The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) in its recent report on the Housing Insulation Program (HIP) returned findings that were highly critical of the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA), but effectively absolved the minister, Peter Garrett of any blame.
On the face of it, this outcome sits oddly with reforms to the Public Service Act introduced in 1984 by the Hawke government, with the stated aim of involving ministers more directly in the management of their departments. The consequences of this and other reforms need to be understood in order to understand the behaviour that gave rise to the HIP imbroglio.
This amendment to the Public Service Act introduced into Commonwealth public administration a diffusion of responsibility between minister and secretary, and confusion about the roles and accountabilities of ministerial staff, the numbers and roles of whom were at the same time to be enlarged by a parallel reform — the Members of Parliament (Staff) Bill, which empowered ministers to engage their own staff and to have assistance in key projects from “people who share the government’s values and objectives”.
The next step towards the mess in which we now find ourselves was Paul Keating’s decision to convert department secretaries from permanent public officials to officers on limited-term contracts, which substantially weakened their capacity to deliver to governments the advice that they need rather than the advice that they want.
A more corrosive step was taken by John Howard who decided, and transacted through the Parliament with little demur, that we no longer needed to have department secretaries appointed by the Governor-General (a sign that they were servants of the Crown, above politics). In future they would be appointed by the prime minister, a corollary of which was that any secretary who earned his displeasure could easily be terminated by him.
All that was needed to make this a really toxic brew was the arrival on the scene of a prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who was such a centralist and micromanager that he made Howard look like a master delegator. Rudd concentrated huge power in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and transmitted instruction, if not direction, to departments and ministers alike per medium of the inexperienced young persons who peopled his office.
The effect of all these changes, including the centralisation of power around the PM, is (i) ministers are more like ministers assisting the prime minister than real ministers, and (ii) there is no incentive whatsoever for department secretaries to give to their ministers the undivided loyalty they gave in the days when they were permanent heads. They now stand or fall on how the prime minister feels about them, and they know it, so what the prime minister wants the prime minister gets — even when, from the point of their minister’s responsibilities, they should be advising caution or a different course.
It is in the light of these changes that we can understand how stimulus measures such as the HIP could be developed “with a sense of urgency by PM&C within a compressed timeframe and with minimal consultation with DEWHA”. We can understand also, given the prime minister’s known wish to make haste and the urgings of the Co-ordinator-General to that effect, why the department was not in the business of giving bad news.
No full risk assessment explaining the breadth and scale of the risks was ever provided to ministers, there was no formal advice to ministers from DEWHA relating to its capacity constraints, and DEWHA gave to its minister advice that ANAO found to be overly optimistic.
I see this problem as a systemic one — a systemic problem that, mutatis mutandis, goes a long way to explain why every jurisdiction in the country has trouble with effective program delivery. Accordingly, there is no point in hanging either the minister or the departmental officials out to dry.
My solution is simple and radical, for both of which reasons it is unlikely to be implemented. We could start by returning to effective cabinet processes, in which ministers are treated like grown-ups who do not need close supervision from the Prime Minister’s Department or unelected prime ministerial staff. Once the strategic decisions are sorted out in cabinet, ministers should be left to get on with the business for which they have been commissioned.
We should also return to the pre-1984 situation in which department secretaries have unambiguous responsibility for “the department and all the business thereof”. They should be appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the government of the day, and having been appointed, should be removable from office solely on the grounds of proven incapacity or misbehaviour.
*Paul Barratt is a former Secretary to the Departments of Defence and Primary Industries and Energy
An eminently sensible suggestion.
Paul Barratt’s analysis is essentially in accord with my 20 year’s experience with a State Public Service, which started in 1983.
As a Secretary, Barratt’s focus is, naturally on the most senior levels of the PS and as the old saying goes, fish rot from the head down. What Barratt doesn’t dwell on, is the systemic erosion of the talent base in the PS rank and file.
A brief history: Hawke and his State compatriots found a PS that had integrity, but was process-driven and thus was incapable of responding to the new economic and technological paradigms. So they changed some of the appointment rules and parachuted in bags of new talent at the top and senior ranks. There were many PhDs and whizz-kids, who were tasked with specific missions. Some crashed and burned, but many performed brilliantly. With time, as the economy started its long march to eternal prosperity, some of this talented cohort was head-hunted by the private sector that they had helped to revitalise, some were normalised into the PS and they all got older. Increasing pay differentials between the private sector and the PS ensured that the talent leak was essentially one way. At the extreme, PhDs in engineering were replaced with PhDs in public administration.
Many years later, at the end of the Howard era we found a vestigial PS that has gone full-cycle and has become process-driven and compliant and thus, importantly, has a diminished capacity to respond to new social or technological paradigms (like NBNs or Murray-Darlings) or matters of extreme urgency like the GFC. To borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s concept, the PS didn’t know what it didn’t know about the unknown knowns- things that the PS of the mid-eighties would, at least, have had a nose for.
For example, the unknowns (to the PS) included the “ecology” of the insulation industry, which has been characterised by dodgy practices for decades, or the fact that the residual 20% of houses that weren’t insulated either belonged mainly to poorer, less socially able people or were rented by them. Add to that the skill-base, or lack thereof, of insulation installers- many of whom probably came from the aforesaid socio-economic group, and finesse that with foil insulation that would never have been installed by anyone with a modicum of knowledge about insulation or the perils of old ceilings. None of this would be in the outsourcing process manuals of the modern PS, but would most likely have been “drinking fountain” chatter 25 years ago.
Revitalising the PS will be difficult, given its current legislative structure, diminished talent base, financial inequalities with the still-prosperous private sector and negative public perceptions of its status.
As the old saying goes “the fruits of success contain the seeds of failure”.
hear hear! the last 14 years have been a debacle. the public service is completely politicised one way or the other.
Thank you Paul for reminding us of the general failure of politicians to take care of one of the key institutions that is supposed to enhance Australia’s national interest. The thoughtful comments above are also welcome.
The experience of the last few years should serve as a clear indication that without a clever, informed, professional and ethically driven public service all Australians will loose out. Many public servants have hung on hoping that politicians will come to their senses and realise that they need an apolitical public service skilled in developing first class public policy. The dreadful practice that has developed of giving politicians the advice they want neither serves the public nor for that matter the government of the day because bad policy is just bad policy.
Unfortunately, now we have new generations of public servants who are not even aware of how the Service has been politically altered, how the skill base has been depleted. Nor do they have the benefit of skilled mentoring and in-house courses to teach them on an on-going basic of the rules and obligations that public servants should be operating within. Instead this training is outsourced to the corporate sector which operate under a different set of governance obligations and accountability.
I would hope that when the Independents get some breathing space they might turn their attention to trying to encourage reform and revitalisation of the public service that will best serve Australia’s national interest rather than transient political interests.
For some reason I often think that the public service is inefficient, wasteful, too internally focused, full of layabouts, timewasters and boondogglers, promotes ineffectualism and creates a safe haven and career path for narcissistic powerpaths, is incapable of producing anything except clever words, pathological in its structure and governance, and almost entirely dispensable or outsourcable. From working in both public and private sectors.