To the extent that it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: the once-respected public service has a major problem around competence.
We’ve been tracking the growing problem of public service bungling for a couple of years now, and the evidence is that things are getting worse, not better. The highest profile public service casualty of recent times has been Border Force’s Roman Quaedvlieg, but his dismissal wasn’t the result of underperformance. The comprehensive failure of the agriculture department to effectively regulate live export companies for animal welfare, revealed by the decade-long non-compliance of sheep exporter Emanuel Exports, led to the relevant minister publicly savaging his own bureaucrats for their failure to do their jobs properly. No one at agriculture will, as far as we know, be held to account for the failure, though. Bureaucrats there will just endure the humiliation of having Attorney-General’s staff come in and give them lessons on how to regulate properly.
Nor will anyone at Prime Minister and Cabinet will face legal action in relation to the trove of sensitive material that found its way to the ABC before being handed back by a cowed national broadcaster. Given the Abbott and Turnbull governments have dramatically extended their own powers to combat what they describe as “insider threats to national security” but which the rest of us call whistleblowers, it’s a strange outcome. Having postured about the need for draconian powers to ensure national security information isn’t revealed, having sought to criminalise basic forms of journalism such as receiving information that is in the public interest, the loss of thousands of pages of sensitive and in some cases cabinet documents seems to have yielded surprisingly little in terms of consequences for the bureaucrats involved.
Perhaps they’ve moved on to other jobs or retired. That’s one of the great mechanisms for avoiding accountability in the public service, one that’s regularly on show at every estimates hearings and at senate inquiries involving the public service — bureaucrats nodding understandingly and declaring how much they wished they could help the senator with her question, but sadly the officer involved is no longer with the department and they themselves have only recently commenced in the position.
But even for public servants that remain in position, there’s little to fear as a result of demonstrated incompetence. Last year, the Australian National Audit Office, after examining the handling of underperformance in eight public service agencies, concluded “there is significant room for improvement in the management of underperformance”. According to the ANAO, “underperformance is not being accurately identified and the proportion of employees undergoing structured underperformance processes is very low in all agencies.”
While you’d hope that a low number of employees would have been identified as underperforming, the plethora of problems found in the public service in recent years — Immigration bungling billion-dollar contracts and locking up Australian citizens again, the census debacle, the robodebt scandal, the repeated loss of personal information, and many others — suggests that the low level doesn’t reflect a dearth of candidates. Instead, there are internal barriers to managing underperformance — it’s time-consuming for managers, the procedures required are often repetitive and unnecessary and underperforming public servants can use sick leave to evade the process or allege bullying or harassment — which in turn deters managers from trying to deal with underperformers.
Sometimes, from the point of view of agencies, there’s been no underperformance. Immigration refused to accept the ANAO’s criticisms of its quite spectacular bungling of offshore processing contracts. Agriculture’s refusal to properly regulate live sheep exports perfectly fitted the view of former minister Barnaby Joyce, who boasted of restoring the trade. If there’s no disincentive for underperformance, then underperformance becomes inevitable — and all the more so if the underperformance is actually endorsed from the Secretary or Minister downward.
I’ve consulted with the Federal APS for over 20 years, Bernard. In my view there are some skills issues, but also significant internal accountability. I’ve seen people moved for conspicuous under-performance, especially at senior levels, and the churn of senior public servants that you can notice in Senate Estimates may in part be testimony to that. The old joke is that if you do ten things and get nine of them right and one wrong, in the private sector your score is ‘nine’ — in the APS, it’s ‘minus one’. I’ve seen plenty of evidence thereof.
The APS works in a treacherous, shifting environment unlike any I’ve seen sustained by the private sector. Rushed policies driven by Utopia-style ‘announcables’, politically over-constrained problems, conflicting and outdated legislation, the politicisation of professionals expected to be neutral, an acute dearth of commercial and hands-on sectoral skills, the challenge of resourcing changing skills in an environment where ‘efficiency dividends’ are levied each year so that people are judged by price rather than capability, constant Machinery of Government restructures, and the integrity of major procurements at risk from private sector grey gifts (especially sinecure consultancies for senior figures) make it a tangled environ in which to perform.
