While Bachelard and McKenzie have very capably described the failure of the Home Affairs experiment, the problems have also been shown, if less floridly expressed, in many auditor-general’s reports and well-informed analyses by two former senior immigration department officials, Peter Hughes and Abul Rizvi, in the public policy journal Pearls & Irritations.

It’s a glum tale. Coming on the heels of robodebt, Home Affairs represents another painful breakdown in federal public administration, bringing distress to untold numbers of people and tearing at the wellbeing of society.

How did it come to this?

The creation of the Home Affairs portfolio disregarded generally accepted principles governing the allocation of functions to departments. For example:

• It brought together a set of unlike and sometimes incompatible responsibilities — not quite as crazy as, say, combining health and defence but not far from it. Immigration has been infected by a security mindset with an overwhelming focus on keeping people, especially boat arrivals, out of Australia and fretting about the bona fides of those who manage to get in.

• The notion that major government functions should have their own departments was forgotten or ignored. Immigration has more fundamentally changed the nature of Australia than any other function of government, and will continue to do so. In Home Affairs, immigration was relegated.

• The Home Affairs portfolio included intelligence-gathering and other agencies that should be kept as far away from related policymaking as possible so that policy doesn’t end up determining what intelligence is collected. It’s salutary to recall how the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States fitted its facts around the Bush administration’s policy on the invasion of Iraq, providing assurances about weapons of mass destruction that inconveniently didn’t exist. Facts should inform policy rather than the other way around. That’s why we have an independent Australian Bureau of Statistics.

• Home Affairs is egregiously top-heavy and doesn’t seem to have clear lines of responsibility. Because its secretary appears to control the money, a busybody occupant of the top job can pry into parts of the organisation that should be left to get on with their work.

• The portfolio was given a meaningless title, Home Affairs. It’s yet another manifestation of the modern habit of giving organisations names that give no idea of what they do.

No one has advanced a case in favour of the Home Affairs portfolio for one simple reason: there isn’t one. When it was created in 2017, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called it “a structure to meet the challenges of the times.” More than that, it was the most “significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements and their oversight in more than forty years.” Stuff and nonsense.

Home Affairs was political and bureaucratic conniving on a grand, misguided scale that found fertile ground in the exaggerated national security apprehensions of the times and community alarm about asylum seekers.

The relevant minister, Peter Dutton, needed a stronger base for his prime ministerial ambitions, now seemingly as far away as ever; his departmental secretary, Michael Pezzullo, had the chance to consolidate his power in the public service by perching on top of a bigger bureaucratic pile. The two men were midwives at a birth that can best be described as empire building, a rationale whose name could not be spoken.

Idle talk about Home Affairs forming a “holy trinity” with Defence and Foreign Affairs suggested only that when no rationale was available the public had to make do with evasion and empty rhetoric.

Thus, a flawed organisation with incompatible functions was asked to deal with matters of intense political and real-life importance: population policy (the country still doesn’t have one); immigration and refugees, including measures to deter boat arrivals; the importation of goods and services; and aspects of national security, intelligence collection and policing — a big bagful even for a well-formed organisation.

To make things more fraught, by the time Home Affairs was born the offshore “processing” of boat arrivals was on a slippery slope. As Peter Hughes has recently explained, when the opportunity for maritime asylum seekers to have their futures determined in Malaysia was torpedoed by a Coalition–Greens alliance, the government and Home Affairs had a predestined disaster on its hands. Henceforth, people would be detained in Nauru and Manus Island, from where the reputable organisations running the detention centres had decamped for fear of reputational damage, leaving billions of dollars of operational spending to be skimmed by opportunists and dodgy dealers.

Former departmental secretary Dennis Richardson’s appointment to investigate offshore detention bribery allegations is great news, but perhaps he should be put on a permanent retainer. These illegalities may now be endemic to the system.

As tragic as all this may be, the grandest failure of Home Affairs and its leaders has been the diminution of immigration as a principal function of the federal government. Sidelined and neglected, its backlog of visa decisions ballooned — so much so that by June last year almost a million applications were on hand. (That figure has since been reduced to around 575,000.) At the same time, impediments to obtaining citizenship meant that people who legally qualified for Australian citizenship had to wait fifteen months just to get a decision on their applications. The settlement of new arrivals has been thoroughly unsettled.

A major review of Home Affairs headed by a former secretary of Prime Minister’s and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, found that “the migration program is no longer fit for purpose”; that there is evidence of “systemic exploitation” of a migration system that poses “a risk of a permanent temporary underclass” with “more than 1.8 million temporary migrants living in Australia”; and that temporary migrants “face tangled and lengthy pathways to permanent residence… that undermines our democratic resilience and social cohesion.”

A further review by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon — leaked but not officially released — makes the astounding observation that “other than the limited capacity of the Migration Agents Registration Authority, there is currently no compliance or investigative capability within the Department’s Immigration Group.” Immigration had no cop on the beat, a fact wholly at odds with many years of Home Affairs rhetoric about the integrity of the system.

Who is responsible for the state of affairs so dismally described by Parkinson and Nixon?

While sundry ministers can take their fair share of the blame, Bachelard and McKenzie have pointed the bone at Home Affairs secretary Pezzullo. His former minister, Karen Andrews, gave them a lukewarm referee’s report on the secretary and then, when asked if Home Affairs could operate without him, simply said, “Well, no one’s indispensable.”

Pezzullo has made himself a convenient target. He has allowed an apparently abundant ego to make him into a prominent public figure. That’s unusual by the standards of senior federal officials, who are typically content with low profiles, especially as ministers often prefer not to be crowded out of the limelight by their staff.

Over the past six years he has made fifty-five public speeches, all proudly listed on his department’s website. They include addresses on Australia and Anzac days, orations usually reserved for vice-regal representatives and RSL presidents. It’s an astounding collection, although one longer in intellectual pretension than substance. To crib a quip from Dorothy Parker, there’s less to these speeches than meets the eye.

In an opening statement at a recent parliamentary committee hearing, Pezzullo claimed that the “integrity of the visa system has been significantly strengthened” and cited in support an increase in the rate of visa refusals from 1.8 per cent to 3.2 per cent. As Abul Rizvi points out, refusal rates say little about how well the system is working. Rizvi asks if Pezzullo would argue that the current very high approval rate for onshore student visa applications reflects a reduction in the system’s integrity. Or, to stretch it to its logical absurdity, would a 100 per cent refusal rate signify a visa system at its acme?

If Pezzullo was one of the principal architects of Home Affairs, and given that he has been its secretary for the entirety of its existence, Bachelard and McKenzie’s question about his position is understandable. But it would be a mistake to think that replacing him or forcing him to change his ways would patch things up. The fundamental fault in this organisation lies in its conception and structure. If that were to be maintained, not even a secretary with divine powers could make it work.

Labor and its Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil have taken some ameliorating steps. All immigration functions in Home Affairs have been consolidated under an associate secretary position. The Federal Police have been returned to the attorney-general’s portfolio. This is all well and good, but it’s insufficient. It’s a pity the Parkinson review didn’t go more deeply into the machinery-of-government and organisational shortcomings of Home Affairs.

Some have called for a further inquiry or, as has become fashionable, a royal commission. While such an inquiry could be useful in providing political cover and impetus for change, it would delay necessary correctives for another year or more and move the consequent decisions closer to the next election, when governments are slowed by the dead hand of political caution.

Enough is known now. The Parkinson and Nixon reviews are at hand and the conceptual inadequacies of the Home Affairs model are clear and have been demonstrated in practice. Thus, the government should:

• establish a freestanding Department of Immigration, allowing a clear-eyed, high-priority concentration on immigration policy and service delivery free of the distractions and distortions to which it is vulnerable in Home Affairs

• legislate for an independent statutory authority responsible for the functions of the existing Border Force on the basis that the decisions it must make, including the imposition of customs duties, should be better protected from ministerial involvement

• retain existing arrangements for Operation Sovereign Borders

• leave management of onshore detention facilities with Border Force but shift its immigration-compliance functions to the Department of Immigration

• place responsibility for offshore facilities and the care of any maritime asylum seekers with Border Force or some other authority, leaving asylum and visa decision-making to Immigration

• return ASIO to the attorney-general’s portfolio

• distribute remnant Home Affairs functions to the most appropriate existing departments or agencies.

This is easy to say, of course, but more difficult to do. Given the brittle political territory involved, courage and strength would be needed, and the risk of political and administrative flak would be high.

Rough as that might be, though, it’s unlikely to be as politically and administratively damaging as the hits governments will continue to take if the Home Affairs portfolio is retained. And while disruptive, these changes would liberate staff from a department that has depressed their morale and enable them to better support governments and serve the country. •

The post It’s time to abandon the Home Affairs experiment appeared first on Inside Story.

Recent censuses have documented a quite extraordinary growth in the Indigenous population, largely in southeastern Australia, driven by growing self-identification and rising numbers of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships. As a result, the national profile of the Indigenous population is changing, accompanied by even greater levels of income inequality. Very high levels of income inequality exist within the Indigenous community, levels that are greater than those that exist within the non-Indigenous community.

Alongside these shifts has been a growth in the diversity of political perspectives among leading Indigenous figures. The contrasting views of Indigenous No campaigners Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, on the one hand, and Lidia Thorpe and author/lawyer Michael Mansell, on the other, are just one example.

The geographical, social and linguistic heterogeneity of Indigenous Australians has long been recognised by policymakers yet only sometimes taken account of. The regionally organised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (1990–2005) was a rare example of a positive recognition of heterogeneity; in other cases — tighter conditions on social security in remote Australia, for instance — the recognition has come with a punitive veneer.

This diversity has increasingly been overlaid (though not replaced) by a pan-Indigenous focus on identity and identity politics that has begun to permeate the national imagination. The emphasis on a single identity — rather than on layered identities, as Noel Pearson advocates — has created a unity with its own fragility.

These strands have created social, economic and political complexities that undercut the possibility of building an enduring consensus among First Nations on virtually any issue. If substantial Indigenous consensus on policy aspirations is just as elusive as it is among the non-Indigenous population, then all-encompassing Indigenous representation is inherently elusive, particularly nationally.

The referendum result alone won’t drive this complexity; it has been emerging for at least two decades. But the vote will inevitably be perceived as a political and societal inflection point. The notion that governments should seek to discern an overarching and representative Indigenous perspective is likely to give way increasingly to multiple Indigenous interest groups, themselves engaged in the cut and thrust of interest-group politics both within the Indigenous domain and between the Indigenous domain and the wider political domain.

Virtually all recent public commentary has been on the politics of the Voice: the campaign, the tactics of the Yes and No camps, the effectiveness of the most prominent advocates, the implications for social cohesion and reconciliation, and the implications for Australia’s international reputation. The shape of the post-referendum policy framework has received almost no attention. Yet it will determine the opportunities available to First Nations citizens and inevitably shape the nation’s future in ways that are difficult to predict but nevertheless consequential and far-reaching.

In a hyper-rational world, the obvious response to the referendum loss would be to press ahead with legislation to create a Voice. After all, if it is important enough to be constitutionally entrenched, why wouldn’t the government seek to establish it legislatively?

We don’t live in an entirely rational world. Prime minister Anthony Albanese explicitly ruled out a legislated Voice before the vote, primarily on the basis that the process of legislating a Voice would become hyper-politicised. Opponents would argue that the referendum result made crystal clear that Australians don’t want a Voice, thus depriving any such proposal of an electoral mandate. Its design would become deeply contentious both in wider political circles and among Indigenous interests. Without constitutional enshrinement, a legislated Voice’s views and policy perspectives would arguably carry less weight and be more susceptible to being ignored by governments.

One alternative path would be to create an appointed Voice, though the prime minister appears to have implicitly ruled this out too. Governments often appoint specialist groups to provide advice; in fact, the previous government appointed a prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council in September 2013 with Warren Mundine as its first chair. It was silently abandoned in 2019 when its advice on how best to progress the Uluru Statement and the proposed Voice became politically inconvenient.

