Another week, another devastating revelation about the Australian public service.
This week’s bad news comes courtesy of the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), which has examined how the community health and hospitals program (CHHP), a $2 billion Morrison government health program, was administered.
Spoiler alert: it’s bad! The ANAO says the program “was ineffective and fell short of ethical requirements”. It describes a completely flawed administrative process: $2 billion was spent, much of it in breach of Commonwealth grants guidelines; many grants went to dubious recipients for doubtful outcomes; some spending may even have been unlawful.
Scott Morrison announced the fund in late 2018, and at the time it appeared to be a fairly boring policy, funding uncontroversial activities such as cancer treatment, drug and alcohol programs, and public and preventive health.
To say the audit is scathing is an understatement. The Health Department appears to have crashed through all the usual policy safeguards. Like the Human Services Department before it, Health appears to have known that what it was doing was possibly unlawful, but did it anyway. The audit states: “Health did not develop grant opportunity guidelines for seven of 108 CHHP grants, and in at least three instances this represented a deliberate decision by senior management to not comply with finance law.”
The grant agreements were often questionable — some were drawn up so quickly that they lacked basic details. One assessment about the suitability of a grant to the controversial Esther Foundation, featured information pulled from a media profile of the organisation.
The audit found that the Australian government solicitor told Health that “making the grant would likely be without lawful authority”. Health signed the contract anyway.
The overriding imperative appears to have been to shovel the money out the door, so that Morrison could hold a media appearance. The Esther Foundation collapsed into voluntary administration in 2022, amid allegations of abuse at its residential facilities.
Not all of this was public servants’ fault. In many cases, Morrison and then-health minister Greg Hunt announced funding decisions before the bureaucrats had drafted guidelines. As Hunt and Morrison travelled around Australia announcing CHHP funding, hard-pressed Health Department officers were reduced to scouring media releases in the hope of catching up with the news. As the audit notes drily: “Health decided to begin drafting national partnership agreements on the basis of public announcements.”
These latest revelations from the ANAO are dismaying, even for close watchers of the federal public service. We’re not talking commuter car parks here, after all. These were precious health dollars, some of the most sensitive parts of any government budget.
And yet, confronted by the tempest of Morrison’s election campaign, senior Health officials appear to have folded with barely a whimper. You couldn’t even say that Morrison pressured public servants to approve inappropriate grants: he simply announced them, and bureaucrats scrambled to do the paperwork.
Journalists and commentators like to use political jargon like “pork-barrelling” for this sort of thing, but what the audit reveals is something more serious. A funding program — in public health, no less — has been used for political considerations.
The yardstick for devising and implementing a community health policy should be exactly that: the health of the community. Voters expect that scarce health dollars will be spent wisely and adequately monitored and administered. None of that happened. Leaving aside the impure motives, the administration of this program was also clearly disastrous.
Some crucial early decisions loom for national anti-corruption (NACC) commissioner Paul Brereton, who will soon be confronted with an Australian public service with multiple scandals and deep cultural decay. Brereton may receive recommendations to investigate senior APS officers as a result of the robodebt royal commission. He may also end up receiving referrals over this scandal in health.
The NACC’s definition of corrupt conduct is broad and wide-ranging. For instance, its website says corrupt conduct includes the abuse of their position.
A public official abuses their office if they:
- Engage in improper acts or omissions in their official capacity;
- Know that those acts or omissions are improper;
- Intend to gain a benefit for themselves or another person, or cause a detriment to another person.
If we examine the actions of officials in Services Australia in the implementation of the robodebt scheme, and perhaps now in this latest scandal in health, it appears public officials knew, or should have known, that the policies were improper, even unlawful. They went ahead anyway under pressure from their political masters.
Establishing the evidentiary bar for abuse of office will not be easy. But if the NACC is to do its job, there are some dark days ahead for the Australian public service.
This is just one more example of the Coalition policy ever since Howard – ”You don’t face the electorate mate, we do. Your promotion or demotion depends entirely on delivering our instructions. If we want frank and fearless advice we will get it from an external source, who will check what the right answer is before writing that advice, and who will return between 5-10% of the fee to us in donations.”
If we want frank and fearless advice we will get it from an external source,… we’ll contact PwC and pay them a fortune to give us exactly the advice we tell them to give us.
And it was not really just one more example of the Coalition policy ever since Howard – it is an example of government practice.
Yes it was Howard who first started blatantly politicising the public service. Only appoint yes-men and mates, and penalise or drive out anyone who dared give frank and fearless advice. Saw the APS as his private domain, not as an independent body service the general public.
We must include unctuous John”lying rodent” Howard in all this. The rot set in with his victory in 1996.
It really astounds me that the blame for this rot was blamed solely on Howard!
In 1992 Keating chose Fred Hilmer to develop a National Competition Policy. This would be the tool that Keating and then Howard would use to force the public sector to compete with the private sector for funding.
Keating was the instigator of the “corporatisation” of the public sector and the resulting hollowing out of the APS. Howard and others since have refined and developed it, giving us the mess we find ourselves in now.
To quote Emma Alberici – “In politics, myth, when repeated often enough, has a way of becoming gospel”.
Yep Ban the buy in parasites running the NDIA, dept Jobs and so called training , public / private infrastructure in developments and resources … scandalous theft – oh and ckean em out of Our ABC – re assess our media licences
And sometimes the consultants decide what the government wants/needs to hear and tailors their advice accordingly. Some consultants are very cosy with particular departments and think they know best: I know of at least one instance where a very senior officer was astonished to find that he had been misled like that – but the consultant firm was so deeply entrenched that they continued to get contracts anyway. But it’s true that Howard oversaw the real politicisation of the APS. Until that is undone and departmental secretaries are appointed on merit and given at least some protection from their political ‘masters’, the APS will never again be frank, fearless and honest. Howard will not be remembered for the gun buyback as much as for his corruption of the APS and his cementing of middle class welfare as an election tool. Definitely one of Australia’s worst PMs – until several of his successors, anyway!
