Public service ends base grade recruitment

By Steve Rogers

CANBERRA -- From September, the Australian Public Service is to end recruitment of regularly paid base grade (or ASO1) officers. These are to be replaced by “trainees”. This has been advised in letters from the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) to the personnel sections of departments across the public service.

One such letter, dated June 14, stated: “As a result of the Government's recent White Paper on Employment, there will be significant changes in the Australian Public Service which will have immediate effect on the recruitment of Office Trainees and ASO1s.

“As of September 1994, all permanent ASO1s recruited into the Australian Public Service will commence as trainees and will be required to undertake competency based training and assessment.

The letter goes on to describe requirements under “Competency Based Training”. These include compulsory training if so assessed, and a demonstration of “competence on-the-job.”

The current experience of office trainees has been atrocious. In one Canberra case, a young woman lost her job after a single punctuation error in an assignment caused her to fail the training component of her course.

Currently, prospective public servants sit a regular entrance exam. With high unemployment, many thousands of people typically sit each exam. Of these only a handful currently gain employment as ASO1s. The new arrangements will ensure that in order to get a job, each person who actually gets accepted will then have constant surveillance for an extended period of time. Pay rates are expected to be substantially lower over this period.

The changes gives the lie to the claim that traineeships will create extra jobs. The public service has simply replaced the fully paid category of ASO1 with a partly paid category of trainee.

Unfortunately, national leaders of the Community and Public Sector Union, including PSU group national secretary Wendy Caird, have been enthusiastic supporters of the new trainee scheme. The union has yet to comment on its proposed implementation.

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