Since then, reflecting the triumph of political considerations over rationality, the Coalition government (and now Labor) operated without a formal Indigenous advisory mechanism while simultaneously funding elaborate bureaucratic and legal processes to design and implement a proposed Voice.

The government’s most likely move will be to embrace the role of the Coalition of Peaks, the alliance of eighty-plus Indigenous peak bodies that emerged in early 2019 from discussions between representatives of fourteen Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and prime minister Scott Morrison. Those discussions ultimately led to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. According to its latest annual report, the Coalition of Peaks directly and indirectly represents more than 800 organisations and at least 550,000 Indigenous people across numerous sectors.

Announcing a greater reliance on the Coalition of Peaks — or, more probably, gradually lifting engagement — has several political advantages. The coalition encompasses a wide swathe of Indigenous policy, it was established and funded by a Coalition government, and it is capably led by its convenor, the experienced former bureaucrat Pat Turner. Perhaps even more importantly, building on the coalition requires no legislation and can accurately be characterised as a continuation of the status quo.

If it pursues this option, Labor will presumably take the opportunity to signal its increased commitment by allocating new Indigenous funding in the coming 2024 budget. One obvious spending opportunity championed by Turner and the Coalition of Peaks is housing, a policy domain with implications for health, education, criminal justice and domestic violence. As the government develops its new National Housing and Homelessness Plan, which will encompass new intergovernmental funding arrangements, it could earmark increased funding to Indigenous communities.

The Coalition of Peaks is, of course, quite different from the proposed Voice. Unlike previous Indigenous representative bodies, it seeks to represent the interests of “community-controlled” organisations rather than the entire Indigenous constituency. Its members cover a broad range of Indigenous interests, but obvious gaps include the educational and economic development sectors. Implicit in any greater engagement would be a shift to engaging with coalition’s constituent peak bodies.

At the core of the Coalition of Peaks is NACCHO, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, which represents 145 Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations across the country employing around 6000 staff. NACCHO’s members service more than 550 primary care sites delivering more than 3.1 million episodes of care to more than 400,000 people.

Apart from their sheer breadth of activity, NACCHO members have the advantage of receiving mainstream healthcare funding for their services, thus ensuring a substantial level of political independence. That advantage does not extend to most of the Coalition of Peaks’s other members, which rely to a greater or lesser extent on discretionary government funding. So too does the Coalition of Peaks’s policy secretariat, creating a major risk to its continued independence.

As a member of the council overseeing the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the Coalition of Peaks has guaranteed cabinet-level access to every jurisdiction in the Australian federation. This is unprecedented in modern Australian history, though the reality is that it is outnumbered and outgunned by the sheer institutional heft of the states and the federal government, and particularly by the size and intellectual capital of their bureaucracies.

Of course, governments will continue to engage with Indigenous interest groups outside the Coalition of Peaks, and will draw on specialist advisory bodies where necessary, as already occurs in the mainstream policy domain. When both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests are involved, governments will continue to appoint Indigenous members to relevant advisory committees.

The advantages of using the Coalition of Peaks to underpin the future framework of Indigenous policy are significant, but there are also significant challenges.

Foremost is the fact that the extraordinarily complex policy architecture of Closing the Gap is unfit for purpose and requires serious attention. Its bureaucratic complexity ties the Coalition of Peaks down in never-ending process, across eight jurisdictions, virtually guaranteeing it cannot focus consistently on strategic policy opportunities. Complicating its work is the fact that the Coalition government shifted political responsibility for most targets to the states and territories and stepped back from any overt leadership role, a move not reversed so far by Labor.

These problems should have been tackled head-on in the Productivity Commission’s recent draft report on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. Although the report is critical of progress, its strategically underwhelming analysis is a lost opportunity to take stock and shift course to ensure governments take their commitments seriously. The machinery of Closing the Gap will not collapse in the short term, but neither will it survive into the medium term without focused attention.

Governments are inherently conflicted on this issue: reform of the policy architecture and a stronger Coalition of Peaks will inevitably make life harder for them. Visionary political leadership within government, always in scarce supply, will be required to crack this nut.

A second implication of the referendum defeat is that governments and First Nations will be forced to reconsider the preparedness of the Australian electorate (and the nation’s underlying political settlement) to accept treaties as a mechanism for advancing Indigenous aspirations. While many First Nations leaders and their supporters will intensify their calls for treaties, the risk of devoting decades of work to inchoate policy reforms, and the challenges of agreement-making with reluctant governments could fracture Indigenous views on the benefits of such a strategy. Pragmatic leaders could well see better and more immediate uses for scarce advocacy resources.

It is also worth mentioning that while a successful referendum would have paved the way for a vote on an Australian republic, the defeat is likely to dampen enthusiasm in the current decade. Perhaps paradoxically, it may also increase the likelihood of an Indigenous person being appointed as Australia’s head of state in the interim.

Progress on Indigenous constitutional recognition, meanwhile, appears more remote than ever. Short-sighted self-interest has triumphed over visionary reform. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth an implicit mandate to lead on Indigenous policy, one it has progressively walked away from over the past decade. The Indigenous leadership, encouraged by progressive Liberals, decided to shift away from the recommendations of the 2012 report of the expert panel on constitutional recognition and replace it with the Voice proposal, a move that now seems a well-intentioned error of judgement.

Led by Pat Dodson and Mark Leibler, the expert panel recommended the repeal of section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, which allows the federal government to enact adverse and discriminatory laws based on race, and called for a new provision prohibiting racial discrimination.

The nation’s Indigenous policy framework over the coming decades will inevitably focus on particular Indigenous interests rather than a notional general interest, tempered by more of the same: more rhetoric over substance, more evasion of responsibility, more blame shifting, less transparency and ministerial accountability, and continued policymaking aimed merely at giving the appearance of action.

If they are to force their way into the dominant bloc of interests that controls Australia’s institutions, Indigenous interests will need to look beyond governments for support and as the sole locus of political action. To be effective, they must build alliances, institutionalise the independence of their advocacy capabilities, and create their own policy institutions. They will need to span their diverse aspirations, and build and sustain the intellectual capital necessary to achieve inclusionary policy reforms in the face of opposition from mainstream interests concerned to protect the status quo. Inevitably, this will be a multigenerational struggle. •

The post Indigenous policy’s inflection point appeared first on Inside Story.

Ministerial staff, on the other hand, have provoked much greater curiosity. In the 1970s, principal private secretaries Ainsley Gotto and Junie Morosi carved swathes during the Gorton and Whitlam governments, though few have since matched their flair. Much less colourful as an adviser was the current prime minister, who cut his political teeth on the staff of Tom Uren, local government minister in the Hawke government, and Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales.

Whether in the Gotto–Morosi or the Albanese mould, ministerial staff still grab a headline or two, if sometimes for the wrong reasons. They inhabit an area of the public service where accountability is minimal but proximity to power gives a sense of dash, even of gravitas — whispering in ministers’ ears, digging their leaders out of strife, telling senior public servants what to do, flitting around sometimes in VIP planes and perhaps glugging on a beaker or two of pinot grigio in a Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

So when things go wrong with ministerial staff, people prick up their ears. And things have gone wrong with them, and with their ministers and other members of the federal parliament — wrong enough for the Human Rights Commission to be asked to review the scene. Its 2021 report, Set the Standard, made many recommendations about how Parliament House could be smartened up as a workplace.

One consequence of that report is legislation to create a new statutory body, Parliamentary Workplace Support Services, which will deal with staffing, complaints, education and training, and related matters affecting Parliament House’s denizens.

Set the Standard also recommended a review of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, now fondly known as the MOPS Act, which provides a legal base for the employment of MPs’ staff. The review, recently completed by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, is important because ministerial staff have become a linchpin between ministers’ offices and the public service. Where that connection has not worked as it should, things have often turned sour.

Before I say any more about the bill, though, a little history.

In 1983, Labor offered voters a pre-election policy on, of all things, the public service. That policy proposed reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointments, a move — however well intentioned — that would have disastrously compromised merit staffing.

The MOPS Act was designed as an alternative to Labor policy. (I confess I played a role in advising on and implementing it.) It allowed ministers, under certain conditions, to engage ministerial consultants who could be employed within departments. But it avoided a further politicisation of the public service by limiting the tenure of consultants to the period for which the appointing minister was in charge of the relevant department. Almost as an afterthought, the MOPS also gave ministers and other MPs legal power they’d not previously had to employ their office staff.

The MOPS legislation came into effect in 1984 and it has not been materially changed since then.

Now, based on the review by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, comes a bill that would materially change the MOPS Act. Some of the proposed changes are for the good, some are not, and some that should have been made have been left on the shelf. The MOPS Amendment Bill might not be as bad as the ridiculously inadequate Public Service Act Amendment Bill, also now in parliament, but it could have been a lot better.

On the positives, the MOPS Amendment Bill would do three important things. It would introduce employment principles designed to improve the behaviour of MPs and their staff. It would better define the employment responsibilities of ministers and other MPs, and elucidate different categories of staff. And it would clarify and improve termination arrangements in association with provisions in the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill dealing with dismissal, grievance procedures and so on.

Given that the optimistic assumptions about the behaviour of MPs and their staff that underpinned the MOPS Act have been invalidated over the years, these changes are welcome. Unfortunately, though, the MOPS Amendment Bill heads south from that point on.

The bill would cut the heart out of the MOPS Act by removing the ministerial consultant provisions. It is as if the bill’s designers have taken fright at the word “consultants” (now an eleven-letter swear word) and simply reacted by removing it from the bill. Their explanation is that the provisions have not been used and are therefore “obsolete.”

But the consultant provisions were never intended to be greatly used. Their purpose was to protect against any return of Labor’s notion of reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointment, and to block insidious, backdoor pressures from ministers to insinuate their nominees into the public service. Any ministers trying such tricks could be deflected by the consultant provisions.

The fact that they’ve not been much used is not a sign of obsolescence; it’s a sign of success. Their planned demolition ignores the deterrent value of many little-used laws. Indeed, getting rid of laws because they’re not much used would probably wipe out half of what are now on the books.

As the MOPS Amendment Bill errs in what removes, so too is it deficient in what it fails to include.

The administrative code of conduct for ministerial staff has been around for many years. Because it doesn’t seem to have done much good, the 2019 Thodey review of the public service and the robodebt royal commission recommended it be replaced with a legislated code. The government has squibbed on those recommendations; the MOPS Amendment Bill doesn’t propose a code for ministerial staff or one for other MOPS staff.

That’s a shame because a legal code of conduct would provide a clear and unavoidable statement of expectations about proper behaviour and a solid base for keeping staff up to the mark, including with disciplinary measures.

For these reasons parliament has put a legal code of conduct for departmental and agency staff into the Public Service Act. For the government to refuse to do likewise for ministerial staff is hypocritical. If it is not to join the government in this two-faced mire, parliament should insist on legislated codes of conduct for ministerial and all other staff employed by MPs.

For all their value, legal codes of conduct are at risk if recruitment procedures allow ratbags to be employed. The MOPS Amendment Bill includes a provision requiring ministers and MPs to assess whether staff they wish to employ have the appropriate capability. That too-small step is typical of this bill.

True, it provides for the prime minister to regulate what kinds of staff can be employed and to establish related arrangements and conditions, but the powers are unspecific. For ministerial staff, the government (or the prime minister) should be required to establish by delegated legislation suitably tight procedures for selecting ministerial staff, for receiving independent advice on appointments, for security and other vetting, and for induction and training.

Unlike recruitment to public service departments, current procedures for ministerial staff are opaque and vulnerable to shady dealing. While ministers (and other MPs) need scope to employ staff with whom they can get on, more open recruitment procedures would promote public confidence and minimise the ratbag risk.

