Capability review warns Department of Transport to tackle purpose, culture, and staff turnover

The Capability Review published on Friday aims to identify existing gaps, and opportunities to address them, with the goal of helping the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (DITRDCA) "meet future objectives and challenges".

The review said the department needed to make it a priority to "clearly articulate its purpose and what it is trying to achieve for Australia in a changed political and economic environment"; a challenge for an organisation that has dramatically shifted in shape and scope in recent years.

The Department of Communications and Arts was only merged with the Department of Infrastructure to form one mega agency just before the pandemic hit in February 2020.

But stakeholders told the reviewers they recognised how hard it was to develop a shared departmental purpose given its "many and varied functions", with some questioning whether a shared vision was "even necessary" as "long as staff are invested in delivering for Australians".

Staff also spoke about how government decisions to merge and move departments had caused some to question how long the current arrangement was going to last, and had impacted their "affinity to the organisation".

"Some people are just waiting for us to be snipped down the middle again," one interviewee told the review.

The review - undertaken by incoming Department of Agriculture Secretary Adam Fennessy, Treasury Deputy Secretary Roxanne Kelley, and retired public servant Robyn Kruk - also found that the agency was haemorrhaging staff at higher-than-average rates.

The department reported a 19.2 per cent average staff turnover as of May 2023, compared to an average public sector turnover and transfer rate of 11 per cent.

The review found that promotion and development opportunities were the biggest reasons staff were leaving, with 24 per cent of departing employees telling exit surveys that they were moving on to pursue better jobs and opportunities.

Managers also pointed to low salary as a major barrier for attracting staff, with the review finding that starting salaries for APS5 and APS6 employees ranked in the bottom 30 per cent and 35 per cent of APS agencies, respectively.

In saying that, Individual Flexibility Agreements have pushed the highest salary for APS6 towards the top end of the scale for the sector.

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The review also found the agency was relying on old technologies and manual systems, something that caused in staff spending "'too much time and effort on low value work" and was a "major barrier" to staff feeling like they belong to one department.

Culture and collaboration were other big focuses of the review, with the department warned that it is too insular, risk adverse, and "reluctant to accept advice and expertise from external partners and stakeholders".

"They're big so they think they can do things themselves," one stakeholder said of the department.

This aversion to risk was flagged as something that could hinder the department's ability to meet the changing expectations of ministers, with the reviewers writing that "ministers and their staff want department officers to offer bold and ambitious policy advice".

"Ministers expect the department to be a 'policy maker not a policy taker'," the report said elsewhere.

The review stressed the importance of fostering relationships governments and ministers, adding that while the department had a "good foundation" for these relationships, there was "room for improvement".

"Effective decisions are more likely when department staff have open conversations with ministers about risk rather than trying to minimise it or resorting to behaviours that appear defensive," they wrote.

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