Bright young students with an interest in policy work are increasingly choosing to join consulting firms instead of the Australian Public Service, a public policy expert warns.
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Professor Glyn Davis, who is a member of the panel reviewing the APS, also said a drop in quality of government services and contracting had contributed to a decline in trust in the government, as well as concerns around the ethics of for-profit companies providing government work.
Professor Davis said contracting policy work out meant the public service was not necessarily the first choice for people wanting to work on policy, and this was creating a challenge.
"If you’re a bright young honours student thinking about your next career are you going to apply to the graduate entry program for the APS or are you going to apply for one of the big consulting firms? And increasingly I think it’s the latter," he said.
Declining capability throughout the public service was a major theme of the submissions to the review, according to the former vice chancellor of the University of Melbourne, but it was difficult to measure empirically.
"People have provided many examples from different parts of the Commonwealth where they feel that a generation earlier there were people who knew, who had careers in this area and had more substantive knowledge," he said.
"The past always looks better so there’ll be a discount to some extent for that, but objectively you look at Treasury ... it's significantly smaller than it was a generation ago. And the Treasury didn't do a lot of clerical work, it wasn't like we've just automated it, in fact it's just got less people and less policy capability and it's less attractive to graduates than it once was."
Some of the more "interesting" submissions to the independent review of the Australian public service had called for a "fundamental reconceptualisation" of the public service and the interactions between citizens, the public service and politicians.
"Some of the most interesting submissions, if I can say, are from [the Australian Council of Social Service] and others who are arguing that that declining trust in government is because we don’t treat citizens as citizens and as customers," Professor Davis told the Policy Forum podcast, produced by Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy.
"They're not in charge of any of the processes, so why wouldn't they be cynical and why wouldn't they walk away?"
Along with review head David Thodey, Professor Davis sits on the panel with Gordon de Brouwer, Maile Carnegie, Belinda Hutchinson and Alison Watkins.
The push for major change coming from submissions to the review created a challenging set of arguments for the review, Professor Davis said.
"It forces you to ask the question of 'Why we’re doing this?' "
Contracting out government service delivery and policy functions had different consequences to be considered, Professor Davis said, including the ethics of the companies that delivered government services.
"You want to be confident if you're going to contract out millions of dollars at a time that you know what you were doing and we've had a series of clear public disasters with this, of which the vocational education one is the the one that most people have lived through, endured, watched with horror," Professor Davis said.
"But we appear to have similar issues in aged care, we may have some issues in disability services, these are all areas which we've contracted out most of what government does, we’ve contracted them out to private providers, often to for-profit private providers and we’ve provided this incredible incentive to really get into this business without necessarily being confident the ethics have followed."