During the Hawke government, many senior positions in ministers’ offices were occupied by public servants on secondment, a factor contributing to a high point in productive relations between ministers and the public service. While those days are long gone, ministers would do themselves a favour by seeing that their offices include a reasonable seasoning of competent public servants.

There is, however, a disincentive for public servants to sign up with ministers’ offices. In doing so they effectively rule themselves out of promotion within the public service, often for years. With the Hawke government this disincentive was reduced by arrangements whereby public servants returning from ministers’ offices could be reintegrated into their department at a level appropriate to the length of time they’d been on secondment and the kind of work they’d done during it. These provisions should be brought back.

Finally, the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill’s provisions for reporting on employment under the MOPS Act are insufficient. It should be up to the government itself (or the prime minister) to report on the employment of ministerial staff; after all, those given statutory powers by parliament should account directly for their exercise rather than rely on others to do so. Points of authority and accountability should match up.

It’s a pity the MOPS Amendment Bill is so modest and weak, errs significantly in removing the ministerial consultant provision, and omits more important provisions than it contains. Timidity, public service incapacity, an unwillingness or inability to see what’s important in the historical background and a sheer lack of imagination continue to dog attempts to improve the Commonwealth public service. •

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The problem turned out to be technical. The computer system used by the agents, designed on the assumption that unaccompanied minors were travelling solo, had no way of recording a link between them and their parents. Some agents stuck sticky notes on infants’ onesies. Others kept makeshift records that were lost when the children were moved.

In Recoding America, technology writer Jennifer Pahlka tells the stories of how technological successes and failures have affected the way the US government operates. As founder of the non-profit Code for America and deputy chief technology officer under president Barack Obama, Pahlka is ideally placed to show why government computer systems sometimes underperform (and occasionally outperform) our expectations.

In one case, a pair of young coders set about redesigning the website for people to apply for food stamps in California. The existing website contained 212 questions and could take up to an hour to complete. Because it didn’t work on mobile devices, some homeless people would try applying at a public library computer only to find it kicked them off after half an hour. The coding duo redesigned the system to remove irrelevant questions, made it mobile-friendly, and ensured that the application process could be completed in about seven minutes.

Part of the reason government websites are so complicated, Pahlka argues, is that their creators rarely stop to think about the consequences of complexity. She quotes a colleague of hers admonishing website designers: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”

The philosophy of good government services, Pahlka argues, rests on dignity. Services that respect our time, use straightforward terms and don’t make us feel stupid will not only work better; they will also help build a greater sense of trust in government.

Pahlka discusses the debacle of President Obama’s healthcare.gov site, whose glitches prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans from obtaining health insurance in the first few weeks after its launch. By contrast, she notes that the covidtests.gov site worked beautifully, allowing Americans to order four free Covid tests in less than a minute.

Part of the difference was that mailing out tests is easier than selling insurance, but the designers of covidtests.gov also made a deliberate decision to keep their site straightforward. In distributing free Covid tests, the designers might reasonably have asked users their vaccine status and household size. They might have required everyone to check a box promising not to resell the tests. But they recognised that the longer it took to use, the fewer people would order tests. They opted for the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.

Fixing one problem often leads to another. Pahlka tells the story of the US veterans affairs department, whose website worked only with the software versions used by those inside the agency and often crashed when used with the browsers and document readers on veterans’ home computers. When the department fixed the online form, the number of incoming applications jumped tenfold. Suddenly the problem wasn’t a faulty website, it was a backlog of applications. Some departmental officials wanted the agency to revert to its technically flawed application form. To the department’s credit, its leadership chose to clear the backlog instead.

Government is the focus of Recoding America, but the problems are familiar in many large organisations. Pahlka wryly notes Kodak’s decision to outsource most of its information technology staff to IBM in 1989. In the 1970s, the company had produced the first digital camera prototype; in 2012, sideswiped by the rise of electronic photography, the company filed for bankruptcy. We’ll never know whether the pre-eminent photography company of the twentieth century could have transitioned into the digital age if it had kept its technological expertise in-house. But the decision didn’t help.

In 2001, Robert D. Atkinson and I wrote a report titled Breaking Down Bureaucratic Barriers: The Next Phase of Digital Government for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Reading back through that report two decades on, some of it seems quaint. At the time, the US government had only been online for eight years. One of our recommendations was that government websites should allow personalisation through the use of cookies — a radical notion at the time.

But some of our suggestions still ring true. Government websites should be arranged with a focus on consumers, not producers. Just as Amazon’s homepage doesn’t feature a photo of Jeff Bezos, service-oriented government websites should be designed around customers’ needs. Atkinson and I argued that governments should avoid the silo mentality revealed by websites that show only the programs provided by a single agency, and instead structure the information around users.

Layers of government within Australia can also be time-consuming and confusing obstacles for citizens. But with sensible use of technology, government can make it easy for people to understand and access all the services available to them.

The Australian government has commenced organising services by life event. A trial allows new parents to perform one simple transaction in myGov to enrol the newborn in Medicare, initiate family assistance claims, and register the birth with the state or territory government. In principle, government can do the same with retirement. If a citizen commences on the age pension, why not offer to add state or territory government concession cards to the myGov wallet and connect the new pensioner with financial support services?

According to Pahlka, American adults spend an average of forty-two hours per year on paperwork for the federal government — a figure that doesn’t include the forms they fill out for state and local governments. Making government easier to use could pay massive dividends for the community. One way to think about it is that if the typical working day is eight hours long, then reducing the paperwork burden by one-fifth would be like giving each American adult another public holiday.

Pahlka quotes Cecilia Muñoz, head of the Domestic Policy Council under President Obama: “We need to think bigger than bringing tech solutions to policy problems.” It’s not the tech, she argues, it’s the tech people. The successful covidtests.gov site wasn’t built by a private provider, it was designed in-house by a team from the US Digital Service and the US Postal Service. The whole project took six weeks.

Technology will change, but the principles of good technology design will remain constant. Design systems based on consumer needs, not government imperatives. Keep private information secure. Beware of locking in legacy architecture. Encourage innovation by breaking projects into small, achievable components. Don’t make websites any more complicated than necessary.

If I were to take a single message from Recoding America, it would be about the relationship between tech firms and government. Governments should learn from how the best technology companies design their websites and apps, tweaking their interfaces to maximise the user experience. Yet just because there’s a lot to learn from the private sector, it doesn’t follow that outsourcing is always desirable. Having coding expertise within government helps align policy and delivery, allows troubleshooting and improvements, and places a priority on that most straightforward of goals: delivering public services effectively. •

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
By Jennifer Pahlka | Metropolitan Books | $49.99 | 346 pages

The post Recoding government appeared first on Inside Story.

To recap. A decade ago a federal minister divided society into “lifters and leaners.” It was a variant on the old “dole bludger” trope that imagined many of the unemployed as spongers needing to be cracked down on, hard. Public compassion had to be tightly rationed and a sense of guilt imposed on those reliant on government support as an incentive for them to, somehow, pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Social welfare was to be as much a source of savings as it was a salve to society’s wounds. The “lifters” should be asked to lift as little as political calculation permitted.

In this nest robodebt was hatched. A minister proud to flaunt himself as a “welfare cop” and ambitiously keen to impress his colleagues was on the hunt for big savings. Obliging officials concocted an automated scheme using tax data to estimate the annual income of welfare recipients to see if they’d been overpaid. Debt notices, inaccurately calculated, were issued to hundreds of thousands.

But the scheme was illegal — and this was known by those developing and advancing it, who between them allowed cabinet to be misled and opinions about illegality ignored or suppressed. Attempts were made to deceive the ombudsman; inconvenient decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal were treated with little respect and the member who made them failed to be reappointed.

The scheme was brought undone in various ways. While it had promised savings of a billion dollars, its resolution has cost taxpayers around twice that, and there could be more.

As the royal commissioner writes in her preface:

It is remarkable how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the Scheme’s legality, how rushed its implementation was, how little thought was given to how it would affect welfare recipients and the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers on a quest for savings. Truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the Scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light. Equally disheartening was the ineffectiveness of what one might consider institutional checks and balances… in presenting any hindrance to the Scheme’s continuance.

How could it have come to this?

In some ways the answers can be found in the obverse of the royal commissioner’s recommendations.

Holmes stresses that developing a public service strong enough to prevent a repeat of something like the robodebt scheme “will depend on the will of the government of the day, because culture is set from the top.” She says that “politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments,” that “anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism” not “confined to one side of politics” and that politicians “need to abandon for good (in every sense) the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient.” They must abandon the “lifters and leaners” rhetoric, in other words, which has contributed to unemployment beneficiaries being pointedly designated as “JobSeekers” and the rate of payments kept at an impoverishing level.

In summary: robodebt is a failure of the very political leadership needed to avoid it. Cultural change must happen at the top.

But Commissioner Holmes also understands that cultural change is not a rabbit that can be pulled from a hat. It requires changes in organisational structures, laws, procedures and people.

On organisation, she recommends “an immediate and full review to examine whether the existing structure of the social services portfolio, and the status of Services Australia as an entity, are optimal.” It’s likely they are not.

Although the commissioner refrains from recommending Services Australia be made a statutory authority, it makes sense to do so. Where government functions and decision-making need protection from ministers, this is the best form of organisation to protect them. That’s why taxation, public broadcasting and other functions are housed in statutory authorities. The government should give cultural change a big shove and make Services Australia a statutory authority with clearly defined powers, better protecting it from inevitably resurgent political pressures to portray welfare support in “lifters and leaners” terms.

The commissioner recommends many changes to laws and procedures. They include establishing a legal framework for automated government services and a body to “monitor and audit” such services; reinstating a six-year statute of limitations on welfare debts; strengthening the ombudsman’s powers; reviving the Administrative Review Council; giving the public service commissioner powers to investigate the behaviour of former agency heads; providing a legislated code of conduct for ministerial staff; and much more. Curiously, none of the proposed legislative changes were anticipated in the Public Service Amendment Bill touted as a major reform and now before the parliament. Regardless, the commissioner’s legal and procedural reforms should be fully accepted.

But those recommendations don’t go far enough. While making telling observations about “the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers,” the “lack of independence” exercised by departmental secretaries” and evidence of senior public servants being “excessively responsive to government, undermining the concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice,” the commission could have done more to investigate why this is so. Yet Holmes says quite reasonably that she had “neither the time nor the resources” to consider wholesale public service reform.

Still, she does say that “the current government has emphasised that the public service must be empowered to be honest and truly independent” and has asked the public service commissioner to see that the performance assessments of senior staff “cover both outcomes and behaviour.” But that’s been the case for decades: the notion that performance assessments would ignore behaviour is absurd, and the commission drolly observes that the government’s instruction “does not go far enough.” Indeed it doesn’t.

For this reason the commissioner endorses those recommendations of the 2019 Thodey review of the public service that deal with the appointment and tenure of departmental secretaries. She observes, however, that “the extent to which these have been endorsed by the government is unclear.” Too right it is. Incredibly, there’s nothing about them in the current Public Service Amendment Bill, and that self-proclaimed bastion of integrity, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (encompassing the Office of the Secretary for Public Service Reform) refuses to say which Thodey recommendations have been implemented.

The departmental secretary, Glyn Davis, has recently mused about the need for a rethinking of Westminster guardrails: “How do we reinstate the idea that yes, ministers in the end are the decision makers, but public servants have this really important role about providing detailed advice, getting it right, making sure ministers have information and can tell them when they can’t do something?”

Rethinking? The fundamental failings in the public service’s robodebt advice were well known long before the royal commission reported. Davis and Gordon de Brouwer, the public service commissioner and before that the secretary for public service reform in Davis’s department, have had a year in which to think deeply. If the Public Service Amendment Bill is anything to go by, they have thus far come up empty-handed on the “guardrail” front.

It’s time to put aside exhortations from on high; they only seem to make things worse. And a stopper should be put on the dispiriting flow of modern management jargon, clichés and platitudes with which officials have clothed their thus far modest and in some cases ill-conceived proposals for improvement. It’s time to do something.

