Last month, the new Public Service Minister, Mathias Cormann, and the new Public Service Commissioner, Peter Woolcott, made speeches that are a step above others in recent years by public service ministers (remember Eric Abetz's risible phobia about another outbreak of wage inflation) and by several senior officials whose "contributions", loosely speaking, are best not remembered.

Woolcott observes that it's the quality of government and its related institutions that "sets apart the prosperity of countries". He points to the importance of public service values and warns that the kind of disruptive change often evident in the private sector "shouldn't be replicated in the APS", where, he says, there is a premium on managing change so that the public sector can provide "a sense of continuity and stability". Those who barrack for innovation in the public service for its own sake should heed the new commissioner's finger-wagging.

While Woolcott is wide of the mark in claiming that the overall rate of technological change is "unprecedented" (it's almost certainly slowed down in the last 30 to 40 years, and that's why productivity growth is sluggish), he is rightly alert to the significant advances in data collection and manipulation, communication and artificial intelligence, and the need for the public service to take advantage of these while protecting personal information.

Woolcott is also sound on the question of staff mobility, which some tend to see as a magic cure for all sorts of problems. He says mobility is not an unalloyed good and it needs to be targeted and carefully managed.

In an interview with The Canberra Times in late October, however, Woolcott puts his foot in it on workplace bargaining in the APS. He's a captive of government policy, of course, but when he says "we're now in the second round, I think people understand better the parameters", he is wrong on the first point and draws the wrong conclusion from the second.

The Keating government introduced devolved agency workplace bargaining in the early 1990s. That government abandoned it after a couple of rounds, and then the Howard government re-introduced it. It has since remained, with minor variations, for far too many rounds – 10 or so. The thing is that "people" have long understood the "parameters" all too well and have been increasingly agitated by them. They know that a policy requiring remuneration improvements to be dependent on productivity increases that can't be measured in public sector organisations is a dishonest sham. They know that the policy implies that one person's pay increase too often depends on the sacrifice of another's job. They know that trading off different aspects of pay and conditions has nothing to do with productivity improvement. And they know that giving up a condition like leave, which has a constant value, for a pay increase, which will be eroded by inflation, is a mug's game.

Woolcott says he backs the policy and "he and the Coalition believed it was working". There is absolutely no evidence to support that belief. Indeed, while the policy, since the 1990s, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars more in transaction costs than the viable alternative, it's likely that productivity has gone backwards. If Woolcott has evidence to the contrary, let him bring it forth. He'll be a magician if he can, because no one has yet been able to show that the policy has done anything to increase the units of output per hour worked in the APS.

Woolcott consoles himself with the thought that pay rises in the public service have been "in line with the private sector and 'in the range' of state governments". That's not logically relevant to determining rates in the Commonwealth. The critical point is that the actual levels of remuneration are in a reasonably competitive position on an occupational category basis with those in related outside labour markets. A policy that pretends to base remuneration on unmeasurable internal productivity gains cannot ensure a reasonably competitive market position – it will only hit the mark accidentally and is more likely to under or overshoot. No comfort can be drawn from vague approximations of trends in remuneration increases in other organisations.

It is imperative that the Thodey review addresses remuneration policy, for it is currently the most critical personnel management problem. It should familiarise itself with the relevant literature, most notably the Priestley royal commission report in Britain, and recommend that remuneration in the public service be fixed on an occupational category basis using comparisons with levels paid by other employers for comparable work. That is to say, remuneration bargaining should be recentralised and made uniform across public service agencies. That will be a bugger of a job but it must be done if the recruitment system is to be effective and if the integrity of classification structures is to be restored.

Next, let's consider Professor Glyn Davis, a member of the Thodey review, who turns up in a podcast with Professor Helen Sullivan from the ANU's Crawford school of public policy. Davis starts by saying a federal public service review he was associated with (which the Mandarin website identified as the 1983 Reid exercise) resulted in "no change whatsoever". That is untrue. The Reid recommendations were treated seriously by the Hawke government, especially public service minister John Dawkins, and by the then Public Service Board. If Davis were to refresh himself on the historical record he would find that John Reid's recommendations 3(a), 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 out of a total of 32 recommendations were acted upon. Some of these recommendations were of no great moment but others were. To say there was "no change whatsoever" as a consequence of the Reid report is wrong and insulting to those who prepared it and those involved in dealing with it.

