my hostility towards the environment

In fact, there is considerable evidence that performance pay does not deliver what it claims to but can often have destructive effects. This evidence, some of which was cited by Leigh Sales on the ABC's Lateline last night when interviewing Chris Bowen, is in governance and management literature all too often ignored by education experts.

Advocates of performance pay tend to draw uncritically on the considerable Human Resource literature propounding its benefits, but this is based on problematic assessments combined with a priori assertions about how (monetary) 'incentives' generate better performance. Human motivations at work and around professionalism are considerably complex and generally better mobilised around intrinsics, rather than the crudest of extrinsic motivators - money - even assuming that generally flawed management systems manage to allocate it fairly.

Indeed, it is not just teacher unionists who act in perceived professional and industrial self interest. The pro performance pay literature is all too often linked to the HR profession's own interests in expanding the use of HR professionals to construct and service ever more complex pay and performance systems. Despite these problems, the literature advocating performance pay has been drawn on in a range of fields, education being one, as those grappling with complex problems of control, responsiveness and accountability search for simple clear management solutions.

In my experience, working as a representative of public sector scientists in the 1990s, the enthusiasm for performance pay proposals at that time (which fortunately came to nought) came almost exclusively from managers either concerned they were out of step with private sector practices, or genuinely feeling it was unfair that they could not 'reward' their best performers with serious money, with a small number of individuals who constructed their roles in a competitive frame also feeling frustrated at the inequity of being treated the same as marginal, lazy or poorly performing colleagues. Against that, most scientists feared the consequences of structuring the workplace even more around competition for money, but this time individualising it, rather than doing it around projects. In profit making organisations, performance pay can function to some degree as a merit-based form of profit sharing. Given limited funds available for salaries, performance pay in the public sector almost inevitably becomes a zero sum game, based on a redistribution of salary dollars upwards. Management culture, power and structures tend to valorise the work of those in management roles in ways that create increasing divergence between pay at the bottom and the top of organisations.

It is no coincidence that the expansion of performance pay systems across the UK and US over the last 30 years has happened at the same time as the development of tproblems with excessive CEO pay. Performance pay is closely linked to the change in norms which has allowed these disparities to develop to every increasing degrees, along with associated social and economic costs.

Within organisations, the heightened stakes around performance review are as likely to diminish as to improve performance for many - for example by increasing risk averse behaviours. For those organisations or governments who successfully institute (impose) performance pay, of course, the revolution only ever succeeds. In complex organisations where there are constantly changing work processes, technology, organisational structures, markets, and so forth, it is impossible to construct a credible counter-factual situation with which to compare the results and actually demonstrate whether performance pay in and of itself has improved performance. To my way of thinking, the things performance pay says about human behaviour, and the norms it promotes have proven destructive at many levels, and there needs to be a much more nuanced debate about the merits of such systems than the 'magic bullet' representation that we so often receive.

However research suggests that dollars is not the right approach.

See this video for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

the two contenders for the lodge have got to their present positions by acting dishonourably; neither of them seem to care much about showing real leadership on issues like climate change and asylum seekers. i want to like julia gillard and be proud of having a female prime minister but i can't - i don't trust her to take close the gap as far as it needs to go, i don't trust her or the mad monk on asylum seekers or climate change. it's all too depressing.

the hope of 2007 has vanished and it's feeling a lot like 1975.