So, in addition to considering what should be done to ministers and officials whose behaviour fell so far short during the life of robodebt and thoroughly implementing the royal commissioner’s recommendations about structures and processes, Davis and de Brouwer should be pressing the government to implement Thodey’s recommendations on the appointment and tenure of departmental secretaries, as endorsed by the royal commissioner. They shouldn’t need to do any more “deep thinking” — they were both members of the Thodey review.

They should also turn away from the distracting dead cat dragged across the path by former departmental secretary and Crown Resorts board member, Jane Halton, who has piously said that, “What worries me is that there is a whole cadre of people who don’t understand that [providing frank advice] is essentially their job.” That’s nonsense. Officials who’ve failed with robodebt have likely understood their responsibilities only too well and their failings can’t be mitigated on the basis of misunderstandings.

So why has the commission found evidence of senior public servants being “excessively responsive to government, undermining the concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice”? There’s no simple answer to that and the situation is befuddled by the character, motivation and working methods of the ministers and senior officials involved.

One thing can be said with certainty: the present laws whereby departmental secretaries can be summarily dismissed and left on the streets with shadows over their reputations does not encourage frank and fearless advice. Officials understand all too well it can be better not to rile ministers and then see their careers and reputations destroyed.

For the thousands of years of public administration, rulers have used intimidation to keep their servants in line. Mostly that has left rulers badly served by corrupt administrations. The great reform movements in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century tried to stop this rot partly by developing a public service in which the appointment and tenure of officials were based on merit. Their dismissal was regulated by due processes and for stipulated causes because this was thought to provide efficient, effective and stable administration in which officials are better placed to advise ministers free of apprehensions about dismissal.

Australian public services inherited these tenets, but they’ve been progressively abandoned in the federal service over the past thirty years. Secretaries have been summarily sacked without explanation; concerns have grown and been forcefully reiterated by Commissioner Holmes.

Public Service Commissioner de Brouwer says a lack of tenure “doesn’t stop me from doing what I think I have to do.” Well, no one likes to admit to being intimidated, but it’s idle to think it’s not happening and that the intimidation doesn’t seep down the hierarchy. The arbitrary sackings have sent a message that’s been heard.

De Brouwer also says he’s not seen the traditional tenure protection for secretaries as a “core driver,” whatever this might mean. That is, he’s happy to turn a blind eye to what has been fundamental in British-derived public administration for going on 200 years. Yet if it’s not a “core driver,” would he like to open up all public servants to arbitrary dismissal? Or might that be too much for a public service aiming to be what it calls “a model employer”?

Certainly governments should be readily able to move departmental secretaries around, but that should not put them in the JobSeeker queue. As was the case for the first hundred years of the Australian Public Service, every effort should be made to find them other secretary positions or positions of a comparable status and remuneration. This has been a “core driver” — or in Glyn Davis’s language a “guardrail” — of Commonwealth public administration and its restoration would make a serious contribution to avoiding another robodebt. •

The post Do the robodebt recommendations go far enough? appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the quality of government and the wellbeing of citizens depend critically on the effectiveness and integrity of the Australian public service, or APS. As that wise old owl Adlai Stevenson once said, “Public confidence in the integrity of government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and pay for.”

It’s true that Australian governments have shown bursts of interest in the condition of the APS. At the federal level, the Whitlam and Fraser governments commissioned significant reports, with Whitlam’s (a royal commission headed by H.C. Coombs) reporting to Fraser and Fraser’s (a review headed by J.B. Reid) reporting to Hawke. These reports were taken seriously by the governments of the day and most of their recommendations were implemented.

But federal government interest has waned since the mid 1990s. Major reports during the Rudd and Turnbull governments were largely ignored, and many of the changes made as a result of the Coombs and Reid reports have been abandoned.

More than that, governments have made life progressively harder for the APS:

• They have levied an “efficiency dividend” uniformly across all agencies regardless of circumstances — a lazy way of saving that has slyly reduced service standards and probably reduced efficiency.

• They have increasingly used consultants, contractors and labour hire to perform public service jobs. While some of these engagements have been reasonable, others have not. Thus, the merit appointment provisions of the Public Service Act have been worked around and swathes of capability have been outsourced. In 2020–21, this “external labour force” equalled around 54,000 staff at a cost of $21 billion.

• They have reduced the tenure of heads of departments to zero and sacked many of them arbitrarily. As a consequence, there is widespread concern that departmental advice is consequently being tempered to avoid giving offence that would lead to dismissal. (Do robodebt, sports rorts and car-park rorts ring a bell?) At the same time governments now rely much more for policy advice on ministerial staff — who know everything about politics and little about policy development — rather than officials.

• Appointments to statutory positions have been politicised and the importance of the appearance and reality of independence forgotten. The AAT might be an egregious example but it isn’t the only one.

• Central management of the APS has been degraded. The Public Service Commission is essentially powerless, no apparent mechanism exists to coordinate the activities of the other central agencies, and much goes into the Secretaries Board — composed of all departmental heads and a few others — but little comes out. The board’s most notable achievement is its advice to the Morrison government to knock back important recommendations of David Thodey’s public service review, commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull.

• Devolved fixing of pay and conditions has created wide disparities in remuneration between departments based on the dishonest pretence that pay rates reflect individual agencies’ productivity, something that can’t be measured. This has debased classifications, damaged staff transfers and promotions, and disconnected levels of remuneration from the outside market. Recruitment has consequently become a hit-or-miss affair.

• Senior management structures in departments have become grossly top-heavy while bureaucratic and political empire building — divorced from sensible principles about the machinery of government — flourishes. The most notable example is the unwieldy Department of Home Affairs, which appears to have been designed to fail and continues heroically to do so.

There’s more, but that list gives a good sense of what has gone wrong and how governments have contributed.

Will this change under Labor? Anthony Albanese’s public service minister is senator Katy Gallagher, a former ACT chief minister who has shown an interest in and sensitivity about public administration. As well as her commentary in the budget papers, she has made several important speeches setting out her aim of getting the APS into better shape.

Useful steps taken by the new federal government include:

• removing the Federal Police from the Home Affairs portfolio — although, regrettably, it left ASIO there and didn’t reconstitute a standalone immigration department

• setting up a National Anti-Corruption Commission

• abolishing and reconstituting the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to negate the malign effects of politicised appointments

• significantly cutting back the use of external consultants and contractors

• removing arbitrary staff ceilings (although the so-called “efficiency dividend” has been retained)

• reintroducing reviews of agency capability and evaluations of the effectiveness of programs

• taking tentative steps to clean up the remuneration and job classification mess (although the underlying policy remains markedly deficient)

• investing significantly in data and digital.

The government also created a position of secretary for public sector reform and appointed former senior public servant Gordon de Brouwer to the job. He was given the support of an APS Reform Office headed by a deputy secretary in the prime minister’s department. Like de Brouwer, that department’s head, Glyn Davis, was a member of the public service review initiated by Malcolm Turnbull.

These early signs were so promising that Peter Woolcott, public service commissioner at the time, forecast public service reform “on steroids.” That rhetorical enthusiasm has been so little matched by reality that the steroid dealer should be asked for a refund. When de Brouwer recently took over Woolcott’s job, the position of secretary for public sector reform was left vacant.

Some of APS Reform’s proposals — described in a four-and-a-half-page “consultation paper” and an “exposure” bill to give effect to five changes to the Public Service Act — are bafflingly wrongheaded, risky or trivial. Although they took a year to prepare, little time was allowed for consultation (eight days on the bill), which amounted to nothing more than the posting of the papers on a website with a request for comment.

First, “stewardship” is to be included in the Public Service Act as a public service “value.” Leaving aside the fact that stewardship is a function rather than a value, the exposure draft bill defines stewardship by declaring that the APS “builds its capability and institutional knowledge and supports the public interest now and into the future, by understanding the long-term impacts of what it does.” That’s all well and good, but capability and institutional memory are essentially secured by providing appropriate resources, structures and procedures. A mere “understanding of long-term impacts” guarantees nothing.

Second, the paper proposes an “inspiring” public service “purpose statement” which, it is claimed, “will provide a common vision through which to view problems, develop solutions and make difficult decisions.” This statement is to be settled by a deliberative committee of forty people, with the minister relegated to observer status. Can it reasonably be imagined that the product of this insular thinking will make the slightest difference to the hardworking staff managing social security counters, collecting taxes or slaving away in naval stores, other than perhaps to demoralise them?

The paper’s other proposals include requiring that decisions be taken at the lowest possible levels and proposing agency capability reviews, published staff census data and “long-term insight reports” are generally unobjectionable, although why legal heads of power are required for any of them is neither explained nor obvious. It’s also a pity that the “long-term insight reports” are not defined, though it is claimed they can “build the capability of the APS as a whole to consider cross-cutting issues in a linked-up way.”

But the fundamental disappointment of these proposals is that they ignore the big things that need to be done. For example:

• improve the central management of the APS as a whole by bolstering the power of the Public Service Commission, restricting the role of the Secretaries Board and providing a mechanism for better coordination between the central agencies

• make the Public Service Commissioner the primary adviser on the appointment and tenure of departmental heads

• abolish fixed-period appointments for departmental heads and put them in a position where they are more likely to believe they can provide full and frank advice without the risk of being sacked

• make it legislatively clear that the merit appointment provisions of the Public Service Act should not be avoided by placing consultants and contractors in APS positions

• give legislative effect to the oft-proclaimed desire for greater diversity and inclusiveness in public service employment

• require the publication of surveys on issues — such as agencies’ adherence to service standards — in which citizens have a genuine interest

• legislate procedures for appointments to statutory offices that would minimise the risk of public confidence being undermined by political association

• tighten the regulation of community development grants so they serve the public interest rather than the interests of those in marginal or government-held electorates

• legislate rules to avoid conflicts of interest in the post-separation employment of public officials

• legislate a code of conduct for ministerial staff.

There is much more to be done, but any one of the above is more important than the whole of the legislative proposals presently on offer.

So why are the proposed legislative changes for the APS so confused, illogical and insipid?

There is probably no simple answer to that question, although a lack of stomach and imagination is evident. It may also be said that big changes would shift relative powers at the official and, to a lesser extent, ministerial levels. When that happens, it is all too common for the losers to circle their wagons and protect their territory. Could that be happening here? It’s hard to tell, but it would be nice to know.

Meanwhile, the reform cart moves slowly on with so lightweight a cargo that a former public service commissioner, Andrew Podger, has suggested that it should be parked until the report of the robodebt royal commission is available. That’s not a bad idea: it’s short odds that the commission’s report will show up the present legislative proposals as wholly inadequate and provide the grounds for a fresh, useful and more courageous attempt to raise the integrity and effectiveness of the federal public service. •

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Anyone who watches him in action will see the evidence. He seems reactive rather than proactive, rarely thinking long-term, preoccupied with the immediate. He seldom anticipates emerging crises or imagines what his role in dealing with them should be. He appears unable to develop a significant policy agenda, instead pursuing a series of often-criticised measures designed to satisfy particular interests (of which the “gas-led” recovery — to ensure energy stability and mollify the Coalition base — is one example).

Obsessed with controlling the daily theatre of politics, managing perceptions rather than considering what must be done, Morrison is ill-prepared for the big challenges. When they arrive, there is hesitancy, inadequate planning and eventually a backlash from a disheartened public.

At that point, characteristic tactics emerge. He evades accountability by shifting blame; attributes responsibility to others; flatly refuses to answer questions (sometimes simply asserting “I am the prime minister!”); exhibits passive aggression when in a difficult spot; and gives absolute priority to “managing” problems rather than engaging fruitfully with their causes.

