OPINION
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In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, made two major announcements about the future of the Australian Public Service.
First up were the machinery government changes which created five new mega-departments and led to the summary dismissal of five departmental secretaries.
Next came the government's response to the much-delayed Thodey review into the APS, which reinforced the Prime Minister's emphasis on the implementation role of delivering services to the Australian people, already stated in his speech to the Institute of Public Administration earlier in the year.
Also flagged were more development of IT and new roles for the Secretaries' Board. At the same time, the government rejected key recommendations from Thodey about greater security of tenure for secretaries, raising the cap on public service staff numbers, greater uniformity of pay and conditions across the service and a code of conduct for ministerial advisers.
The support for more and better use of IT is welcome. So too is the attention to implementation and service delivery. But this is hardly new. Whether the new mega departments will lead to improved outcomes must remain an open question. As many commentators have pointed out, the proposal appears hastily put together and leaves many questions unanswered, for instance the accountability relationships between single super-secretaries and multiple ministers.
For the Prime Minister, the concentration on service delivery and congestion-busting is not just about improving outcomes for members of the public. It's also a matter of putting the public service in its place. This was the key message of his August address to the IPAA: it is elected ministers who set the policy direction not public servants. This is an unexceptionable summary of Westminster relations between ministers and officials that is enshrined in the APS values and accepted by the vast majority of public servants. That the Prime Minister saw the need to spell it out yet again reflects the prevalence of a common misconception that public servants assert a right to contest government policy under the obligation to offer "frank and fearless" advice to ministers.
Certainly, public servants are expected to give ministers objective policy advice based on robust evidence and the benefits of collective experience. But such advice should be seen as telling ministers what they need to know in order to formulate their policies and achieve their objectives. From this perspective, the need for "frank and fearless" advice is not unique to the public sector but can arise in any leadership context. Successful business executives in any large organisation require advisers who will have the courage to tell truth to power and save them from error and failure. Confident and successful ministers have always recognised the value of such unwelcome advice from public servants.
The steady war of attrition drags on, as it does against other institutions deemed to be centres of progressive opposition, such as the universities, the ABC and the arts community.
The claim that professional public servants working on policy are likely to threaten the policy leadership of ministers is therefore without serious foundation. It might have contained some truth a generation ago but not in the present era of limited tenure for secretaries and a large ministerial offices. The Prime Minister's attack on such an obvious straw-person appears designed to deflect the case for strengthening policy capacity and security of tenure by implicitly characterising such moves as attempts to undermine ministers' policy leadership.
Mr Morrison's intention to show who is boss was also evident in the machinery of government changes. If nothing else, they have shaken large numbers of public servants out of their comfort zones. That the changes also involved summarily dismissing several secretaries, many of them highly respected, would have been an additional bonus. It allowed Mr Morrison to adopt the mantle of his mentor John Howard who had used his "night of the long knives" to demonstrate his determination to control the APS. Like Mr Howard, Mr Morrison does not appear to have used the power of appointment politically, to appoint ideological sympathisers. The key message is control. In this respect he differs from Tony Abbott, who deliberately appointed secretaries with known Liberal sympathies.
The Morrison government's suspicion of the public service is most evident in its continuing support for the cap on APS numbers (the so-called "average staffing rule") which has gradually squeezed the capabilities of the departments. As Thodey argued, the cap has contributed to the continuing weakening of the service's policy capacity as well as to the greater reliance on private contractors for the delivery of public services.
Though the government admitted some wriggle-room, Thodey's clear recommendation to abolish the cap was rejected. Indeed, the continuing constraint on APS numbers fits with the Prime Minister's own stated support for more reliance on private-sector sources of advice and service delivery. He and his government are clearly comfortable with the increasing incorporation of the leading consulting firms (who are also major donors) into the structure of government. In this respect, perhaps the most significant aspect of the secretarial appointments was the return of former Immigration and Agriculture secretary Andrew Metcalfe, back through the revolving door from Ernst and Young. Prudent secretaries will make sure they have an escape route into the consultocracy in case the axe falls. The growing number of consulting contracts offers plenty of opportunities to foster fruitful relationships.
The overall conclusion is that the Coalition's hostility towards the APS continues unabated. A more conciliatory approach may have superseded the all-out attack of culture warriors Tony Abbott and Eric Abetz, spearheaded by their hand-picked champion, John Lloyd. But the steady war of attrition drags on, as it does against other institutions deemed to be centres of progressive opposition, such as the universities, the ABC and the arts community. Unfortunately, the conservative narrative of a subversive APS overlooks the fact that the main beneficiary of a well-resourced and confident public service is the government of the day of whatever political stripe. Casting the public service in the role of a recalcitrant workforce that needs to be kept on short rations and regularly chastised is a recipe for third-rate government.
- Richard Mulgan is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy. richard.mulgan@anu.edu.au