Certainly. Given the number of big scandals still to be properly investigated that are known since, for example, the bugging of the Timor government decades ago, it is far from sure the NACC can possibly have sufficient resources and investigators to cope with the initial rush. Maybe the NACC should use consultants? For a suitable fee maybe PwC could help…
This often happens – the revelation of a scandal is treated as the bad news, instead of seeing the scandal itself as the problem. On the contrary, the dark days for the APS are here and now, and have been going on for years. If the NACC opens it up to serious investigations, and (let us hope) some prosecutions, that will bring light, not darkness, which will be good for the APS, even if it’s painful. Like necessary surgery.
if Labor had any vision and/or guts, they’d use these scandals and the PWC debacle etc, to instigate a full restructuring of the APS – give the departments the resources they need to the jobs (without outsourcing) and the administrative framework to protect them from political manipulation … and give the ANAO more money and resources to ensure things like this can’t happen again
I’m sure it would be an easy sell to the voters, despite certain sections of the MSM
Personally I’m loath to criticise Labor when it is the corruption of the Morrison govt that is being revealed.
Goodness, give them a chance. There is a full review of the APS happening. They’ve only been in government for a year. You can’t make these things happen overnight. These findings of corruption by the previous government will serve to increase the findings of the APS review and hopefully bring about change. The previous government decimated the APS and the corporate knowledge that went with it.
They have had plenty of chances. And they were in opposition for 9 years. Doing what exactly? Rebuilding the APS is a total non event in the eyes of the public, so they should have had a detailed plan and known exactly what to do from day 1. It would have had no effect on the election result. Reading any number of ANAO reports of the past 2 decades is plenty to go on.
The current government have no more intention of building the APS to be a competent and impartial service than the last lot. They are just better at concealing the rorts and more subtle at the kind of mendacious control that is now standard across the Commonwealth at Federal and State levels.
The excuse for the current lot that they need time is wearing awfully thin. Whitlam’s government transformed the joint in three years. What has this lot done in over a year? A nearly there anti-corruption commission and…slightly cheaper PBS scripts and…and…
Care to release your name?
Mind if I call you 95ddOa7 for short?
And they were in opposition for 9 years. Doing what exactly?
If a party is not in government, they can do pretty much nothing.
The Greens who want everything now will not get much at all as they are not in gov
well the sad thing about labor in SA is decimating right to assemble and rights to protest / support of the golf partnership deal -Gough would roll in his grave
In stead of couching it in pejorative terms, why don’t you give them a chance to do so ?
Life’s too short.
The heat death of the Universe will occur sooner.
Have you no shame or is the stipend from SussexSt a sufficient salve?
Don’t judge everyone by your own lack of ethics. I am not and never have been associated with any political party in any way.
Incidentally, when did you stop beating your wife ?
The headline is clickbait crap. The top line of the public service is clearly corrupt, though I’d start with Home affairs/migration rorts Mike. This is part of the political appointments to secretarial roles. Had they spoken out they would be sacked at the next level. Heads of departments and crooked ministers seem to be the problem not the APS.
Thank you greybeard. That is correct. Low and mid level APS staff are not really in a position to conduct legal evaluation of their day to day tasks.
The problem is corruption at the top
‘At the top’ still brings in the APS.
The ‘top’ are political appointments, not made by the APS nor the State PSs.
Mike is an example of the tail wagging the dog.
It’s not a clickbait crap. It’s about the findings in the ANAO’s report on the community health and hospitals program. And how you can imagine there is not a problem in the senior levels of the APS is a mystery. The cause can be traced back to ministers and government policy sure enough, but still there is a problem in the senior levels of the APS, and they do not get to absolve themselves by pleading ‘only following orders’. Just the same as soldiers are required to refuse illegal orders. Even worse, in the Robodebt scandal some of the APS involved were not merely following orders, they were actively running ahead of their ministers trying to anticipate wishes by creating an illegal scheme to bring in money and covering up the legal advice against it. There’s no guarantee there are not other APS scandals still to be exposed.
Defence personell are under the War Services act which allows for summary judgement up to and including instant execution in times or fields of war.
I doubt that in that position, you or the vast majority of couch warriors would have the guts to disobey direct orders. OK, at trials or enquiries after the event, but potentially fatal if not to life or limb, but to at least career prospects.
You are missing the point. It is irrelevant whether or not it is easy to refuse an illegal order. It does not matter what consequences follow from not obeying an illegal order. None of that can change the duty not to carry out an illegal order, and none of that changes the established principle that ‘I was only obeying orders’ will not be accepted as a defence to a charge of committing war crimes.
No, you are missing the point. I gather from your attitude you have never served in a war zone nor even be a member of the armed forces.
“Possible consequences”for failing to carry out a direct order in the face of summary judgement over-rides what may happen further down the track.
No military person in those circumstances would be thinking of the Nuremberg defence.
Armchair warriors never understand the context of their insular assertions.
Trickle-down decomposition – as the fish rots from the heads, the lower down are copping that head slime.
The lower levers must be drowning in a tsunami of it klewso! The whole system is a disgrace!
That should be “levels” and not “levers”. Apologies for the error.
We need Hunt and Morrison in the dock answering some pretty serious charges here. This is not “sweep under the carpet” white collar crime, this is serious corruption.