In her September 2020 Quarterly Essay, The End of Certainty, journalist Katharine Murphy captured Morrison’s unusual “shapeshifting” proclivities but regarded his prime ministership as a work in progress, fascinating to watch. A year later, she is incensed by a government that claims to be “trying to do its best” without the “barest hint of remorse, or any sustained interest in learning from past mistakes.” Instead, she says, “we endure these cycles of self-exoneration and thin-lipped irritation. Why are people so mean to us?… It is a disgrace.”

It is hard to disagree with such observations. But, as the late psychoanalyst, biographer and historian Erik Erikson argued in Life History and the Historical Moment (1975), leaders don’t spring from nowhere. They become prominent because their specific traits (product of their life history) coincide with the expectations or demands of a particular historical moment.

The economics writer Larry Elliott argues that the pandemic has made a twenty-year-long structural and social crisis so starkly apparent that it may finally make change imperative. Equally, it can be argued that the assumptions and institutions of that twenty-year “crisis” led to a leader like Morrison.

Above all, we are living in an age of leader-centrism. Gone are the mass parties of the past — the parties within which, despite ideological differences, internal disputes were resolved by moving to the centre. They have gone because the class and community coalitions that sustained them have been swept away.

In their place, we have smaller, professionalised parties with few members. Their financial support comes from interest groups rather than members, they use market research and polling to craft a message, and they rely on leaders to speak for the party, since appeals based on shared beliefs have lost traction among all except an activist few.

Resources have built up around leaders, extending their power and influence. Everything rests on what has become the leader’s key task: to deliver the vote. In media terms, we have arrived at the “retail” politician (can he/she deliver the message?); celebrity coverage; and, inevitably, a preoccupation with leadership battles (often sparked by who is and isn’t “winning” in the polls). This generates the “permanent campaign.”

These developments didn’t happen yesterday; they have evolved over years, reaching a frenetic peak in the revolving-door prime ministerships now so familiar to us. It is a context ideally suited to “Scotty from marketing.”

The diminished pool of true believers can’t be ignored. But none of the parties, and especially neither of the Coalition parties, is capable of reconciling the wishes of their remaining base with what polls indicate majority opinion demands. The scepticism about global warming displayed by many Coalition politicians is not only a matter of individual belief but also a constraint imposed, through preselection processes, by the party membership. Political scientists Anika Gauja and Max Grömping have shown how — from voter to branch activist to electoral aspirants to elected members — the deviation from general public opinion becomes more marked the closer you get to the centre.

The result is an intensification of partisan, adversary politics. The consensus-building essential for meeting major political challenges becomes near impossible. Only courageous politicians, with clear objectives, intent on leading public debate while also able to carry the party with them — politicians like Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard — can succeed.

The challenge is not only to show the courage to lead — a capacity Morrison has yet to demonstrate, as he continues to heed the naysayers within the Coalition — but also to deploy the vast resources available to a leader in an effective way. The pandemic has induced politicians to take expert advice from beyond their usual networks. They have intervened in economic management and social behaviour to a degree previously regarded as anathema, with largely positive effects.

And by exposing long-term structural deficiencies, the pandemic has also revealed much about the dysfunctional institutional configurations in which leaders are now embedded.

At the centre of the federal government is the Prime Minister’s Office, or PMO, which was never intended to become such a major player in contemporary politics and policy. It was prime minister Gough Whitlam who wished to bring the “ideas people” so important to his opposition campaign into advisory roles when he took government in 1972. The new office, designed principally by a young public servant, Peter Wilenski, was intended to shake up the public service, to bring new ideas to the fore.

Having soon decided that the real change needed to happen within the public service proper, Wilenski was influential in establishing Whitlam’s royal commission into Australian government administration. Terry Moran, another young public servant associated with that initiative, later said, “We did not know what we were doing.” Following his own term as secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Moran became a major critic of what the PMO had become.

But subsequent prime ministers were loath to sacrifice a resource that gave them a competitive advantage in the party room and fed into their debates with public service advisers. At first, they were still intent on ideas: Malcolm Fraser had David Kemp, Petro Georgiou and other former academics as key advisers; Bob Hawke and Paul Keating relied on Ross Garnaut, Don Russell and other economists. But they also ensured that the office was led by experienced public servants — Hawke’s office by Graham Evans (from Foreign Affairs), Keating’s by Don Russell (originally from Treasury), Howard’s by Arthur Sinodinos (from Finance and later Treasury) — who could understand and relate to their public service peers.

In favourable circumstances, where leaders remained aware of the benefits of robust debate, it was an effective policymaking network. There could be collaboration, not simply competition.

This began to change during John Howard’s term. The PMO continued to grow, staffed increasingly by party loyalists rather than people with ideas. Even though Sinodinos sustained good working relations with then secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Peter Shergold, Shergold wasn’t always forewarned of important decisions, including the initiation of the controversial Northern Territory Intervention into Aboriginal communities.

Howard’s dissimulation in 2001 about the notorious “children overboard affair” is a notable example of how the office operated. In his book Don’t Tell the Prime Minister, political scientist Patrick Weller described how the PMO and other ministerial advisers facilitated “plausible deniability” by guessing what the leader needed but never conveying the detail, enabling him to deny all knowledge if questioned. Some advisers had become “the ‘junk yard attack dogs’ of the political system,” wrote Weller, “the hard men and the hitmen.”

The trend didn’t abate under subsequent governments of either stripe. Morrison’s office has been less high-profile than some — notably Tony Abbott’s, led by the formidable Peta Credlin. But it has worked to afford Morrison plausible deniability and has been intimately engaged in preserving secrecy when transparency was called for. It beggared belief that Morrison appointed his chief of staff, John Kunkel, to investigate pernicious activity by his own PMO media team, as he did in relation to Brittany Higgins’s claim that PMO staff had briefed against her partner after she made allegations of rape in Parliament House. Kunkel’s circumspect report was sufficient for Morrison to insist that his office had been “cleared,” but it turned out to be a gift for the opposition.

As a haven for loyalists, the PMO and ministerial offices have become training grounds for political aspirants to win attention and favour, paving the way for their own preselection. Armando Iannucci wickedly satirised similar trends in Britain in his TV comedy The Thick of It, but later remarked that he stopped doing the series “because politicians were seeing it as some sort of training manual rather than a warning.” In offices staffed by political wannabes, as Don Russell observes in his recent book, Leadership, the public service becomes “a problem to be confronted and addressed” rather than a source of expertise.

As this trend has deepened, the public service has become increasingly alert to the fact that it is just one voice in the policy domain. It must contend not only with advisers but also with consultants to whom specific tasks are outsourced. On the other hand, it remains the biggest player on the field, and its longevity and institutional memory give it an advantage, if only this can be sustained. The focus on the leader also plays a role here: the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet has become the pinnacle and coordinator of the public service. Talented incumbents can still effect change: Peter Shergold, for example, managed to persuade Howard’s sceptical Coalition cabinet to support an emissions trading scheme in 2007.

Yet the public service’s capacity has been eroded by three things.

First came the fracture of the political centre, as former Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Martin Parkinson argues in his recent book, A Decade of Drift. This was an outcome of the intensification of adversarial politics, which reached a crescendo with the disastrous battles over climate policy in 2009, the subsequent defeat of legislation that demonstrably worked, and the incapacity since then to reach the degree of consensus necessary for effective action on this and other policy imperatives.

Morrison was only a bit player in the last (failed) attempt to achieve consensus on emissions abatement, the National Energy Guarantee, which brought Turnbull down. But he artfully manoeuvred through the ensuing chaos to claim the prime ministership.

Second was the incremental diminution of the public service itself by under-resourcing, privatisation, and the outsourcing of key roles to the private sector and favoured consultants, which were managed with contracts veiled by “commercial confidentiality.” Paring back costs was the aim, but the latitude to act without scrutiny, and to reward mates, was an additional benefit.

Morrison has taken advantage of such developments, pouring money into private firms (even, for instance, outsourcing the initial management of the pandemic vaccination rollout) and refusing to answer questions, or even provide details, about the work being done. Combined with more manifestly dubious grant distribution enterprises — the sports rorts, the car parks in marginal electorates — these decisions encourage the perception of a system open to malfeasance.

At the heart of the efficiency drive imposed on the public service has been a blindness to the factors that make for innovation and flexibility. A degree of redundancy is needed within complex organisations to provide the capacity to change when required. Consider, for instance, the startups and tech giants fostered in Silicon Valley in the late twentieth century. Their “innovation hubs” brought together creative, ambitious individuals; all ideas were encouraged, some leading to enormous advances, others failing. You might conclude that the proponents of failed experiments were “redundant,” but learning from failure also fed into future success.

Governments have taken the opposite route, deciding that their role was “steering not rowing,” and that work could be doled out to “more efficient” private agencies. Rather than following assessments of where this might work and where it might prove problematic (as it has with some of the former public monopolies), the strategy was adopted across the board. Key players left, institutional memory was lost, and the “redundancy” essential to flexibility and rapid change was squandered.

Third, successive attempts were made to render the public service more “responsive” to government. This, too, could be said to have started in the Whitlam years, and accelerated under Hawke and Keating. The legislation was reviewed and amended periodically, and departmental secretaries were transferred to contract appointments, subjecting them to greater ministerial and prime ministerial control than the mid-century “mandarins” had experienced.

Political appointments were made to key positions. Whitlam installed John Menadue, a former adviser, as secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet (though Whitlam’s successor, Fraser, thought Menadue acted entirely properly during the 1975 dismissal, and retained him for a time thereafter). Howard gave the same role to Max Moore-Wilton, who advised public service colleagues on his arrival that things would be “more presidential” now. After a rocky initial term, though, Howard reverted to a more conventional public servant appointment in Shergold.

Morrison, just as his predecessors had done, triggered a review of the public service in 2019. Its purpose, he told the Institute of Public Administration, was to tackle the “trust deficit” generated by the public service’s failures in service delivery, to make clear that once the government has set out its policy direction he “expects” public servants “to get on and deliver it,” and to insist that the public service be an “enabler of policy, not an obstacle to it.” Morrison evidently subscribes to the view of the public service (as Russell noted) as “a problem to be confronted and addressed.”

Again like some of his predecessors, Morrison provoked controversy by choosing someone seen as a partisan appointee to head Prime Minister and Cabinet, in his case Philip Gaetjens. Along with lengthy experience in state and federal public positions, Gaetjens had served as chief of staff to Liberal treasurer Peter Costello and to Morrison himself. His performance in Senate estimates when questioned about his handling of the investigation of Brittany Higgins’s allegations, handballed to him by Morrison, did little to allay suspicions about his engagement in the web created by Morrison. It might prove to be the capstone in Morrison’s control of a diminished public service.

My argument is this: Scott Morrison’s career to date suggests a man who steers by power chances, seizing on anything that will serve the cause of domination and control. Thus, the rapid shape-shifting, the consistent effort to avoid being pinned down, and the frustration of those who have attempted to discern his driving beliefs. This might be read as the pursuit of power without purpose.

Yet it has been enabled by the decay of institutions and conventions that once served to restrain capricious leaders — media committed to scrutiny, parties with real community engagement, a commitment to principles, a PMO offering alternative ideas yet capable of working with the public service, a public service with the resources and capacity to innovate, and commercial and interest-based groups operating at arm’s length from the policy domain rather than “contracted in” to the centre.

We need not pretend there was a golden age to realise that, in relative terms, all of those ideals have been diminished by successive governments, leading to the social and structural crises now apparent. And in virtually every step he has taken, Scott Morrison has been advantaged (and shaped) by developments and precedents with a long history.

But does last week’s announcement of the AUKUS alliance with Britain and America to develop nuclear submarines for Australia — and thus take a stand against China’s ambitions — finally demonstrate purposeful leadership? Some, like journalist David Crowe, argue that this move gives the lie to impressions of Morrison as “all tactics, no strategy.” Now he has made a hard call that shows his mettle. Yet Peter Hartcher, a hawk on China, was flabbergasted by and critical of the decision. Others want us to be wary of a deal that pairs us with an inveterate chancer like Boris Johnson and an America whose will to sustain the obligations of global leadership is subject to the unpredictability and volatility of its electoral politics.