Anyway, after this belly flop, Davis recovers and goes on to make some good points about the need for proper balance between change and maintaining what should remain constant, using new technology effectively, learning from the lessons of experience, the use of statutory authorities to reduce unproductive political influence in some government activities, in the process taking a well-judged swipe at the discredited Uhrig report on statutory agencies, and so on.

His fellow podcaster, Sullivan, doesn't do so well. When asked about the main change she'd like to see as a result of the Thodey review, she says for the public service to be "appointing more people who don't look like public servants". Of all the things that have been said about the Thodey review, this must be one of the silliest, even if Sullivan is bringing folk into the Crawford School who "don't look" like academics.

What do public servants look like? What is it about the appearance and other characteristics of clerical officers, trades people, research scientists, policy boffins, technical officers, engineers, frontline counter staff, etc in the public service that distinguishes them from their counterparts elsewhere? What would anyone responsible for recruitment do with Sullivan's suggestion? Well, nothing if they had any sense.

Sullivan would appear to be an adherent to the school of thought that believes diversity should be used as a recruitment technique rather than as a performance indicator. She seems to imply that, in some mystical way, more diverse workforces are more productive; that need not necessarily be so. It makes eminent sense for recruitment to be tailored so that work groups have a proper balance of skills to do the jobs required. It makes much less sense, however, to try to achieve diversity on the basis of gender, ethnicity, educational qualifications, occupational background and so on for its own sake.

If there is an inexplicable lack of diversity in a work group, the first step should be to seek to eliminate any bias in selection procedures. Governments inflicted huge inefficiencies on the public service by refusing, until 1966, to appoint married women. In that line, the Thodey review should consider abolishing the current Australian citizenship requirement for appointment as it has nothing intrinsically to do with merit and is almost certainly blocking many worthy potential appointees. The point is that rather than seeking to appoint people "who don't look like public servants", an indeterminate prerequisite that essentially has nothing to do with merit, there should be constant attempts to eliminate factors in recruitment that are irrelevant to judgments about how well people can do the work.

But to return to Davis, when talking about the ethical behaviour of public servants, he gives the impression they're not subject to the kinds of post-separation employment restrictions that now apply to politicians. In fact, there are rules that are supposed to govern the avoidance of conflicts of interest when public servants resign and take up employment elsewhere, most notably in the private sector. Davis might be reassured that his misapprehension is one he has in common with the Treasury.

On July 12, Treasury secretary John Fraser announced he was resigning. He left the department on July 31. On August 8, the AMP announced that Fraser had been appointed as a non-executive director to its board.

While there's no doubt Fraser is as pure as the driven snow, there is a legitimate question that, if he had been involved as Treasury secretary in considering and advising on possible changes to regulation of the finance sector in the light of the banking royal commission, his new appointment with AMP should have been considered in accordance with the Public Service Commission's guide Values and code of conduct in practice, which has specific advice on managing conflicts of interest upon leaving the APS.

The guide provides that "no later than the point at which an agency head is inclined to accept an offer [of outside employment], they should inform the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Public Service Commissioner and the minister about their intentions and any conflict of interest arising as a result. They should also outline steps they are taking to mitigate the risks."

When the Treasury was asked if Fraser's case had been considered under the post-separation employment provisions, it said: "Post-separation employment restrictions apply where certain former public officials take up lobbying positions under the lobbying register arrangements ... The restriction does not apply to Mr Fraser in relation to his appointment to the board of AMP as he is not required to register as a lobbyist under this definition."

When it was pointed out that the post-separation advice was separate and distinct from lobbying restrictions, the Treasury said: "We have nothing further to add."

In 1979, the committee of inquiry concerning public duty and private interest (the Bowen committee) provided a report (one of the finest of its kind), which, among other things, recommended procedures to govern post-separation employment. These procedures were adopted and for many years worked effectively. It would seem, however, that, over time, they've been watered down and may now be being widely ignored. The Treasury seems to be unaware of them. If he's concerned about such matters, Davis should arm himself with the Bowen report and see that the Thodey review brings back the effective post-separation employment arrangements it recommended.

On a more general point, the Thodey review's cause would be better advanced if contributors to discussions on things it should have on its plate could stick more closely to facts, verifiable history and the truth, and give less weight to beliefs, unreliable memories and fantasies. That shouldn't be too much to expect.

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