Forget the 'disruption' fad, why not just 'better' government and public service?

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This was published 6 years ago

Forget the 'disruption' fad, why not just 'better' government and public service?

By Jack Waterford
Updated

Martin Parkinson, chief commissar of the Australian Public Service, can scarcely walk around the corner these days without mentioning, usually two or three times, the word "disruption". It's not the first time he has become given to repeating sloganistic words over and over again. But he means it, I think, helpfully, rather than as some sort of explanation or excuse for the fact that the government is finding it more difficult to make things work, and that the bureaucracy seems no more able to connect or be effective than do the politicians it serves.

"Disruption" is the in word for suggesting we are living in a period of unprecedented technological change; change of a pace and a scale never been known before in history. That's true, I suppose, though I could imagine that an Aboriginal Australian may think that 1788 around Sydney compared. What's less clear is whether disruption is a symptom or a cause of the political or the administrative malaise, whether senior public servants have any particular insight into the challenges or the opportunities disruption provides, and whether anything important or permanent has yet, or will, much change in the foreseeable future.

Martin Parkinson, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Martin Parkinson, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.Credit: Rohan Thomson

It is not an unimportant question, not least in an administration struggling with constant reorganisation and change under different management mantras, long before the word "disruption" was adopted. Some look at the future to reimagine a public administration they think will be innovative, agile and nimble enough to cope with the new social, economic and technological environment. Others are as focused on the past. And not because they are reactionary, or resistant to proper change, but because they see that a good many of the current and likely future problems of effective government come from brash public service innovators fiddling unwisely with well-established checks and balances, rather than from situations never previously encountered.

A good example of this is some of the supposed disasters of public administration in recent years – whether the so-called pink batts affair, the school halls affair, the management of the national broadband network in delivering internet technology, VET fee help, ongoing and worsening catastrophes in the management of Indigenous affairs (and from within Parkinson's Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet), Centrelink's robo-debt, spectacular mismanagement of contracts and waste in immigration, and umpteen procurement and outsourcing disasters across many departments in recent years.

H. C. 'Nugget' Coombs presides over the royal commission into government administration.

H. C. 'Nugget' Coombs presides over the royal commission into government administration.Credit: National Archives of Australia (M2153, 20/1)

Some of these involved the use of new technology but all were classic problems of management and administration, generally reflecting poor leadership and poor management. They involved failures to follow process, impatience with principles of fair dealings with all players, failures of documentation, want of planning, and want of systems of review and improvement. In almost all cases, people who came from central agencies and were involved in the conception and birth of disastrous and "innovative" programs were agile and nimble enough to be well out of the picture once the music stopped. Afterward, when it's time to bury the dead and shoot the wounded, central-agency leaders re-emerge from their shell holes to blame the lack of a risk-taking culture, public service timidity and red tape for all of the problems. And prattle about accountability – if only always for others, and then only for juniors.

Parkinson has been as enthusiastic as any about flaying cautious and risk-averse public servants. Perhaps because of the criticism about the disconnect between this culture of blame and the apparent immunity from criticism of leaders such as himself, he tried honey rather than gall. I was one of his critics in the past, and it would be churlish now to chide him for distributing praise instead of criticism. But there are some who think that 2017 did not see much in public administration to be complacent about. As witness, for example, some of the achievements Parkinson mentioned in his year-end speech to the Institute of Public Administration.

"The Commonwealth government, and by consequence the APS, is doing more than at any period since perhaps World War II," he said. "We're delivering major infrastructure, like the NBN, inland rail, the western Sydney airport, while planning for Snowy 2.0, the largest pumped-hydro scheme in the southern hemisphere. We're starting to build a sovereign national defence industry, which includes the largest naval recapitalisation since the second World War.

"And we're rolling out the NDIS, one of the most ambitious social reforms in decades, while developing significant, data-driven reforms with the objective of delivering more targeted, tailored and efficient services to Australians in education, health and welfare, and beyond. [I think that, here, he means robo-debt, the war on suspected scroungers, and the BasicsCard.]

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"We've just delivered the first foreign policy white paper in 14 years, a true whole-of-government effort, and are supporting the government to strengthen national security and pursue Australia's interests overseas. We've rolled out new reforms in Indigenous affairs – like the Indigenous procurement policy, which has exceeded all expectations.

"We continue to support the government on important questions of constitutional law – for example, constitutional recognition of the First Australians [!] and the question of dual citizenship raised by section 44. [!]

"But let me make a particular mention of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which has had some ups and downs in the last 18 months. If the census was a concern, that needs to be set against the consummate job delivering the Australian marriage law postal survey. The high participation rate in that survey was an extraordinary thing, and is a credit to the ABS.

"I am immensely proud of the work you do. Public service is a vocation, and I am gratified to lead an organisation dedicated to making Australia a better place for each and every citizen. The government, and the Australian public, are fortunate to be served by such a reliable, dedicated, diverse and motivated group."

The Coombs report still stands up well to modern criticism.