While the wisest course may be to wait and see, this startling initiative is nevertheless commensurate with what I’ve described. Rather than a new departure, it is a reversion to our traditional allies, eschewing serious engagement with neighbouring Asian leaders. It is a strategy without a plan, and we will have to wait for eighteen months (well after the next election) for details. While a product of Defence officials, it also has a venerable history: Robert Menzies used the threatening “great world struggle” of the 1950s to reinforce his dominance, as did Howard in joining Blair and Bush in their interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now Morrison takes his turn with our “great and powerful friends,” undoubtedly with the same objective of assuming the guise of commander-in-chief. A quiescent Labor Party, having largely abandoned its own ambitions, has fallen into line. We now face a national security election that will favour the incumbent (remember the 2001 election). With the enormous cost of this “defence” of our interests, allied with the austerity measures likely to be adopted to manage pandemic outlays, what chance is there that the structural, social and institutional dysfunction revealed by the pandemic will be tackled? •

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The predicament can be traced back to the government’s outbreak of self-congratulation after keeping infections so low. Hastening vaccinations was unnecessary, we were told, and there were advantages in learning more about the vaccines as they were administered in countries that didn’t have the luxury of waiting.

This was a risky strategy, as was the decision to rely so heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk was compounded by the federal government’s decision to take the leading role in the vaccination program. Giving the states the primary responsibility for dealing with the spread of Covid-19 had made sense: they manage the hospitals and they alone had the constitutional authority to enforce a lockdown; and they would also wear the blame for mishaps and incur resentment at the restrictions. But it turned out that even the most vehemently parochial premier reaped electoral advantage from the lockdown while the Commonwealth, which paid the bills, was given little credit. This time it would take the lead.

But how? The federal government administers Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It controls private medical insurance, subsidises aged care and supports research through the National Health and Medical Research Council. It also regulates medicines through the Therapeutic Goods Administration and buys the vaccines for the national immunisation program. But none of these activities involves treating patients, and the Commonwealth has never had the clinical expertise to undertake a mass immunisation program.

Undaunted, Scott Morrison declared that his government would procure, store and distribute vaccines and itself vaccinate “frontline” staff in quarantine and border control as well as aged care residents and their carers. To this end the health department engaged logistics companies and private health providers. The states, for their part, were to provide the clinics and health workers for the general vaccination program.

Problems quickly became apparent. Several vaccines due to arrive in the first half of 2021 were held up or, in the case of the one developed by the University of Queensland, required further work. The European Union restricted exports of AstraZeneca and the timetable for mass production by CSL proved unrealistic. Australia was to have administered four million doses by the end of March but had received just 1.57 million. Distribution to clinics was mismanaged, general practitioners left high and dry. Many aged care centres are still waiting.

The Commonwealth took on a further responsibility: it would provide “timely, transparent and credible information” on the progress of the vaccination program. From the outset it failed to do so. Each setback was dismissed with assurances that the timetable would be met. All questions were brushed aside with an airy confidence that all was well. “Our approach is to under-promise and over-deliver,” boasted health minister Greg Hunt at the end of last year.

A popular explanation for this debacle is that it confirms the federal government’s incapacity to undertake essential services. The prime minister’s explanation for his absence on holiday during the bushfire emergency of December 2019 — “I don’t hold the hose” — was widely criticised as a glib repudiation of personal responsibility, but no Commonwealth agency (apart from the army) has ever held a hose. The states have always been the providers of education, health, transport, utilities and other principal public services, and they accordingly have expertise in conducting such large undertakings.

As Centrelink’s robodebt scheme revealed, the Commonwealth’s record in administering its own programs is poor, and the Hayne royal commission criticised its failure to competently regulate the financial system. The aged care sector has been dogged by scandals going back more than twenty years to Bronwyn Bishop’s kerosene baths. The record in large national projects — the National Broadband Network, Building the Education Revolution and the National Disability Insurance Scheme among them — is little better.

One well-known casualty was the Rudd government’s home insulation program, abandoned in early 2010 after four deaths occurred among those installing foil-lined insulation and pink batts. The program was handicapped from the beginning, hastily conceived and relying on contractors who cut corners. Even so, I recall my amazement at what quickly became the conventional wisdom: that the problems were entirely predictable since the Commonwealth was incapable of conducting major projects. My mind went back to the introduction of wartime rationing in 1942, devised and implemented with remarkable success in just three months, and the Commonwealth’s central role in the country’s largest construction project, the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, in the 1950s.

In little more than a decade the Australian Public Service has been subjected to a score of reviews. The purpose of the most recent major report, Our Public Service, Our Future, which was published in 2019, was to “identify an ambitious program of transformational reforms to ensure the APS is fit for purpose.”

Throughout the report, the guiding assumption that Australia and its public service stood on the threshold of unprecedented change finds breathless corroboration. While “not broken,” the public service is “at a watershed,” presented with “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to prepare for a “new era” and a “different world.” On closer inspection, this apocalyptic diagnosis rests on little more than the changes brought about by new digital platforms and interconnectivity. The problem with such technological determinism is that the history of communications is replete with technological change. On what basis is the latest judged so momentous?

An inattention to history is a feature of public policy reviews. Their frame of analysis prescribes what is to be done rather than engages with what actually happened.

A very brief passage in Our Public Service, Our Future identifies just two eras in the Australian Public Service over the past seventy years. The first, which lasted to the 1970s, was “one of public service pre-eminence — a powerful, centralised and hierarchical organisation” that exercised inordinate influence. That’s true, though the APS had almost no policy capacity until the second world war, and the powerful influence of the original mandarins didn’t extend to all departments. As territories minister throughout the 1950s, Paul Hasluck forbade his officers from making any recommendations.

The second era saw a new public management philosophy distinguished by decentralisation, program budgets, an emphasis on efficiency and performance management, rigour in program and policy evaluation, and much greater responsiveness to ministers. This new orientation is credited with enabling the reforms made by the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments.

Why, then, the need for change? The short answer is that shortcomings become apparent in any established paradigm as the world changes. What shortcomings? The report’s authors mention the depletion of expertise as a cumulative effect of the government’s efficiency dividend, the proliferation of contractors and consultants, and the continued growth of ministerial advisers. They observe that no other country with a Westminster system of responsible government allows the prime minister unfettered discretion in the appointment and termination of departmental heads.

They also note that many of the recommendations have been made in successive earlier reviews. This surely should have prompted questions. Did the government fail to accept those recommendations? Or did they turn out to be impractical or ineffective? What reason is there to think that this time they will do the trick? To ignore these question is to reinforce failure. Let’s hope those who devised our vaccination program will recognise the risk of ignoring them again. •

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This is not to question programs designed to give more Australians access to good-quality sporting facilities and encourage them to participate in physical activity. Even hard-nosed Treasury economists acknowledge that money spent supporting physical activity saves money down the line by reducing heart disease, diabetes and other lifestyle-related conditions.

Those economists also know that while the market may be able to fund elite sports, there is no way that the Wilcannia Football Club can sell tickets to spectators to see its games or that the Victor Harbor Bowls Club can sell TV rights to its tournaments. These cases of what economists call “market failure” justify public funding.

But why should the Commonwealth, rather than state or local governments, be involved in such a program? After all, section 51 of the Constitution — the part that spells out the powers of the Commonwealth — makes no mention of sport.

Of course, we are not rigidly bound by a document drafted 130 years ago. Many areas of necessary cooperation have been achieved through referral of powers by the states (as allowed by section 51) or by negotiated agreements between the Commonwealth and the states. For example, until Commonwealth and state officials got together in the 1980s to address emergency management issues, different states had incompatible standards for fire hose couplings: it’s fortunate that we sorted that one out.

When it comes to community sports, however, it is hard to find any need for harmonisation or standardisation that may dictate Commonwealth involvement. It is indeed a problem that different states have different rail gauges, but it doesn’t matter that they have different football codes. Surely funding of swimming pools, ovals and so on should be the task of state and local governments, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity.

So how did we get to this point of such Commonwealth involvement, particularly under conservative Coalition governments that have traditionally stood on a platform of “states’ rights”? Why, in 2018, did a federal Coalition government establish this Community Sport Infrastructure Grant, or CSIG, program when there were so many other calls on public revenue and when it was supposedly bound by a commitment to small government?

A pragmatist will answer that question by reference to the difficult financial conditions experienced by state and local governments. In a tough fiscal environment, state governments have to prioritise vital services — school education, hospitals, policing and transport, leaving community sport well down on their list of priorities. The Commonwealth has easier access to funds, so it makes sense for it to take on funding community sport.

The problem in that justification is that it takes the present distribution of funding between tiers of government as an immutable condition. It ignores the reality that state and local governments, whose responsibilities are largely for services employing skilled labour, should have a better financial deal. Just to sustain a given level of service, their revenue base should be a growing share of GDP — a reality the Coalition refuses to recognise.

A political analyst — a hardened cynic in the Canberra press gallery perhaps — would consider the question about Commonwealth involvement to be naive. All governments like to be seen doing something, and programs that have a regional component are all the better because they can be shaped to yield electoral benefits. A pork barrel is one of the trophies of office.

That’s the “obvious” conventional political wisdom. When checked against reality, however, it doesn’t stack up. Academic studies of the effects of regional boondoggles show that they’re usually neutral in terms of electoral outcomes. While electors like an upgraded road, a refurbished stadium or a new cycle path, their liking is not accompanied by gratitude. Rather it’s the satisfaction of an exchange — they have paid their taxes and are getting public goods in return. It’s the same transactional relationship we may have with our local supermarket or hairdresser.

Specifically in relation to the CSIG grants, William Bowe (keeper of the Poll Bludger site) has found that in spite of its politically targeted outlays, it had no net effect on the Coalition vote in the 2019 election. (By now the program would be yielding net political costs.)

Even if it doesn’t pay much attention to research, one may wonder how, in designing the CSIG program, the Coalition hadn’t learned from the Ros Kelly whiteboard affair, which contributed to the defeat of the Keating government, or from the problems the Rudd government had with its home insulation program (which involved poor administration rather than political interference). In both cases the government would have been far better off politically had it handed the money to the states as tied grants, acknowledging that the Commonwealth just isn’t equipped to administer such programs.

Perhaps, in failing to learn from these cases, the Coalition was so blinded by a belief in its own competence that it believed it could succeed where Labor had failed. That’s plausible, but there is also another possible explanation: the Coalition doesn’t really have any firm principles guiding the way public money is spent, because it sees all public expenditure as wasteful. For its part the Liberal Party, in its statement of beliefs, is explicit: “businesses and individuals — not government — are the true creators of wealth and employment.”

If you believe that nothing of value comes from the public sector, it doesn’t matter how public money is spent. A grant to a gun club, a new railway, Medicare… it’s all waste, and may as well be spent in order to maximise the government’s chances in the next election. Such a view of public expenditure underpins the political economy theory known as “public choice,” a theory that arose in the United States in the late twentieth century and that caught on in Australian universities in the 1980s.

Traditional economic theory sees public expenditure in terms of providing public goods that the market cannot provide or cannot provide so well, but public choice theory sees public expenditure quite differently. Its assumption is that public expenditure is used to appease interest groups — private health insurers who want subsidies, commuters who want a railway, or the Betoota Cricket Club, which wants a change room so the crows and galahs aren’t embarrassed by cricketers’ nakedness. The aim of elected office holders is to spend just enough money appeasing these interest groups, to get them over the line in the next election.

Lending evidence to this interpretation of public administration is Morrison’s handling of McKenzie’s misdemeanours. In requiring the head of his department to inquire whether she breached ministerial standards he is rejecting the Audit Office’s assessment, an assessment based on traditional principles of public expenditure and on laws regarding the separation of ministers from the administrators of statutory bodies. Rather, the question according to Morrison is whether she has breached “ministerial standards,” the standards set by his executive government.

