ANALYSIS
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Halfway through 2020, it's easy to forget that about six months ago the public service embarked on a reform agenda as Prime Minister Scott Morrison remade the shape and leadership of the bureaucracy.
The new direction of the Australian Public Service appeared set. Having chosen its favoured recommendations from the major review into the public service, the Morrison government left bureaucrats to follow through on them.
Public servants had been told in August their chief role was to implement the government's agenda. Spending on consultants for policy advisory work had risen. Another year of APS budget cuts and staff reductions awaited.
If Mr Morrison's unexpected election win last year seemed to promise such trends for the public service would continue, 2020 has thrown this into question.
The coming months will bring the demands of the pandemic and the needs of a stretched government to bear on the APS reform agenda.
A lingering coronavirus will test the government's ability to form and set policies that not only temporarily limit the health and economic damage, but restructure the economy in ways needed for the post-pandemic world.
The federal government will need the advice and expertise of the bureaucracy for what will be a long-haul task. Whether ministers will listen to the public service, and adequately equip it for the job, will influence heavily how the bureaucracy will emerge from the crisis.
This depends on whether the Morrison government embraces its more pragmatic tendencies, and whether it believes its pre-pandemic views of the APS are suited to the new COVID-19 world.
The public service is grappling with other questions about its role. It discovered it could be flexible in responding to the immediate problems of the early-stage pandemic, redeploying staff to new tasks, working from home, busting slow and bureaucratic process, and breaking down departmental siloes.
In the coming months, the bureaucracy will have to decide what parts of its newfound flexibility it should keep, and how these fit into both its larger reform agenda and its delivery of the government's COVID-19 response.
Department of Education, Skills and Employment head Michele Bruniges, speaking in a Institute of Public Administration Australia podcast last week, said this about the public service's efforts and long hours in the pandemic: "The question for me is: how do you take the good bits out and make it sustainable so every night's not like that? And how do you make it work so it works well and we hold the momentum going forward?"
In the same interview, Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources secretary David Fredericks said it had been necessity that made his own department innovate in its pandemic response.
It might also be pragmatism that brings more permanent change to the federal bureaucracy, and its relationship with the government, in COVID-19.