The Sydney advertising guru Siimon Reynolds isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially since he inserted an extra “I” into his first name (like the S in Sussan Ley) for numerology reasons — an affectation which gave Siimon, creator of the knock ’em over like bowling pins HIV/AIDS scare campaign of the 1980s, that all important brand differentiation. Pretentious? Moi?
But Reynolds hit the nail on the head when he said you “can’t bore people into action” — a comment he has made on the federal government’s new band-aid-on-the-arm COVID-19 campaign to get people up and out to be vaccinated.
To be honest you didn’t need him to tell you that the sight of a dozen band-aids on (diversity correct) arms somehow fails to get the blood pumping. But why didn’t someone in Canberra get that?
Reynolds is one of those creatives alien to the denizens of the Canberra bubble. They arrive like a rainbow on a grey day, all leather and jeans in a sea of suits. But his comments illuminate a greater truth about federal public servants. They might be world class on policy. They might be the one thing that saves the country from the now hollowed out political class. But when it comes to actually dealing with the public they are, time after time, woeful.
It is final proof of the horror prophecy that bouncing from Narrabundah to Downer to Belconnen risked producing a class of very smart automatons — automatons, that is, who make the final decisions on comms programs.
We all know the classics of the genre. From stiff competition, my all-time favourite remains the Department of Finance recruitment video showing real public servants having real conversations that had been scripted by the creatives. Did I say stiff? “Just act natural when you mention that paleo banana bread in the canteen. OK. Take 47.”
This year alone we’ve had the immortal milkshake series, which attempted to educate teenagers on the power dynamics of sex and consent by a series of quirky comic book interactions that seemed to skirt the central questions.
But if only a failure to communicate was restricted to paid advertising campaigns put together by those crazy creatives.
The true menace to the well-being of Australians lies in the horror of everyday communications from Canberra — its tortured MyGov and My Aged Care and Centrelink platforms. The websites that take you through a thicket of impenetrable directions and categories, all in the service of providing digital government — which is OK if you have a computer, an internet with unlimited broadband, a smart phone, a university education and four or five hours to kill.
As it turns out this pretty much matches the description of your average federal public servant — which might go some way to explaining the kind of communications we get.
In fact it completely explains it.
Exhibit one is an extraordinary admission made by a top mandarin, the much decorated Kathryn Campbell AO CSC. Campbell really is one of Canberra’s finest and was appointed late last week for her latest challenge: running the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It sounds like a promotion from running the Department of Social Services, and judging by its location in the parliamentary triangle it probably is.
Back in 2018 Campbell delivered a speech to her fellow public service heads at the Institute of Public Affairs titled “Why delivery matters”, a disconcerting subject choice given the fair assumption that public service departments actually only exist in order to deliver things to the public. Never mind. It gets more alarming.
Campbell began with the idea that citizens might not care too much about policy frameworks but they have “a high expectation of public services because they are paying for the service through their taxes”.’
Campbell’s example of bad service delivery was the government’s robodebt scheme which ultimately did over thousands of Australia’s most vulnerable to the tune of more than a billion dollars, pushing many to the edge of despair and beyond. Campbell was head of Human Services which “delivered” robodebt for the government. And to make matters worse it wasn’t just lousy policy. It was terrible delivery too.
Campbell doesn’t exactly say that. What she does say is this:
Listening to the voice of the citizen ensures that policy will be delivered in a manner most likely to achieve success. Some policy will be welcomed by citizens and some policy less so. Co-design means working with the recipient or participant to determine how best to deliver services. It can be achieved by the use of focus groups or one-on-one in customer experience laboratories. The bottom line is that we hear from the citizen. It is fair to say that we didn’t initially do enough co-design when we were rolling out the online compliance initiative (OCI) which came to be known as robodebt.
Translation: robodebt was so badly communicated that people didn’t understand what they were meant to do until it was too late and the debt collectors were on their case.
The solution, Campbell said, lay in bringing in some actual people — “real recipients” — “to test our letters and ICT system interfaces. Watching the co-design participants review what we had thought was good design was refreshing. Their insights were powerful.”
And the lesson?
The department identified the need for a chief citizen experience officer. (Not a joke.) Naturally enough the CCEO needed to be recruited from the private sector because it would appear the upper echelons of the Australian public service aren’t populated by regular humans who can talk to other regular humans.