McKenzie’s behaviour has been in line with the standards set by the Coalition, particularly as seen in the behaviour of the prime minister in his nonstop political campaigning. Is it fair that she becomes a scapegoat for the Coalition’s entrenched disregard for the public purpose? • 

This article first appeared in Pearls and Irritations.

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But the announcement shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. The bureaucratic shake-up is slowly but surely becoming a set piece for a newly elected leader, part of the ritual of assuming power. True, Morrison’s side has occupied the government benches for five years now, and the prime minister himself has been in the chair over a year, but recall that most Coalition MPs were resigned to defeat up until, well, just about election night this year. It has taken time for the government to adjust to the startling fact of its continuing existence and start asserting some control over the agenda.

And that’s what the almost-traditional public sector purge and restructure is all about — control. John Howard set the standard in 1996 with his infamous “night of the long knives.” Even before being sworn in, he announced the sacking of six departmental secretaries — from Immigration, Transport, Foreign Affairs, Health, Environment, and Employment, Education and Training. Before the election he had promised “no slash and burn… no punishment of people on the basis of ideology,” but evidently mere proximity to Labor over the previous thirteen years gave him enough to work with. The bitter relationship between the government and the top layer of the public service would linger, with one dumped secretary, Defence’s Paul Barratt, taking the government to court over his dismissal.

Howard’s break with convention was stark. For his idol, Robert Menzies, questioning the professionalism or loyalty of the civil service was strictly the preserve of conspiracists and radicals — not a matter for serious statesmen. Though he had promised to roll back many of Labor’s postwar regulations, Menzies sacked no senior civil servants on taking office in 1949. Even “Nugget” Coombs, one of the architects of Labor’s Keynesian economic strategy, was summoned post-election and told not to worry about his job; he would go on to serve nearly twenty years as head of the Commonwealth and Reserve Banks under the Coalition. Indeed, as Norman Abjorensen reminded us just before Morrison’s purge, Menzies kept on a phalanx of senior Labor-appointed mandarins, and he would come to trust in them sometimes more than in his own cabinet.

Menzies’s relationship with the bureaucracy typified the “career service” model of the bureaucracy: it would be independent, professional and impartial. We saw some cracks in that facade under his successors — John Gorton replacing the long-serving head of the prime minister’s department, John Bunting, with Treasury’s Lenox Hewitt, to murmurs of disgruntlement in the top echelons of the public service, and his successor William McMahon reversing the decision — but for the most part this was the nature of the relationship in the postwar era.

That began to change in a serious way under Gough Whitlam. The Labor leader viewed the bureaucracy, which had not worked for a non-Coalition government in nearly a quarter of a century, as a potential handbrake on many of his ambitious reforms. In his 1973 Garran Oration, he shared his concerns that permanent heads in the Commonwealth Public Service seemed at times to dominate the policy process. In contravention of the Westminster system, he believed, ministers lacked control over policy. And so he announced a strategy to put the public service in its place: he would diversify his sources of advice, bringing in new commissions and inquiries, consultative committees and ministerial staffers to weaken the bureaucracy’s monopoly over policy advice.

Whitlam also made some controversial appointments, including John Menadue, Jim Spigelman and Peter Wilenski — Labor sympathisers or, in Menadue’s case, a former Labor candidate. But there it more or less ended. Like Morrison, Whitlam sought to amalgamate departments, but he conspicuously avoided a purge of department heads. He kept John Bunting as head of his own department, Keith Waller at Foreign Affairs, Frederick Wheeler at Treasury and Clarrie Harders at the Attorney-General’s — old-guard mandarins all, each of them a knight, and some of them destined to became thorns in the government’s side.

Like Whitlam, Labor’s Bob Hawke retained most serving senior bureaucrats, including the controversial John Stone at Treasury. Political scientist Patrick Weller has largely debunked the claim that Labor entered office with a “hit list” of department heads too close to the previous regime. Hawke made one secretary a judge and posted another overseas: not exactly a purge. For the most part, secretaries had their chance to develop a working relationship with their new ministers. But there were exceptions: the head of Immigration was disposed of under mysterious circumstances, while the buying out of Defence head Alan Woods with a chairmanship was clumsily done.

More significantly, Hawke loosened the job security of top mandarins. First, in 1984, “permanent heads” were replaced with “department secretaries,” an ominous shift in nomenclature. Three years later, Hawke abolished the Public Service Board, which had played an important role in the appointment of top public servants. Later, under Hawke’s successor Paul Keating, department secretaries’ tenure was radically altered, making it far easier for governments to get rid of secretaries they found undesirable. Frank and fearless was out of fashion; “responsiveness” was ascendant.

Howard’s 1996 purge, then, wasn’t a bolt from the blue. The federal government had been slowly sliding from a Whitehall-style professional civil service towards an American-style partisan bureaucracy for some time. But it was a shock. Here was an incoming prime minister clearing the bureaucratic decks. Not just a diplomatic posting here and a cosy board job there; wholesale sackings were now in the governmental repertoire.

While Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard avoided a blood-letting, Tony Abbott sacked four department heads on arrival, including Treasury head Martin Parkinson; and Malcolm Turnbull replaced three departments heads, who ostensibly resigned after he took over the prime ministership, and brought Parkinson back as head of his own department. Now, after recovering from the shock of still being in office, Morrison has ousted five secretaries — just a few months after jettisoning the same Martin Parkinson and replacing him with his party-aligned chief of staff, Phil Gaetjens.

The Coalition has taken the public service so far down the politicised route since 2014 that Labor looked to be sharpening their own long knives ahead of the 2019 election: Gaetjens and Home Affairs head Mike Pezzullo looked like they might be first up against the wall under a Shorten government. It never happened, of course — but a change in leader can now be as dire as a change in government for secretaries sweating over their tenure. The need for new leaders to differentiate themselves, to create new cut-through, new ideas and more responsiveness, is just as great.

Here’s the question, though: does it actually work? Do purges and departmental reorganisations really help prime ministers get a grip on things?

Looking at Howard’s tenure, we might be tempted to conclude yes, it does: those years went on for so long they are routinely referred to as an “era.” But it took time for Howard to become the dominant figure we remember him as. His first term, immediately following his night of the long knives, was distinctly shaky — scandals, broken promises, unpopular policies, flagging public support. Months out from the 1998 election, his net approval rating was in the negative 30s and polls put the Coalition’s primary vote at 34 per cent.

Howard barely made it to his second term, losing the popular vote that October. If there was a political dividend to the 1996 purge, it did not seem to matter two-and-a-half years after the fact. The Australian’s Paul Kelly concludes that the “unjustified” sackings, which “injected bad blood into relations between the new government and the public service,” were one of Howard’s key missteps in his first term.

So it went for Tony Abbott, who seemed to gain little in the way of control from his own purge. Rather, it helped to isolate him and cut him off from critical advice. Martin Parkinson himself reported that public servants were more reluctant to serve the government with gusto after the sackings, because doing so could make one a target for the next government. (Parkinson had worked on climate policy for Rudd and Gillard.) The public service was even less keen to tell the government which of its policies came with fairly serious risks. And, of course, Abbott didn’t make it to his first election as prime minister.

Similarly, amalgamations may seem to grant enhanced control over the machinery of government, but history records that, if anything, they have the inverse effect. This was the recent experience in Victoria, for example. In 2013 Dennis Napthine’s Coalition government brought planning and transport together; in 2015, his Labor successor, Daniel Andrews, added a series of other economic portfolios to create the unwieldy Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. If anything, amalgamations made it harder, not easier, to control the public service and ensure it was working on the government’s priorities. Over the past two years the government has opted to break that mega-department back up into pieces, the lesson apparently learned.

In the process, however, much was lost. Great chunks of time and money went into relocating, renaming and reorganising the new departments. Morale took a beating too, with the future of this unit or that team unclear each time. Units and authorities were split up or abolished, fragmenting or even losing expertise, documentation and institutional memory. Ask a department to turn over records from their previous incarnation and they will tell you they don’t know where they are, how the filing system worked or who they could possibly ask about it. As Laura Tingle pointed out in her Quarterly Essay, Political Amnesia, endless turnover — of senior bureaucrats and in departmental structures — shatters the capacity of the public service to remember, and thus to learn.

Morrison’s shake-up, then, is a potentially fraught move. History doesn’t suggest it will deliver much in the way of enhanced responsiveness from the public service. Indeed, in some cases these shake-ups appear to have made the life of a prime minister harder. Controlling the bureaucracy can be more difficult, controlling the agenda harder, policymaking riskier. Perhaps governments rather than the bureaucracy are where tighter control is needed, for it takes discipline to put suspicions aside and work with an institution that until yesterday served your bitter enemies.

John Howard had many vices, but one thing he excelled at was learning from his mistakes. Scott Morrison, in so many ways a reincarnation of Howard, doesn’t seem as sensitive to mistakes of the past. •

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Grube co-opts the term “megaphone diplomacy” to create “megaphone bureaucracy,” an approach to the business of bureaucracy that will have many Australian public servants gasping in horror, and their political masters apoplectic. His basic premise is that, in order to serve modern democracy, senior bureaucrats need to step up to the microphone (or raise their megaphones) and contribute their well-informed opinions to public debate.

At this point, some public service leaders will need a stiff drink. It’s one thing to develop a level of subject matter expertise — it’s quite another to enter the public fray and argue your corner. While Grube understands this reluctance, he is adamant that bureaucrats really don’t have a choice.

That’s because advanced democracies are sitting in a pivotal moment: if they want to respond to the rise of popular discontent (yes, think “Trump” and “Brexit”), they must do something. Grube’s contribution to arresting this slide into democratic dysfunction is to mobilise senior bureaucrats. For every “alternative fact” and bit of “fake news” being bandied about, there should be a public servant ready to correct the record.

But what about the obvious counterpoint, and the likely objection of senior public servants: that public policy discourse is a matter for politicians, and that public servants must stay in the background? Grube has considered this objection, and honestly, he doesn’t much care for it. He deals with it swiftly, in the opening lines of his second chapter: “Civil servants are political actors. Period. Claims to the contrary are constitutional fictions invented for convenience.” In other words, public servants who believe they are somehow above the political fray are kidding themselves.

For those senior public servants still intent on resisting, Grube provides a further piece of advice: the world is already changing, and public servants must adapt in order to perform. For Grube, the “relentless public scrutiny” of the political class has changed the game utterly. The 24/7 media cycle and the rise of social media mean that the once watertight information pipeline, controlled by ministers and government leaders, is now an “information colander.” In these conditions, the idea of public service leaders refusing to engage is absurd.

To his credit, Grube doesn’t simply dismiss concerns about public service politicisation and move on. His goal is to be persuasive, and to take his readership along with him. The strength of this book is the author’s absolute determination to win over sceptics, and he assembles his argument with skill.

To make the case for change, Grube reminds us of how far we’ve come, and how quickly. The modus operandi of government has changed enormously over the last twenty years: the speed with which decisions are now made and announced means there is a “lack of private spaces to engage in any kind of reflective decision-making.” This point alone may be enough to make many of us weep. The media-driven mania that powers twenty-first-century government may be disturbing, but Grube doesn’t dwell on it. Ever the pragmatist, he accepts the nature and pace of change, and says that senior bureaucrats need to keep up.

The centrepiece of the book is a new model for how public service leaders should operate in this new world. He proposes a “Washminster” hybrid that applies some of the slicker, bolder skills of US administrators to the Westminster model of public service. Grube does remain loyal to one of the central tenets of the Westminster model, that senior public servants should not argue with ministers in public or express partisan views. But all other elements of accreted Westminster practice are ripe for shedding.

The idea that a public servant is simply an extension of her or his minister, and has no separate identity, no longer stands up to scrutiny, in Grube’s view. Ministers have abandoned key elements of Westminster convention, notably that of taking full responsibility for the actions (or acts of omission) of their departmental public servants. When was the last time an Australian minister took responsibility for a departmental stuff-up and fell on his or her sword?

