The ACT is banking on being able to ease the workload concerns of public sector staff to get its enterprise agreements over the line without needing to find more money to offer bigger pay rises.
Public Service Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the government believed there were issues other than just the proposed pay increases that drove staff to vote down an offer earlier this month.
"The bottom line is that the budget is in deficit. Our ... fiscal situation is challenging, and so we don't have the opportunity to just come back and offer more," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
"We do need to undertake further negotiation with the unions to be really clear about what the priorities are, recognising we've heard clearly that current cost-of-living pressures are the priority and the risk-sharing approach that we had put forward was not something that people necessarily had confidence in."
Ms Stephen-Smith said further claims were being considered by the government.
"Obviously everyone's not going to get everything that they want, that's the nature of enterprise agreement negotiations," she said.
Public sector staff were offered top-up payments linked to inflation spikes as part of an offer designed to de-escalate the threat of industrial action after almost a year of bargaining talks.
But the government's own inflation estimates showed the government was betting on not having to hand over the extra cash to its staff.
The ACT government's revised offer, sent to staff on July 20, maintained 3 per cent a year pay rises for three years that unions had complained sat below inflation, but included a $600 cost-of-living payment if Canberra's annual inflation hit 3.5 per cent in the second and third years of the deal.
If inflation hit 4 per cent, workers stood to receive $1000.
The Community and Public Sector Union campaigned against the offer and 63 per cent of staff who voted rejected the proposal.
On Monday, Ms Stephen-Smith said the government had not considered any additional or alternative offer for the rejected administrative agreement.
"We do have a couple of unions who've said that they would like to see their agreements go to ballot with the current pay offer," she told The Canberra Times.
"We're working through what that would look like in terms of how any potential change to the core [conditions] would then flow through to those agreements, so there's still some process detail to work through in terms of where we go next, whether we do go to ballot for a couple of other agreements, whether we wait a little bit and go back to ballot for the admin agreement."
Ms Stephen-Smith said further talks with unions would focus on genuine staff priorities and she would meet with the teachers' union after a work stoppage on Thursday that will force public schools to open late.
"We certainly know that workloads and safe staffing are a real priority across a lot of our employment areas and that's something that effectively needs to be balanced with the pay offer in terms of really understanding what is it that drove a no vote," she said.
"We recognise it's current cost of living but we think there's also other things that are underlying the response of staff to that offer."
Ms Stephen-Smith said she recognised teachers and school leaders were looking for assurances about the process and timing of efforts to offer more central support to under-pressure schools.
"We are committed to ensuring that we are reducing the splitting and collapsing of classes, getting more visibility of information about what is occurring in schools and why that is occurring, [and] ensuring that there can be additional central support for schools to backfill the teachers who are away," she said.
