When elected in May 2022, the ALP government inherited a federal public service that had been debauched for many years, the damage reaching a high pitch during the Morrison era.
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In the interests of the citizenry, the mess deserved to be cleaned up and the new government, notably through the Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher, has followed through to an extent.
While there has been significant investment in the public service, progress on important fronts has not been rapid and in some instances it's been one step forward and half a step back, for example:
- The Federal Police were taken out of Home Affairs but Immigration and ASIO were left behind. To be clear: Immigration cannot work properly in the inherently flawed Home Affairs structure and it will continue to cause governments political agony and migrants real agony while it remains where it is.
- Steps have been taken to even up remuneration across agencies but pay has been adjusted on the ridiculous basis of looking at wage and price indexes, something no "model employer" should ever do if it want to be fairly competitive position in the labour market.
- Following an "audit of employment", the number of labour contractors have been reduced yet a flawed "strategic commissioning framework" founded on the false idol of "core functions" while neglecting the public service employment provisions in the constitution and the Public Service Act.
- A bill - still stuck in the Parliament - to amend the Public Service Act avoids major needs, including recommendations of the Thodey public service review, contains more trivial matters than is necessary and is fatly wrong-headed in proposals on "stewardship" and a public service "purpose".
The amendment bill would have the Secretaries Board determine the "purpose" of the public service. That is to say, employees will decide the "purpose" of an organisation essentially created by the Parliament. It got sillier when someone decided to have a deliberative committee of 40 persons come up with eight purpose statement options one of which would be selected by the Secretaries Board.
Happily the board has belatedly realised the nonsense of the deliberative committee and dropped it like a hot spud.
More recently a bill has been introduced to abolish the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This drastic action is a consequence of the corrupting politicisation of appointments to the tribunal under earlier regimes. While the bill proposes improvements in appointment procedures, they appear to leave open the possibility of the kind of shenanigans that stuffed up the tribunal.
That is to say, there appears only to be a half fix in the offing. A month ago the minister was asked to clarify this but he and his Department didn't take up the chance - they've got lots on their plate, it might charitably be assumed.
In a major speech last November, Senator Gallagher foreshadowed, among other things, changes to appointment procedures for senior officials. She has in her back pocket related recommendations from the 2019 Thodey review and, presumably, the results of a study she commissioned almost 18 months ago on how to do statutory appointments.
Six months since the minister's speech, apart from the Attorney- General's proposals on the AAT, nothing on senior appointments has been forthcoming.
Maybe the minister's good intentions have collided with the curious views of the Public Service Commissioner, Dr Gordon de Brouwer. He's reported as saying that he doesn't think integrity issues in the senior ranks can be linked to the appointment process. "It's really, I think, fundamentally about culture and behaviour and personal attributes of leaders that's actually more important" he says.
But hang on, the Public Service Commissioner promulgates a host of detailed procedures governing appointments and promotions in the public service as a whole.
They're to see that the culture, behaviour and personal attributes of those seeking selection are appropriate for the positions to be filled. And so that should be for the most senior selections where Dr de Brouwer seems to have things inside-out and even upside-down.
Allowance might be made for sceptics to suspect that those now slaving away trying to get the public service on a more even keel think that words can speak louder than actions. See, for example, the Secretaries Board charter of "leadership behaviours" which misrepresented the Public Service Act.
Well, rhetoric won't do it.
A former chairman of the former Public Service Board and one of the country's foremost public administration analysts, Dr Peter Wilenski, was fond of saying that to improve to the public service, it was necessary to change laws, procedures and structures. Right culture and behaviour then followed.
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Thus, those responsible for public service reform should concentrate on the main game - that is, fixing up primary legislation, most notably the Public Service Act, in ways that close off as much as possible opportunities to repeat the bad habits of the 21st century. So the government could:
- Abolish fixed-period appointments for departmental secretaries and make the Public Service Commissioner the primary adviser on them.
- Include a set a values and code of conduct in the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act.
- Legislate a basic set of principles for statutory officer appointments that would limit ministerial discretion to picking from a list of persons assessed as suitable by an independent advisory committee.
- Make it clear in the Public Service Act that public service work should, consistent with the provisions of the constitution, be performed by people recruited through the merit staffing provisions of that Act.
- Make it legally necessary for departments and agencies to develop merit staffing plans and report against them to the Public Service Commission and in their annual reports.
- By law, require the Public Service Commissioner to approve the creation of all new positions at the deputy secretary level whose numbers in the last 50 years have increased by around 800 per cent while the public service has shrunk in that time by a third and now has a much narrower and less complex range of functions.
- Include provisions in the Public Service Act to regulate conflicts of interest associated with post separation employment.
- Enhance whistleblower protections.
There's much more but that these would be a good start.
In 2022, Dr de Brouwer's predecessor at the Public Service Commission, predicted "public service reform on steroids". It's not obvious such boosting medication has been taken in sufficient quantities thus far.
- Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au
