This will be my last column for the foreseeable future: I have taken on the role of chief executive of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Its first chief executive, Professor Fiona Stanley, founded ARACY in 2001 to bring evidence into policymaking and practice to improve the lives of children and young people. Unfortunately, too many actions taken in the name of children – then and today – are based on little more than good intentions rather than evidence. Doing what evidence shows actually works delivers better outcomes. Although ARACY has excellent and productive interactions with public servants, I am leaving the Informant because I no longer consult directly for the public sector. So today I look back over the past decade on common themes in this column.
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First, though, last Saturday was the Australian festival of democracy, the election. The result will affect the lives of many public servants. At the time of writing (before polling day), pollsters called it a 50:50 bet. Regardless of the result, the post-election period is always busy for public servants adjusting to new ministers, priorities and pressures. Even when a government is returned, few ministers stay in their old portfolios. It's traditional for some to go back to their old haunts (treasurers, for example) but most change.
A good public servant turns a change of minister into an opportunity, regardless of that minister's skills or lack thereof. Indeed, a junior and inexperienced minister will often be more open to new ideas than older colleagues, and keen to learn. An experienced minister brings the ability to pursue portfolio interests vigorously and exert influence in cabinet, allowing public servants and ministers to work together to achieve their goals quickly and effectively. However, the downside is an experienced minister is more likely to have preconceptions about your administration – sometimes not entirely rational, founded on something as trivial as a decade-old cabinet disagreement or a long-forgotten inter-agency dispute. The trick is to discover the root cause of such prejudice (usually by asking the chief of staff, not the minister), address it and move on.
Whatever the issues facing government, they won't be addressed without a capable public service. We have that. Australia is well served by public services at national, state and territory level. From time to time in these columns, I highlight opportunities for the public service to perform better – often when a secretary or other public service leader has said so. I have been flabbergasted at feedback from some public service managers – one even refused me a consulting job because of it – that an article identifying need for change was an attack on the public service. That's absurd. An organisation that believes it has no shortcomings or weaknesses will fail: bankruptcy if in the private sector, descent into meaningless make-work and irrelevance if in the public sector. The world is continually changing, and the public service must change with it or lose public trust.
One aspect that should change is excessive risk aversion. Over the past 10 years of writing these columns, the Australian Public Service has become notably more risk averse. It reflects incentives, many of which come not internally but from ministers. No matter how much successive governments have said they want innovation and risk-taking, in practice, when risks have eventuated, the public servants involved have been blamed and pilloried. The other incentive that makes a huge difference is selection and promotion decisions. In a climate where any hint of a mistake in a career history means a person is not promotable, it's no wonder public servants avoid risk: taking risks inevitably means a mistake or two along the way. In some departments, risk management has become a synonym for risk avoidance, and people are considered good risk managers if they never do anything. Reforming risk avoidance will require change not only at the senior levels of the APS but also to the culture of blame-finding among ministers and politicians. This is not impossible. Other jurisdictions (for example, New Zealand and NSW) have worked out ways to innovate and bring progress in the public service without a blame culture.
The other enduring theme has been the need to measure and report on performance. The phrase "what gets measured gets done" is a management cliche only because it's almost always true. If the public service wants to improve its delivery of policy, administration and services to the public, it must commit to meaningful measurement that asks: how has this activity contributed to meeting national goals and improving well-being? One of the disappointments over the past 30 years of public service reform is that real progress to decent measurement was made in the 1980s and 1990s, but lost its way during the mining boom years of the 2000s when money was no object, the budget coffers were overflowing and politicians eased up the pressure on the public service to perform. Current moves towards a greater focus on outcomes and measurement have had to reinvent the lessons of past reforms and transfer them to the modern context.
One of those lessons is that transparency – information and operations open to external scrutiny – can dramatically improve performance. Despite advances in IT, the APS still resists opening itself to online scrutiny. There is more guff on departmental websites than ever before, gigabytes of carefully massaged messaging – that's not performance information. What's missing is real-time information on what is actually going on in delivery of services to the public: the kind of thing that the City of New York pioneered in its city-wide performance-reporting system, which gives citizens a window into all aspects of administration, whether roads, policing or even the mayor's office. Anyone can access it online. NSW has just moved to a similar approach. Allied with this is the wealth of government data still secret or inaccessible. Opening it up would immediately enlist thousands of unpaid analysts in private homes and universities around Australia and the world to help make it useful.
New Zealand has other useful lessons. Their government identified 10 key priorities for the public service, set ambitious targets and biting performance measures, and now regularly reports on these with honesty, including where targets are not met. As a result, the public service is, at long last, making progress to addressing difficult, previously intractable problems facing New Zealanders, such as reducing welfare dependence, improving skills and reducing crime.
Finally, I have written occasionally over 10 years about the dangerous, complacent belief that the APS is free of corruption. Each time, I received ever-more emails from public servants who have observed corruption in their agency but have no safe way to bring it to light. Without a body with broad anti-corruption investigative powers, we have no way of knowing the extent of corruption in the APS and among federal politicians. A federal equivalent of an ICAC is a winning, each-way bet: if there is corruption, it can be found and corrected; if there is relatively little, we will be reassured. I predict that post-election pressure for such a body will become irresistible.
Thank you to all the loyal and supportive readers of this column, and especially those who disagreed with things I have said but were courteous and constructive in correcting me. Above all, remember that public service is just that: working for the good of Australia, with a purpose. That makes public sector work not only a job but a calling; we are all better for it.
Stephen Bartos is chief executive of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, and a former senior public servant. stephen.bartos@aracy.org.au
