Catherine Althaus | What should be the purpose of public service?

The movie Living featuring Bill Nighy is a poignant drama that should be watched by every public servant. It confronts the imperative question: should public servants play an active role in directly serving the community or should they only be passive implementation agents of the government of the day?

Nighy plays Rodney Williams, the quintessential umbrella-wielding, pin-striped, bowler hat-wearing British public servant who catches the train every morning with relentless predictability to serve the post-war London County council.

Rodney undertakes his duties alongside a range of office subordinates, including youthful optimist Miss Margaret Harris and public servant newbie Mr Peter Wakeling. The rules-based order of a mainstream interpretation of bureaucracy dominates the first scenes.

Mr Wakeling is brought into the inner circle of the routines and habits of an encrusted, but gentlemanly Rodney and the strict interpretation of orderly processes that guide the form and function of how due process is delivered through the County system. Grey and beige dominate the palette, just as quiet and orderly paper shuffling overwhelms the soundscape.

Then the big blow hits.

Rodney receives news from his doctor that he has terminal cancer and nine months to live.

The private world he has built around himself crumbles immediately. He cannot discuss the diagnosis with his son and frustrated daughter-in-law who are living with him in their modest suburban dwelling. He has flashbacks to his now widowed existence and to a lifetime of lost opportunities. He confronts his mortality and challenges his own status quo, playing hooky from work and tripping to the seaside, contemplating suicide but instead relishing a day at the beach. Losing his signature bowler hat, striking up friendship with a stranger who takes him drinking and, later, meeting up by accident with Miss Harris who has left the public service in a quest to be a manager at a local high-end tea shop. Rodney transforms his view of his world and what time he has left in it. He connects with people and with the world and allows himself to become inspired by the beauty and joy of his childhood. He remembers the power of play and his mum's refrain each evening to come back inside after frolicking around his local community.

At the close of the film, we see the results of Rodney's self-provocation. He eventually goes back to work, but this time, he sets himself a mission. He helps a group of dedicated, persistent local women achieve their quest to convert a World War II bomb site to a local community playground. Rodney dies during the film and we witness the powerful questions that his final public service - to help these women cut through formidable red tape to build the playground - generates in his co-workers. They reflect on his shift in motivation and actions, his style and energy, the outcomes he achieves and the sacrifice he is willing to undergo. And it makes them question their system, their processes and their purpose. Why are they doing what they are doing? Will his transformed achievements inspire any change in the system?

In many ways, Living is about micro-moments of genius. Quiet, street-level acts of purposeful persistence. These are seemingly not dramatic but actually stand as monumental moments of daring paradigm challenge. We see these in Australian settings. When we defy the odds, when we show compassion, when we sacrifice ourselves for important values, when we challenge the status quo and invite it to be better. Moments like winning the America's Cup. The outpouring of community volunteerism to meet disaster relief. The ANZAC sacrifice. Ash Barty winning Wimbledon. Gun control in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre.

Living is powerful because nowhere do we connect with the elected official, that all important minister who is the elected representative of the people. We don't see them or hear from them. They are an omniscient figure who undoubtedly is there, but they are not involved in this particular drama as an active figure. Don't get me wrong, elected reps and ministers are super critical in our system of governance. But in Living, a very real scenario is played out. Street level bureaucracy is at play. The drama lies in the discretionary relationship between the public and public servants.

Instead of the senior echelons of policymaking at the apex of ministerial offices, senior public officials and ministers, we interact in Living with the relationship of Rodney with a group of active women citizens. What's fascinating is Rodney's relationship with them. For the first half of the movie, he is involved almost in a game of defiance with them. Using rules, he, and the system he participates in and helps shape, propels them from one agency to another, sending them on a wild goose chase through complicated webs of bureaucracy. It results in bringing them back to the very place they started with a rejection tactic that says, "building a community playground is not my problem". The visceral experience of this is directly felt by Mr Wakeling, who is asked to accompany the women, and we viewers feel the very inhumane powerlessness and frustration that these citizens are forced to assimilate. The hope, of course, is that they will give up. But they don't. They hold onto their purpose.

Meanwhile, our protagonist Rodney has gone through a metamorphosis and a road to Damascus intervention through his cancer diagnosis. From being a mastermind of stalling tactics, he realises that he shares a common purpose with the local playground activists. He thinks they are right. This is what the community wants and needs. And for the final third of the movie we witness his mastermind skills being deployed to leverage the bureaucracy, to follow due process, to work on behalf of these citizens to get them their playground. He works directly with the citizens and helps them achieve their playground because he makes it his purpose, he makes it personal, his final act of service in a life that has become timebound and momentous in what he would remember on his deathbed as his legacy.

And there we have it. At the centre of Living, sits a foundation challenge to the doctrines of responsible and representative government that lie at the heart of our Westminster system. Professor Richard Mulgan eloquently presents these doctrines in their nuanced perspectives.

In our Westminster system, we believe that ministerial responsibility means that it is the minister who is the elected accountable representative. Public servants have to serve the minister, and in so doing they serve the public. Does this make them stooges or lackies, as Peter Shergold framed it? They can certainly interact effectively, personally even, with communities, and bring back the voices and wishes of the people to the minister and seek out the minister's decision to make something happen. This is legitimate and the wise course of action in the Westminster tradition.

But does it always happen this way? Do public servants feel empowered to go out and actively seek community sentiments and engage with them to then bring back an evidence-based, well-analysed and articulated case to their minister to get their decision to "make it so" or no, as the case may be? Or are they waiting passively to be told what to do, or not to do, by their political masters; focused only on implementing the will of the government of the day. In the absence of such active community interaction, public policy can be influenced more greatly by those with greater access to ministers and decision makers; the corporations, consultants, lobby groups, and activists filling the void.

In Living, we see powerfully this choice lived out on the screen. Rodney, before his cancer diagnosis is actively taking a position of red tape until he hears otherwise from his political masters that a playground is directed to him to make happen. He is part of a technical machine. But after his terminal prognosis, Rodney takes an active role to seek out community sentiment and make it happen - effectively, ethically, compassionately, respectfully, lawfully. He is still part of a machine, but he has given it personalised community driven purpose.

Over Australian public administration history, we know that politicians have sometimes felt that the bureaucracy was too big for its boots and knew better than its masters. At other times, the bureaucracy has been hauled over the coals for its learned helplessness.

Either extreme seems terrifying and a misapplication of Westminster. Surely there is a place for a bureaucracy to step confidently into its place as part of the fabric of Australian democracy? An institution that dynamically and adaptively uses its agency to actively serve the Australian public and the common good of all Australian communities in keeping with the will of the elected government of the day but with the same kind of urgency and purpose that impelled Rodney?

That's my purpose in this article. To get us thinking that this is not only possible, but desirable. That's the kind of public service I want to be part of. As we engage in important times of APS reform at this point in our history, we have the ability to challenge our existing systems of governance and see if they are still fit for purpose. I, for one, feel that there is much that is good about our system that is worth holding onto, but I don't think it is enough. Just like Rodney, Australia is experiencing its very own life-changing situation. We have the opportunity to question our purpose and the legacy we want to create. Pivoting and clarifying our ideas of responsible and representative government to meet modern challenges seems like it is pretty important if we're going to leverage the best of Australian values and update our democracy, including the purpose of public services in it.