Finally, a lot of private sector organisations have in the last couple of weeks been providing support and support services to employees that may have been personally impacted by the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the defence in Gaza or by antisemitism or the rallies that have gone on. Has the APS offered services to APS employees?
Senator HUME: Yes, please. Finally, a lot of private sector organisations have in the last couple of weeks been providing support and support services to employees that may have been personally impacted by the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the defence in Gaza or by antisemitism or the rallies that have gone on. Has the APS offered services to APS employees? Are any supports available? If they have, how is that information being communicated to APS staff?
Ms Talbot : We haven’t provided any specific support to APSC staff. I’m not aware of what support other departments may have provided. I would say, in keeping with usual practice in the APS when there might be events that might have a particular significant impact on a group of employees, the expectation would be that the chief people officers be thinking about reminding staff about the employee assistance program and other services that are available to guide and support people.
Senator HUME: I know there were significant supports offered after the referendum. I’m assuming, because you do a lot of work on the diversity of your workplace, that you would notice that there were employees that were of Jewish faith or employees that were of Muslim faith. Has there been no outreach to those employees in the face of what’s been quite a traumatic couple of weeks?
Ms Talbot : I would need to take on notice whether there was specific support provided to particular agencies. It’s important to note that sometimes we’re relying here on managers to actually know the people that they are managing and to personally make connection and provide support. We don’t actually ask departments to advise us of what particular support they might be providing for particular examples of where, perhaps, a group of employees might be impacted.
Dr de Brouwer : The informal feedback was, at least initially, that we didn’t have a significant increase in employee requests for support around the Israel-Hamas issues. It wasn’t arising in the workplace. Even if it is a big issue for many people, we couldn’t see it appearing in the early data that we were getting on this issue in the APS workforce. There may be more particular bits occurring in some workplaces, but we did have a look, and the initial feedback was that we weren’t getting it back in the workplace employment support services.
Senator HUME: That’s interesting, because the feedback that we’re hearing is that it’s occurring an awful lot in some of the larger firms in the private sector. I would be astounded if those diversity characteristics weren’t reflected in the APS as well.
Dr Steele : Can I clarify a statement that I made earlier about the APS data release: it does provide a breakdown by agency for terminations to do with underperformance. That’s table 73. In addition, each year we ask agencies a few things through a survey. One of those is about the number of employees that are being underperformanced: the number of employees placed on a formal underperformance process, the number of underperformance processes finalised and the outcomes of those processes.
Senator HUME: Thank you.
CHAIR: We will break for afternoon tea.