Arguably, there are sometimes public servants who should be named and shamed; I’ve known of a few whom I believe should have been jailed but weren’t; and some I was glad to hear were fired and marched from their building. But as tempting as it might be at times to charge through with a stick, I’m not myself clear on who should wield it. It certainly can’t be Parliament, who already do too much blame-shifting; in my opinion the Australian National Audit Office lacks both skills and appetite; and I don’t believe Attorney General’s has anything like the management experience you seem to think.
I think there does need to be HR reform in the APS; there certainly needs to be some moratorium on post-APS conflict-of-interest employment just as Parliamentarians (are supposed to) have. But that has to take place in a different political environment than the one the APS currently inhabits. In my view a Stick of Vengeance would just be more of the same: fear and blame-shifting in a workplace already suffering too much from that.
I think we could begin by looking at how Parliament engages, and then talk about the right kind of strategic resourcing, integrity, performance frameworks and accountability. Though not nearly as melodramatic, that’s the approach that as both a citizen and as a professional engaged to help prevent and solve problems, I’d most like to see.
Great comment. Measured, pointed and well-informed.
I thought Bernard’s last para underscored the problem. The present ministry is barely competent – the worst I can recall in the 48 years I have lived in Canberra. They do not want to be shown up or contradicted and even a modicum of public service competence would easily achieve both. The presence of so many “political advisers”, who are outside public service traditions, laws and obligations but who do have the ministers’ attentive ears, also adds layers of complication. I would certainly not want to be held responsible for a minister’s actions taken on the advice of a political adviser rather than a public servant.
Then there are the political appointments – to the ABC, the NBN, the AFP – people appointed to do ministerial bidding and hollow out organisations which might question government actions or, heaven forfend, take action on some.
And where people are competent, Senate committee members feel free to ask absurd question and to insult. Who’d want to follow the Gillian Triggs example?
Brilliant comment, well done..!!
I reckon a lot of rot set in in 1975, courtesy of one Malcolm Fraser with scant regard for proper process, and John Howard went a lot further but with considerably more cunning.
The current crew are completely incompetent but certainly not lacking in cunning, greed and mendacity.
It’s not like there’s any accountability in government anymore. (see e.g. Michaelia Cash). So why would anyone expect any in the organisations they run?
What sanction has Cash paid?
English your second language Peter?
Your own question has omitted the singular present indicative of (to) be; namely “is”. That omission aside, I think it is fairly obvious that the question was intended as “What sanction has Cash incurred”? Having written that, regarding the pages of Crikey, the word “as” proxies as the word “because” (where no comparison exists) and even some of the reporters are unclear on words such as conservative, liberal-anything or indeed antisemitism.
Only god could imagine how the world “oriental” would be received nowadays. I think it was Churchill was the last person in parliament to use the world correctly (in 1909) but, we’re in luck, there is Said’s book on the topic : Orientalism (published in the late 70s)
The LNP has managed to corporatise these departments, so it’s just like private enterprise where you pretend problems don’t occur and just look after damage control.
Is the issue being held to account, or competence? If competence is the root cause of the need to hold to account then possibly we are seeing the result of the politically anointed public servants as opposed to the ‘old school’ professional secretary/bureaucrat model. Now public servants shift quickly because of saying the right thing on behalf of the right person, or as in the military doing the right thing for the right people.
Political anointing does not take into account competency, it’s about paying backing favours. When it goes wrong you then have to quietly move them on, otherwise your coat tail is entangled with the mess.
Well about time we poured some light on the Public Service. Congratulations to David Littleproud in ramping up the Anti on the AG Department. Complains have been coming to them for a long time about Live Cattle Exports and Joyce has long ignored them and probably encouraged the department heads to do the same. We, the public pay their over large salaries and Super. Why cant the government push through to productivity changes? Well because yes minister is alive and well. Just a few issues Fire fighting foam contamination, Immigration offshore detention center cost blow outs, Immigration poor responses to request for sick detainees in the detention centers for urgent transfers to Australia for urgent medical intervention, The Filing cabinet papers issue, Ignoring Defence spending by the Minister after very serious ANAO’s criticism. Hell no one can shake them up. I am no dictator but generally speaking culling one in four public servants may scare them in to doing a good solid days work. There is a lot of deadwood. Centrelink top management is filled with them, they are stuck in very old technology ideas no wonder the IT expert Turnbull employed to sort the whole of government out walked away.