Even in her last week as deputy chief executive officer, Michelle Lees was still wearing a name tag around the Services Australia office.
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"It holds me accountable," she says, recalling how vital wearing one was during her days fronting 1500 daily customers at a service centre on the Gold Coast.
"It's part of my armour."
Lees finally hung up the badge on Friday, wrapping up 38 years in the public service; a career that has seen her help create the country's first mobile service centres, deliver the COVID-19 vaccine certificates, and manage the agency's responses to bushfires and floods.
Not a 'particularly welcoming environment'
Lees - the middle-child of five kids - left her family farm in Lismore and moved to Byron Bay to join the public service as a clerical assistant at just 16 ("I would have been 15 but our phone was out and so they tried to phone a few times and ended up sending a telegram," she laughs).
The year was 1985 and the public service was a different-looking place. Almost all of the leadership team were men. Not long before Lees joined, women were required to leave the public service when they got married, meaning few had the chance to work their way up in the office.
A Centrelink service centre also "wasn't a particularly welcoming environment", Lees tells me.
There were no computers, meaning welfare recipients were paid via cheques in the mail and had to send in a fortnightly form requesting their next payment. A wall separated people working through records out the back, leaving a few staff to man the "big high desks" as you came in. Medicare and child support were housed in separate organisations.
"And really even the language was different. So people referred to as 'beneficiaries' rather than 'customers'," Lees says.
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The "real shift" came in the 1990s, Lees says, when the walls were torn down and computers were wheeled in. Customers could see the staff helping them, and services could be taken where they were needed most. "It's far easier to connect when you can see the people that you're going to be serving," Lees says.
The government agency still has a long way to go as it recoups its image and public trust following the release of the damning royal commission robodebt report; the "cruel" and unlawful debt recovery scheme Services Australia administered.
Asked what the public service should learn from the dark chapter, Lees - like many senior public servants - says the government is still working through its formal response and won't be drawn on the issue. But later, in response to a different question about the future of the APS, she does talk about the importance of creating "more tailored, easily accessible services based around what individuals need".
Taking services on the road
Lees has spent much of her career working across service delivery. In 2006, assessing the aftermath of Cyclone Larry, Lees said she and her team were thinking about how they could deliver "an office-in-a-box-type concept" to communities who needed the support.
But then widespread drought hit Australia and - under pressure from the minister at the time - Lees and her team suddenly had two weeks to get a mobile office on the road. Lees, a project manager at this point, remembers telling the crew how to gut a Winnebago they had managed to find, and figuring out how to convert its bedroom into a separate office. "It was crazy nuts," she recalls.
Meanwhile, the IT team figured out how to get their technology up and running remotely so workers could look up someone's record and process help on the spot - technology they hadn't had up to this point.
"Now, needless to say in some of our locations, you had to sort of stand on one leg and have the satellite facing a certain way to get the technology," Lees laughs. But it was a start. Today Services Australia has four mobile service centres, a "critical part of our emergency response", she says.
From droughts to fire to floods
The veteran public servant understands the agency's emergency resources all too well, having led the response to the Black Summer bushfires and the 2022 floods that devastated south-east Queensland and parts of NSW.
She still remembers the moment she looked out of her Brisbane apartment and watched the Kedron Brook in the northern suburbs grow to river-like dimensions in a matter of minutes; when she realised the disaster the communities were facing.
"Growing up in Lismore, you know flood rain and you know regular rain. And it's like, 'This is flood rain'," she says.
Down in Lismore, the situation was quickly worsening. Lees remembers "seeing the vision of places where I grew up, seeing the floodwater, seeing the horses on the bridge at Woodburn and thinking, 'this is nothing I've ever seen'."
She organised for staff to go to evacuation centres, had a temporary office up and running within the week, and set up a mobile service centre down town as soon as they could get it past the floodwaters. Employees flew in from around the country to be based on the Gold Coast, ready for deployment in each direction.
The floods were personal for Lees. Her voice wavers as she remembers the moment she lost contact with her sister, who was trapped on the farm with her husband.
"She was checking in throughout the night and said, 'OK, well the power's gone off and I'll just keep checking in'. And then the water was coming in the house and then we lost contact for hours. And we're waking up in the morning and there was still no contact," Lees says tearily.
Her sister and brother-in-law managed to get up on their roof, where they were spotted by helicopters and rescued.
I ask Lees a question you aren't supposed to put to public servants. Is she frustrated with the government?
We know climate change is making natural disasters more frequent and deadly. And governments have the greatest power to stop our climate from warming, but inch towards mediocre reforms. Is it hard being in the public service and having to go in and essentially clean up the government's mess?
But Lees, once again, brings her response back to the customer; a focus that feels genuine, rather than evasive.
"I think for me, I've chosen to be part of the system that services, regardless of what happens," she says.
"All I've thought we can do is continue to learn every event, always understanding what is the right response at this point in time? What can we do better next time? How has the needs of the community changed? How have the needs of individuals changed?
"I think for me, it's not a frustration at all, it's really more when people really need the most help, how can we be of best service and responding at the time?"