It's not just the PS selection criteria that needs a good kicking, but the whole culture.

Where else can the following happen: people of limited usefulness command the rarefied heights of the bureaucracy totally unmolested; people of talent always moved sideways like billowing smoke that hits the ceiling; money being inanely and enthusiastically spent on the latest operational or cultural fad; talkfests masquerading as important business; and salesmen posing as people of substance.

Welcome to the modern Public Service.

Congratulations to the auther for beginning to expose what has to be one of the most shameful apsects of the public service in Australia.

Shergold is having a lend of himself when he says that he is buoyed by the ability of the PS to select the best and the brightest, because that can only at best, be partly correct.

It hides the hideous consequences of what happens when they get it wrong, which is done with monotonous regularity.

People who are nothing more than corporate psychopaths are appointed to senior positions, where they then decimate their organisations by behaving in a manner that is totally inappropriate, and completely at odds with the prescious selection criteria anyway.

These psychopaths mouth all the right words at interview,their referees are all lined up, and they have all right degrees, but they personally have zero management ability, and zero interpersonal skills, and ONLY do things that enhance their own tenuous existence, and enormous egos. Naturally they invariably have all the right political connections to begin with.

If you want to check this out, one has to only start by looking at high turnover rates in organisations, that by their very nature should be keeping the best and brightest.Some have turnover rates as high as 18%. Suspected early deaths of people is also not uncommon.

But this is not likely to happen because it will mean that those responsible for putting them on their Nero like thrones will be shown to be wrong. Worse still there is great reluctance to have to remove someone, and have to pay out a contract.

Shergold might be a bit more credible if he said that he had instituted mechanisms whereby the destructive ego driven psychopaths had been detected, and weeded out. Something the current processes in both state and federal government dont do, and havnt done so for over 30 years.

No, I am not a victim of this type of behaviour -just an observer.