The Prime Minister's new head of the public service sees its ability to learn and prepare for future crises being eaten away by government's mindset of cutting redundancy through efficiency dividends.
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The practice, which Labor has promised to maintain, of cutting a fixed percentage from public service agency budgets each year accounts for thousands of jobs cut to motivate doing more with less.
But Professor Glyn Davis, who was installed as head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in June, says government organisations need to have redundancy within them to understand how they can improve preparedness.
After giving an end-of-year address to public servants in which he spoke of the profession's stewardship role in being prepared for future crises like the next COVID-19, Professor Davis was asked about the importance of planning for those situations.
Nobody was going to be against planning, he replied, but the mindset of cutting staff was taking away the public service's capacity to get better at serving Australia's future needs.
"It's particularly hard to do if organisations don't have capacity," he said. Even talking about having capacity was hard because doing so invoked the language of redundancy within organisations.
"Because if you start looking at redundancy, you take us back to the world in which people are always cutting because it shows that you're over-funded."
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Professor Davis said there would ideally be a rotation within public service teams that allowed everyone an opportunity to step "outside the shed" and think ahead.
"We have to get ourselves into the mindset that says part of the stewardship [of the public service] is about having the capacity for organisations and people who do get the moment to think ahead, to stand aside from the day to day, to reflect on what you've learned and then to take that back into practice."
The existing 1 per cent efficiency dividend on government agencies was due to stay for the next four years, Labor's Katy Gallagher promised earlier this year.
But the government is also growing the APS with a projected 8000 new public service positions in the October budget.
Labor asked agencies to cut $500 million in contractor and consulting expenses from their operating budgets, while also lifting the public service staffing cap. Average staffing levels will grow from 173,000 to 181,000 in 2022-23.
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