's sought to elevate, through the use of consistently applied selection criteria, performance information to its proper place in staff selection.

The Lloyd-Thawley line risks repeating the worst of the public service's staff selection history, where many people were ruled in or out mainly because of their previous work history, a habit that led to staff inbreeding and cloning. PM&C seems to want to attract a wider range of job applicants but is adopting a procedure with the potential to make that much less likely.

Perhaps it might not be as bad as that, because while the department says it's getting rid of selection criteria, a recent advertisement for policy advisers contains 12 of them – yes, 12. That's absurd, as it will be impossible for applicants to deal with these criteria in the one-page "pitch" for jobs the department now requires.

In some instances, selection criteria may be being misused or misunderstood, but that's no reason to chuck them out. That's a recipe for less-structured assessments in which the comparisons of individuals' merits will be inordinately difficult. Rather, ways should be found to allow selection criteria to work as they should and provide high-quality, behavioural information to ensure that the most is made of merit.

Meanwhile, the commissioner has done a good deal of fretting about the vexed question of "underperforming" staff. Individual cases of underperformance can, of course, be troublesome and often costly. The overall extent of the problem, however, is unclear and the commission doesn't appear to have undertaken a concerted, systematic study of it. It's likely that the extent of whingeing about poor performers is inversely related to their incidence.

However that may be, Lloyd is right to draw attention to the problem and to see if he can find ways of mitigating it. But he doesn't help the cause when he says, seemingly with approval, that "some companies actively manage out the bottom 10 per cent of performers every year". Let's be quite precise about that: it's bullshit.

Many medium and larger organisations do have annual staff turnover rates of between 5 and 15 per cent. Often higher-performing staff leave while the less able remain. To add a further 10 per cent to these turnover rates would, for most organisations, be somewhere between very damaging to catastrophic. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how many companies with a continuing 25 per cent annual turnover – i.e. one that would effectively replace their entire staff every four years – could keep their heads above water.

The problem of underperforming staff should be approached soberly, not via reckless measures like booting out 10 per cent of lower-level contributors every year.

In some cases, the causes of the underperformance come down to poor training or supervision, inadequate resources or a person being in the wrong job. Such problems can usually be solved without resort to dismissals. Where problems are more intrinsically the responsibility of individuals, and if they can't be resolved, then those who are not up to the mark should be moved through the exit door in the nicest way possible. However, the fundamental problem is not procedural; it is that this is unpleasant and often nasty work from which people naturally shy away. What's needed is for those involved to be given all necessary help to get through it.

Let's end on a gloomy note: the government's concessions on pay bargaining. As is well known, agencies have now been permitted to offer a 6 per cent increase over three years rather than 4.5 per cent.

Because it is impossible, as the Productivity Commission has reminded us, to measure productivity in the public sector, this concession can't be justified in terms of the policy that requires all remuneration improvements to be 100 per cent offset by productivity gains; all those agencies claiming to have done so are pulling our legs. At least the Tax Office has been honest enough to admit it doesn't know if its productivity measures will be sufficient to fund its pay offer.

Figures are being plucked from a hat. There's no rationale. How could there be when the policy is based on a pack of lies? Staff, taxpayers and Uncle Tom Cobley are all being deceived. There's no way of knowing if 6 per cent is too much or too little.

So what has happened to cause a move from 4.5 per cent to 6 per cent? Well, unions and staff have exerted what Lloyd rightly observes is minimal industrial pressure, and the government has caved in. That is, the staff and union pressure has been rewarded. The lesson for unions and staff is obvious: keep up the pressure, the more the better, because, in the absence of a rational remuneration policy that would permit increases to be justified, you never know what might pop out the other end.

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash reckons public servants are not living in the "real world". She has a public service remuneration policy that leaves her in cloud cuckoo land.

Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au