John Lloyd

John Lloyd

And thus perhaps the most eccentric appointment of the Tony Abbott era ends with a whimper following the announcement that John Lloyd will be stepping down as head of the Australian Public Service Commission. Lloyd is an industrial relations warrior and former Institute of Public Affairs ideologue, and most recently earned a stonking $670,000 a year to head what is basically the HR department of the public service. Job description: support the government’s efforts to cut public service pay, issue draconian attacks on free speech and, it seems, help your old mates at the IPA out with a bit of research.

Honestly, who can blame Lloyd for chatting with his IPA pals, griping about Penny Wong and doing his bit to help the IPA’s war on whatever their donors designate as a target? He must have been bored rigid. I’m a former public servant and even I have no idea what the 200-odd staff of the APSC actually do other than count other public servants, but I would have liked to be paid $670,000 a year to find out. Certainly it doesn’t have anything to do with improving the overall quality of the public service, which in terms of competence is at a nadir unseen in living memory. With only further estimates grillings, and counting his money, to look forward too, it’s understandable that he pulled the pin.

But the enduring mystery is why Lloyd was ever appointed to the role remains, unless it was a kind of thank-you from Tony Abbott for his years of loyal service in attacking the CFMEU when he headed the early, funny version of the Australian Building and Construction Commission — that’s the one that abducted and questioned people who might have been walking past a building site when something untoward happened, then threatened to jail them if they revealed what had been done to them, while deaths in the construction industry spiked. Still, can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, etc.

Lloyd will depart in two months; on current form, the serious question of whether he used taxpayer resources to help his IPA cobbers won’t even be close to being answered; various bureaucrats are still working out whether to even conduct an investigation. From the bureaucracy that gave us the epic Roman Quaedvlieg inquiry, now comes a new, months-long saga of the investigation into whether to have an investigation into Lloyd. If he was sent in to rid the APS of its risk-averse, process-obsessed ways, he was a clear failure.