Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Martin Parkinson has challenged public service leaders to hold a potentially "discomforting" national survey of Australian views of government service delivery.
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Australia's most senior public servant, Dr Parkinson used an end of year address to the Institute of Public Administration Australia on Monday to propose taking up a key recommendation from a 2010 reform agenda put forward by his predecessor Terry Moran.
Mr Moran's Ahead of the Game report proposed a regular, non-partisan survey to gauge citizens' satisfaction with government programs, services and regulation, based on similar surveys conducted in Canada and New Zealand.
The survey would also compare satisfaction with public services to private sector activities, and could be expanded over time to cover state, territory and local governments.
"If it's non-political and focused on citizens' experience of and engagement with the APS, I think this would both help us frame policy better and alert us to where programs or other interventions are failing," Dr Parkinson said.
"I'm not under estimating the challenge here or the criticism that's likely to come my way in the event that we did that.
"But I think if we did we'd be better off but if we were to do this I think to get support for the idea we'd need to ensure that the survey results were made publicly available, albeit with a lag."
Dr Parkinson questioned if department and agency bosses in Canberra "would we be comfortable" with the results.
"I suspect it would take us into a whole range of areas which would be discomforting but I think it would be discomforting because we actually find a set of results, public expectations or experiences of engagement with us that don't fit our preconceptions."
The Moran report said Australian governments faced unprecedented challenges in addressing the increasing demands of citizens, intractable social problems and tight fiscal conditions.
Survey results would be included in individual departmental annual reports
In the 2010 federal budget, the Australian Public Service Commission received $38.7 million over three years to lead bureaucracy-wide implementation of the report's recommendations, including the survey.
Other projects included in the funding package were efforts designed to streamline and integrate service delivery, use new technology effectively and build strategic policy capability within APS agencies.
Dr Parkinson said public servants should be emboldened in their work in 2018, should think big, innovate and be ruthless.
"Let's be frank: much of what we actually try has a risk of failure. If it didn't have a risk of failure, why would we bother doing it?
"The challenge for us is we need to be prepared to fail fast and pivot, and that needs to be a core attribute for us as a service."
He said the political class and government auditors should recognise that public servants learnt from experiments and pilots programs.
"Gotcha games, including at Senate estimates, may give everyone a thrill but they fail miserably at improving the quality of public service and instead what they end up doing is encouraging inertia and mass risk aversion."
