Creating a Perfomance Culture?: Performance-Based Pay in the Australian Public Service

The paper provides a critical analysis of the operation of performance-based pay in the Australian Public Service (APS) from 1992 to 1996 and questions the desire by the Federal Coalition Government for 'further experimentation' with such managerial incentives. The paper argues that the performance agreements underpinning performance-based pay were unable to adequately measure the performance of senior officers undertaking policy work, while the appraisal reviews of these agreements failed, on-the-whole, to increase performance feedback between supervisors, and senior officers.