PM&C head Terry Moran has heralded a return to more centralised Public Service as part of an effort to strengthen the APS and its capacity for high-quality advice.
In a major speech to the Institute of Public Administration last week, Moran, who has deliberately kept a lower profile than his Howard-era predecessors, said the Public Service needed to overcome “critical weaknesses” as part his goal of the APS becoming the world’s best public service.
He also reiterated the imperative of serving the Government of the day, deliberately echoing the views of his immediate predecessor, Peter Shergold. In pointed words that reflect sensitivities arising from the Godwin Grech business, Moran said:
Ministers carry accountability for policy decisions. Our role is to assist them make good decisions, not launch alternative policy proposals into the public domain. We do not therefore advise the Opposition, backbench members of the Parliament or the media. The public service only serves the Parliament in specified and limited ways.
Moran’s point is an important one, and addressed an ongoing, and widespread, misapprehension about the role of the Public Service. There persists, even amongst some bureaucrats, and particularly in the press, a view that the Public Service serves the public interest. Michelle Grattan expressed this when she criticised Moran on the weekend for ignoring the Public Service’s “obligations to the public”.
While this sounds good, it is a dangerously anti-democractic notion. As Moran noted, elected officials have obligations to the public, not bureaucrats, who are merely appointed officials and never face voters. Public servants are no better at understanding what “the public interest” is than anyone else. That is the role of the politicians they serve, who stand or fall by whether the public thinks they are doing a good job. The Public Service serves the public interest by serving the Government of the day as well as possible; if that Government performs poorly, it is up to the public to throw them out.
That doesn’t mean that public servants don’t act ethically and with propriety, or blow the whistle when others fail to do so and there is no recourse within the system. But it does mean accepting, providing good advice on and faithfully implementing the agenda of the Government of the day.
Having tackled that issue, Moran identified four areas of concern to him, and flagged what will be a major change in direction from that of the last two decades. He believes that there is too much “silo” thinking in the APS and wants greater cross-portfolio policy development, and a great emphasis on a single APS, with links to other bureaucracies and to the private sector.
The APS still generates too much policy within single departments and agencies to address challenges that span a range of departments and agencies. We need to shake up our old structures and practices by creating policy teams within and across departments — both to increase the competition of ideas within the APS, and to ensure we have the right people for the right problem. We are one-APS, and in my view we need to bring more meaning to that statement. The APS is not a collection of separate institutions. It is a mutually reinforcing and cohesive whole.
Moran specifically spoke about enabling greater mobility across departments, with no sacrifice of conditions or salary.
This represents a major reversal of two decades of decentralisation in the APS, which began under the Keating Government and accelerated under Howard. While certain core conditions remained service-wide, over two decades significant salary differentials emerged between agencies for the same level of and type of work.
As with most management fashions, the pendulum was always destined to swing back toward more centralisation, and it began in the Howard Government’s last term, with a switch to whole-of-Government policy coordination on indigenous affairs. However, it accelerated substantially with Lindsay Tanner’s adoption of the Gershon Report on IT procurement, which emphasised the significant savings possible from centralised procurement.
Moran has previously made known his concern that policy development capacity was uneven across the APS, a legacy — although he has never said this outright – of the Howard Government’s lack of interest in genuine policy debate. His primary means of remedying this is to strengthen the quality of the next generation of APS leaders, targeting Divisions Heads and Deputy Secretaries. And Moran has recently launched a major cross-departmental recruitment process – in fact it advertised in the papers last weekend —to lure non-APS executives into the Public service at the SES Band 2 level, which is one level below Deputy Secretary.
With senior SES ranks almost invariably filled by APS promotees or transfers of senior state bureaucrats, the new process represents a major effort to attract external skills from the corporate and academic sectors, men and women who may be weak on APS process but are likely to bring a more outcomes-focussed attitude to policy development and delivery.
Moran has also separately said he wants consultants to provide not merely a specialist advisory resource for the bureaucracy but to enable a transfer of private sector skills while they’re working with public servants.
Moran flagged in the speech that he wants an end to the growing division between policy development and policy delivery agencies, which has meant policy areas (invariably in Canberra) have lost touch with issues arising in service delivery out in Australian communities. “If that means deputy secretaries spend a week staffing the Centrelink claims desk in Murray Bridge, or perhaps in a Medicare office,” he said, “we will all benefit from their experiences.” But that process should also involve input from public servants involved in service delivery.
Moran wants a more “citizen-focussed” public service, discussing more personalised, mobile services potentially delivered through cross-portfolio delivery mechanisms in smaller communities. He also lamented certain critical skill shortages in the APS, and in particularly complained about a failure to recruit “creative thinkers” in addition to more traditional weaknesses like financial skills.”Creative thinkers”, though, can look an awful lot like an indulgence when departmental budgets are under pressure, which they are now and will continue to be for some time. And many line areas in Canberra don’t take kindly to too much creativity.