Siiiimon! Where are you? Who cares how many “I”s you’ve got now. Scotty from marketing needs you.
It is quite fair to be critical of a collection of appalling delivery processes by government. Mostly they reflect appalling policy decisions. What is missing from this critique that focuses on public servants is the level of political intervention involved in those policy decisions, how programs run – and in particular in public communications. Consider the two Ministers age and religious affiliations who signed off on the strange ‘milkshake’ consent video.
Ministers expect to see their pet ideas put into practice. The fact that they may not correspond to the needs of the real world is not a primary concern for them. It is a difficult job for a public servant at any level to persuade a Minister away from their preferred path. Once upon a time the so called ‘mandarins’ of the public service had some capacity to do this. However it seems these days Departmental Secretaries have given up – or simply been replaced by politically comfortable yes men (and some women) if they tried to push evidence based activity too hard. This is part of the creeping Americanisation of government where all senior positions are political partisans serving the leader.
The biggest scandal here is the transition of senior public servants from neutral advisors to courtiers – as explained by Jack Waterford at John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations site in his article ‘Public servants as courtiers rather than stewards’. They simply become enablers of whatever the Minister wants – with no responsbilty to the public that employs them or the nation they serve. They should not be government servants.They are responsible for ensuring tapayers money is at least not stolen, and for ensuring there is at least honest advice provided on what a policy decision or implementation process is likely to lead to.
Yes. The assault on the public service has undermined, probably fatally, one of the fundamental elements of our system of government. It was a convention rather than anything explicit in the constitution, but it was still well understood and respected, that the top levels of the civil service were a long-term repository of essential knowledge and experience necessary to guide the actions of ministers, who typically have very limited personal knowledge and experience of government to draw on.
But the neo-liberal revolution deliberately discarded this and demanded that the public service does what it is told, without question. Senior public officials who tried to provide advice were removed and replaced. The rest got the message. The transition to a servile and passive public service was quite explicit in the UK, where John Major’s government issued a binding Civil Service code to end any notion that the UK’s civil servants could ever separate the national or public interest from anything the government was doing. From then on, in effect, the government’s wishes were by definition the national interest, and any public servant not blindly doing whatever a minister demanded was in the wrong.
Here and in the UK this has removed any brake on ministerial folly (or worse) the public service might have provided, as well as opening the doors wide to an ever-growing army of expensive and secretive consultants and fanatical political advisors each with an axe to grind, and I have no doubt it has played a large part in many of the debacles and scandals of recent decades. The government’s brilliant answer to this growing problem, of course, is to remove any remaining elements of oversight or accountability from ministers.
Spot On. Sir Humphrey is dead.
I’m an over 70 Yr old female – lucky to have worked in admin all my working life. So was there for the beginning of computers in offices. Could say I know my way around websites etc. Have a mygov a/c which was fine at the start. However, in the last 2 years or so,have had to delete my sign in, get a new one (with assistance from some tech person), unable to log on, and when I had a medicare claim had to spend an hour or so with some linking code, some other issues which meant I had to go to the actual office. When you make a claim online, you are actually doing the work of the medicare admin (who are no longer available) -you also become familiar with the half dozen or so procedures to make the claim (uploading invoice etc). Someone not familiar with computers (and I mean a desktop not the silly phone) would not be able to do this.
And would you believe at the end there is a questionnaire about “your experience”! It’s the usual numeric formula (banks have similar) and I’d like to see the results.
It’s not public service, and I can only assume a friend of a friend receives the IT contract.
Absolutely and to make it worse they want you to give feedback – code for assessing staff which usually has a monetary undertone.
And they claim to be managers when all they do is get others to manage for them and act as consultants who borrow your watch to tell you the time and keep getting consultants until the consultant guesses their answer which is already in their safe.
Either that or get out of Canberra and actually listen to the public servants who work in the state-based service delivery offices who have actual experience of how policy impacts on the public. They can tell you what works but generally aren’t listened to because they are suspect for being too close to the ‘customer’
What a pity that Campbell chose the IPA as the vehicle for her announcement. Nine Radio must have been busy.
“He can see more with 2 i’s”?