There was no mention of the state of the economy, about which the Treasury is unaccountably bullish, or the government's success with creating jobs, but perhaps that owes more to politicians than the APS.

No doubt Parkinson needs to be judicious in his choice of which great government achievements must be celebrated. But it says something that the NBN is at the top of his list, or that he can number among the APS achievements the collapse of a movement towards constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians, or the quality advice received by government over the dual-citizenship debacle. Perhaps he was remembering the confidence with which the Prime Minister informed the world of what the High Court would decide on the matter. Who knows? What we do know is that digital disruption had nothing to do with whatever went wrong.

It's true that we can't blame Parkinson, his department, or the APS at large if the Prime Minister, or the ministry generally, had a terrible year, virtually devoid of achievement, a sense of direction or anything much other than frantic efforts to catch up with events. Prime ministers of all stripes, and ministers, get all sorts of good advice from professional and disinterested public servants, and we are not usually told whether the latest announcement follows departmental recommendation or is a product of the political system, including the minder system.

What does, however, seem to be clear is that neither the Prime Minister's political office nor his department seemed able to protect the Prime Minister from charges of being in drift, of being in thrall to political colleagues able to arrange his assassination at a minute's notice, and of being a mere hostage to events. One of the functions of PM&C is supposed to be developing a whole-of-government perspective in policy development, and the capacity to coordinate other agencies so everyone rows in the same direction, if each in her own lane. It's true that this is difficult when ministers are fractious, suspicious of each other, given to spiteful leaking, or have become distracted by opinion polls and leadership speculation. But then again, managers must manage with what they have.

More than 40 years ago, the Whitlam government began, and the Fraser government continued with, the Coombs royal commission into public administration. It was set up to deal with some new issues in public service management, including the view of many in Labor that the administration it inherited had become complacent and conservative as a result of 21 years of serving consecutive Coalition governments. It was a feeling that the service needed to be faster, more "responsive" and outcome-oriented, rather than hidebound and process-driven. It was also considering how Australia was becoming more one market, one economy and one nation, even in areas traditionally a matter for the states, such as health, education and social welfare. It was meeting as the APS was shifting away from data entry, to policy and program development in new areas, including Indigenous affairs, family law and in the compensation field. It was asking if there were better systems of administering grants to the states, to regional bodies. And whether there could be more coordination between agencies in the field. It looked closely at cooperation between state and federal public services.

The Coombs report still stands up well to modern criticism and review, even if not all of its recommendations were followed. But it helped spark a wave of reform, particularly during the Hawke government, with the reorganisation of agencies into mega-departments, new financial management rules and accountability systems, new accountability regimes, and forms of judicial and administrative review. More controversially, there were changes to public service tenure, regimes of privatisation, and contracting in and out. The APS today – indeed the APS of 1996 – was quite different from the public service inherited by Whitlam in 1972.

It's time there was another such wide-ranging inquiry. Not so as to deal with technological disruption – though it's worth remembering that, when the Coomb commission reported, there was not a single personal computer or mobile telephone in Australia, and that the 1974 Darwin cyclone saw people in that city – even officials – unable to communicate with the rest of Australia for more than a week.

By today's standards, the minder and ministerial office system scarcely existed, although there were already critics, such as John Stone, complaining of prime ministerial advisers, such as John Hewson and David Kemp, as "meretricious players". There were political advisers, even spin doctors, but only a fraction of those today, and with only a fraction of the power or capacity to freeze out the public service. Ideas of ministerial accountability and responsibility are quite different, having evolved as prime ministers have sought to avoid old principles. We had fewer senior officials who were openly chosen for being "one of us". There was not a new head of PM&C every time there was a new prime minister.

By contrast, politicians and public servants must now be much more frank about conflicts of interest, even if people on both sides of politics then would be absolutely scandalised by the modern revolving-door system by which politicians, military officers and senior public servants move freely into lobbying, and into positions in businesses with which they had dealings while in office.

One shouldn't get one's hopes up. Alternative parties of government are comfortable with existing arrangements; it's the public, and good public service, which is being let down. But politicians should be more interested, if only because they suffer, too, from a changing environment in which well-conceived interventions fail to meet expectations, expertise has been allowed to wither, and policy development is outsourced, often to groups lacking detachment, professionalism or a concept of public interest.

We don't need an inquiry simply to expose the government, or some particular agency, for some mishap or malfeasance. There's room for that, including the reopened idea of a federal ICAC. This one should focus on what works and what doesn't. How professionalism and leadership is fostered, and boldness and openness to new ideas encouraged. How we adapt the public service for 2025, rather than continue with one designed for 1985.

The modern tendency is to have an inquiry only if it can flay a past administration for political mistakes (an Abbott precedent the Coalition will probably soon regret), to buy time and provide cover, or to underline the impotence of the prime minister, and of his reasoning, when opportunists on his own side see the advantage of jumping into bed with the opposition. After a week in which there was a report from a "good" inquiry – into institutional abuse of children – it may be good to wonder whether there is any mood for better government, rather than its disruption.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com

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