The Moran Revolution is underway, but it may not be rapid.
Bernard – very idealistic indeed! – all very well if we had a Parliament where debate was not strangled by majoritarian [aka partisan executive] rule, a media able to FOI as standard tool in political journalism (think Sweden)……and shield laws to protect well-meaning whistleblowers.
Helen Ester
At last a crack in the Economic Rationalist edifice that was imposed on Australia by Hawke & Keating, then Keating and Beasley, then Howard & Costello and Now The Ruddster and Deputy Sherrif Gillard. The bankrupt idea that the Federal Public Service is better off being split into little competitive corporate silos, and the idea that 7 or so little Hitlers is better than 1 looks like it may have had its day. Whooppee.However the devil is in the detail and if I was a Public Servant, (which I’m glad I currently aren’t) I wouldn’t be popping the champagne corks just yet.
Does the world according to Moran mean that there will be APS wide bargaining(if so Halleluja) for all Federal Public Servants instead of the awful individual agency bargaining where each individual department ie Tax does their own thing which has resulted in pay inequalities from one department to the other. It also meant that the trogolodites
running sectors ie Centrelink were also doing Enterprise bargaining with the union and as a result tried it on and in some cases such as the recent Tax EBA were successful in cutting the conditions of its workers.
From a Public Servants point of view the restoration of agency wide bargaining
(ie that sets the pay and conditions of all Federal Public Servants)should result in the pay of workers & conditions in the same bands across different departments being the same,ie equal pay for equal work and the starting point should be that the department with the highest pay and best conditions should be the benchmark – otherwise some public servants pay & conditions may be worsened.
However given the decline of the CPSU – the union that covers Federal Public Servants whose power in the workplace has fallen so low that they lost a recent key EBA worker vote in the Tax department, one suspects that the ability of the union to actually peg pay and conditions for all public servants to the department that has the best pay & conditions may be problematic. The CPSU like many unions now is very reluctant to take stopwork action presumably because it may be illegal and more importantly may adversely affect the preselection plans of some of the officials who don’t want to get their hands dirty actually fighting for workers rights, one official named in Crikey recently as being rumoured to be trying to become the next member for Throsby is a case in point.
I will not believe it till I see it.
Written as a (state) public servant of more than 30 years.
Too many smaller mandarins have too much to lose.
Terry Moran is quoted as stating:
“The community perception . . . is that public servants have some duty to the public interest, something beyond, and greater than, the interests of the Government of the day, and where the public interest and the Government’s interests are perceived to conflict, public servants should speak out. This is a view encouraged by the media, which has a strong self-interest in public servants doing just that.”
I haven’t seen the full context of Terry’s remarks but am disturbed by the possible suggestion that public servants do not have ANY “duty to the public interest,. . . beyond . . the interests of the Government of the day”. As a former public servant who has advised elected governments at all levels of government in Australia, I always regarded the public servant ‘s overriding duty to the public interest as a necessary and difficult ethical responsibility of. I do not however regard going public as the preferred means of fulfilling that duty where the public interest and the Government’s interests are perceived by the public servant to be in serious conflict. The role of the media is in my view a distraction from the ethical issue.
A public servant might well have a view that, in a particular matter, the public interest and the Government’s interests are in conflict; that view could well be the result of informed consideration or of prejudice and poor judgement. The public servant at the centre of the Utegate affair seems to have been driven by interests other than the public’s.
Equally, a public servant might see the interests of the Government of the day as paramount, to the exclusion of any ethical responsibility to the public interest. The Senate Select Committee report on A Certain Maritime Incident in 2002 found that a “public service culture of responsiveness and perhaps over-responsiveness to the political needs of ministers, and deliberate deception motivated by political expedience”, were factors contributing to the false report that children were thrown overboard from a boat seeking asylum. It would seem that the public interest did not feature in that incident and there was not much evidence of Dr Shergold’s “frank, fearless and robust policy advice” as cited by Terry Moran.
The ethical responsibilities of a public servant where the public interest and the Government’s interests are perceived to conflict are probably best met at present by the clear (frank, fearless and robust) advice to the government of the day AND a preparedness to resign, a courageous step apparently not canvassed by Peter Shergold or Terry Moran. A better alternative would be the introduction of powerful whistleblower legislation which protects both the genuine whistleblower from government retribution and the responsible government from public service vengeance, and reinforces the overriding duty to the public interest as an ethical responsibility of the public servant.
Peter Johnstone
Bernard Keane and Terry Moran have obviously not visited New South Wales for a while. In NSW nobody acts in the public interest – not the NSW Government and its Opposition; not Local Government which has been hijacked by political parties; certainly not the public service which focuses on burying scandals and reputation management through media releases to the fourth estate. ICAC is so ineffective that it seems it will only investigate something as serious as organised crime.
How to fix it? Open up the government to scrutiny, depoliticise the public service so that it is able to give frank and fearless advice, and get rid of the corrupting influence of political donations from the big end of town.