If senior public servants have an identity separate from that of their minister, then it is their responsibility, Grube argues, to contribute their individual talents and expertise to serve the public directly — while also continuing to serve their minister. Yes, the potential for conflict here is very real, and Grube does not shy away from the fact.

Heads of public service agencies must walk a line that avoids cheerleading for the government of the day but also keeps them out of the line of fire if they withhold “full-throated support” for a government policy. Grube acknowledges that this is tricky terrain — but he says that bureaucratic leaders simply need to assess the risks and weigh the potential benefits on a case-by-case basis. They may not always get it right, but it’s often riskier — to the quality of government and democracy — not to act.

Grube’s method for teasing out issues and advancing his argument is very effective, and frequently entertaining. The book is part manual, part narrative. The author selects four of the Westminster system democracies — Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — and compares them with the United States, where the independence of public officials is often formally protected.

The book is full of well-chosen case studies. While some of these are from the United States (think James Comey), most are drawn from the four Westminster countries and are therefore immediately comprehensible to an Australian audience. They allow for plenty of “compare and contrast” moments, along with the occasional “he did what?”

Crucially, Grube also has access to a pool of forty-five retired (and anonymous) public service leaders from the four Westminster countries. He quotes extensively from interviews with them, and part of the fun is in trying to guess which former secretary said what about whom. Tellingly, Grube’s interviewee pool is divided between those who applaud a more public profile for bureaucrats and those still clinging grimly to the Westminster traditions.

Of course, the question for an Australian audience is: how do we fare in the book? How does Grube think that Australia is doing?

Briefly, he concludes that public service leaders in Australia (and New Zealand) are more likely to “embrace a public persona” than their counterparts in Britain and Canada. To do this, he makes good use of case studies, including the tale of Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s role in developing the Rudd government’s mining tax. The “resource superprofits tax” was a recommendation of the Henry tax review in 2010, but it quickly became mired in bitter political debate, largely because of the mining industry’s belligerent response. Henry was seen to “own” the policy, and he responded to the political furore very publicly and with considerable vigour.

Grube emerges as a fan of Ken Henry’s public leadership style, holding it up as an exemplar of his Washminster model. But Grube also reveals that at least two of his interviewees — retired Australian secretaries — remain critical of Henry, claiming that he “weakened Treasury” and “went too far on [sic] a number of instances.”

Grube’s analysis of press reporting turns up a fascinating result. Sifting through newspaper archives in the four Westminster countries for the period 2010–13, Grube finds that Henry attracted much more press attention than both his own Australian colleagues and the heads of agencies in the other three countries. As Grube notes, a kind of “exceptionalism” in Australia allows the head of Treasury to rise above the parapet and engage with the public via the media.

In fact, Grube thinks that Washminster-style leadership may already be emerging in Australia. Readers will be able to think of other examples, beyond Treasury, of strong “public personas” among federal mandarins — Martin Parkinson at Prime Minister and Cabinet, Mike Pezzullo at Home Affairs, and even heads of traditionally reticent agencies, such as Frances Adamson at Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Grube even wades into the murky waters of public servants’ use of social media, and for those wondering, he does mention the Banerji case (recently the subject of a landmark High Court decision) although only in passing and not by name. He concedes that social media is the riskiest field of public engagement for public servants — at all levels — and that Australian policies on social media use are highly risk-averse.

By the end of Megaphone Bureaucracy, Grube has decided that some sacred cows of the Westminster tradition need to be slaughtered. Pondering the hallowed relationship of trust that allegedly exists between political leaders and public service mandarins, Grube asks whether it is “essentially illusory already.” The tradition of ministerial responsibility is already “hanging on by the skin of its teeth.” If these supposedly central tenets of Westminster practice are almost gone, why should public servants feel incapable of change? For those public service leaders tempted to forge a new path, Dennis Grube has written the guidebook. •

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In late August, Lord Kerslake — himself a former head of the civil service — argued that civil servants must consider putting their “stewardship of the country ahead of service to the government of the day.” Not surprisingly, a chorus of critics attacked the idea that the civil service should consider itself some kind of arbiter of Britain’s fate.

Which raises the question: what exactly should civil servants be doing in these extraordinary times?

It is indisputably true that the civil service exists to serve the government of the day. Constitutionally, it is an indivisible part of the executive government.; it can’t pick and choose which bits of policy it sees as worthy of support. Equally, though, another core role of civil servants is to “speak truth to power,” to offer unvarnished and evidence-based assessments for ministers to consider. The civil service doesn’t exist simply to tell ministers what they want to hear.

Where, then, is the line between appropriately “serving” and blindly “obeying”? To answer that question, we need to take a step back from the noise of Brexit to assess an underlying shift over the past two decades, and not just in Britain. It’s a swing away from what we might call “governing in private” to “governing in public.”

Where once civil servants could give their frank and fearless advice privately to ministers in the quiet rooms of Whitehall, they now find themselves drawn into a brighter light. The anonymous mandarin of the Sir Humphrey era has given way to something more public and more confronting. In this age of real-time leaks on social media, freedom-of-information laws, a 24/7 news cycle and select committee investigations, the room for civil servants to reflect privately has shrunk dramatically. As the former cabinet secretary Lord Wilson observed in 2002, the civil service “has a strong gene against this.”

This does not mean that our civil servants have suddenly become Beyoncé-like bureaucrats, cultivating millions of followers on their Twitter accounts; but it does mean they face new challenges. As they become more public, they are exposed to the perceptions of those keen to criticise what is seen as the politicisation of their position.

The late Canadian academic Peter Aucoin once highlighted a type of “promiscuous partisanship” creeping into the work of public servants in Canada under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. Public servants were increasingly acting as the political agents of the government of the day, he argued, toeing the line in their dealings with citizens. Of course, allegations of politicisation can be easier to make than they are to refute, but Aucoin’s thesis reveals the degree to which the persona of administrative leaders is being tested by the new realities of modern governance.

That is not to say it’s somehow novel for civil servants to be tested by politics. What is new is the extent to which that test takes place in public. One way to draw out the contrast is to look back to the Suez Crisis of 1956. It is now a matter of historical record that Britain and France secretly supported an Israeli invasion of Egypt in order to wrest control of the Suez Canal back from Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Having disingenuously called for an Israeli withdrawal, Britain and France followed up by sending in troops of their own on the pretext of separating the warring parties. When asked about these events in the House of Commons, prime minister Anthony Eden insisted that there had been no foreknowledge of the Israeli invasion.

The reason this tested the civil service leadership is that the cabinet secretary, Norman Brook, knew very well that there was documentary evidence of the agreement between Britain, France and Israel. He knew this because he had been asked by the prime minister to destroy it. What is salient here is that the full extent of Brook’s insight was not revealed until segments of his diary were released by the National Archives more than fifty years later. In 1956 he acted with maximum discretion in an environment of close trust with the politicians he served.

Both that level of trust and the capacity for working in secret are much diminished in the twenty-first century — and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Of course, even now not all ethical challenges for civil servants are as dramatic as the one Brook faced. Many of their forays into the public domain occur despite their best efforts, rather than from an innate desire to get involved in political battles. Think, for example, of someone like Britain’s former EU negotiator Olly Robbins, whose conversations were overheard in a Brussels bar and splashed across the newspapers the following day. Similarly, permanent secretaries have little choice when, having been berated by select committees, they find themselves on the front pages.

But the contemporary setting also allows for more proactive interventions. For example, former UK treasury secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson supported the release of his advice to government during the Scottish referendum campaign on whether it would be viable to maintain a currency union with Scotland if it voted for independence. His conclusion that it would not be advisable for Scotland to be allowed to retain the pound was widely reported in the press.

This is just one episode among many that suggest the former ideal of the anonymous civil servant is no longer commensurate with the demands of modern government. Until the 1990s, for instance, the British security services did not publicly release the names of who was leading them. The same desire for secrecy saw the British establishment go to extraordinary lengths to try to prevent a former spy, Peter Wright, from publishing his memoirs in the 1980s in the sensational Spycatcher saga — the legal battle that first brought Malcolm Turnbull’s name to public notice. Yet within a decade, the new head of MI5, Stella Rimington, had not only released her name and her photograph during her time in office but went on to publish a memoir within five years of leaving the job. The current director-general, Andrew Parker, freely provides media comment and travelled to Berlin in 2018 to give a speech on the current security challenges facing Europe. He is “governing in public.”

Officials in charge of other arm’s-length agencies have embraced an even greater licence to intervene. For instance, in 2017 the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, publicly criticised the then foreign secretary Boris Johnson for continuing to claim that Britain would regain £350 million per week once it leaves the European Union. Norgrove labelled this “a clear misuse of official statistics” in a public letter of rebuke released via the authority’s Twitter feed.

Is this a good thing? Is there a line between frank and fearless advice and an unwarranted attack on the government of the day? And where should civil servants draw the line in supporting their governmental masters if they are to avoid becoming “promiscuous partisans”?

Practice from other parliamentary democracies operating on some variant of the Westminster system of government suggests that there is room for public servants to stand their ground without bringing the institutions of government crashing down around them. During the 2013 Australian election campaign, for example, the heads of Treasury and the finance department put out a media release effectively rebuking the then prime minister Kevin Rudd for suggesting their departments had provided advice on opposition financial costings. They took care not to make an overtly political statement, simply expressing a desire to correct the public record.

Practices of public sector leadership in the United States — with its balance-of-power system of government — have long allowed for greater visibility for administrative leaders, who carry a more obvious level of public accountability for the agencies they lead. In the age of Trump, this has dialled up to new levels of combativeness. In its most dramatic manifestations, we find confrontations like the one between the president and the former head of the FBI, James Comey. This kind of public slugging match through the medium of Congressional or Senate committees gives non-elected administrative leaders the opportunity to speak truth to power in very public ways.

Less dramatically, but just as importantly, some American leaders simply bring uncomfortable facts to the public square, knowing that in the process they will undermine the political wishes of their president. The extraordinary story of Hurricane Dorian, with its pathway mapped out by a presidential Sharpie pen, is a case in point. President Trump had been convinced that the storm would take in Alabama — an assertion that was contradicted the same day by the National Weather Service in Alabama.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration then weighed in, saying that the National Weather Service had been wrong to assert quite so categorically that the hurricane would pass Alabama by. Either the National Weather Service had in fact got it wrong or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took a politically expedient position. Either way, what makes it remarkable is that this three-way conversation between the president and two scientific government agencies happened in full public view.

Is something similar happening, or going to happen, in Britain? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? The key distinction here is between being “political” and being “partisan.” No civil servant has any business openly supporting one political party against another. But at the same time civil servants — especially at the permanent secretary level — deal with politics every single day. Policymaking always has a political element. There is no concrete divide between politics and administration.

Every comment founded in evidence-based policy is capable of being read in political ways. In the current environment, it is hard to conceive of any public statement about the potential impact of Brexit that all sides would accept as “non-political.” Just as any statement about the effects of Hurricane Dorian would be read through a political lens, so any civil servant who says anything about Brexit is walking into uncharted territory.

Today’s civil servants, like their ministers, operate in a noisy public square that is full of ideas, opinions and comments — wrapped in a heavy layer of antagonism and political hyper-ventilation.

But in an era of fake news, constant real-time critiques and hyper-partisan politics, having voices prepared to bring data and evidence to the table has benefits. Civil service leaders are well placed to contribute to well-informed discussions — not in an overtly political way, but simply by providing evidence and facts about the likely impact of events on policy outcomes. As they do so, they must also be aware that observers will seek to draw them further into partisan debates. Politicians may well take umbrage at their views and argue back — as indeed they are entitled to do. It is part of the cut-and-thrust of democratic debate. Civil servants have in fact been arguing with ministers for centuries.

That brings us back to Lord Kerslake’s observation, which is not nearly as revolutionary as it at first appears. What civil servants must do is speak truth to power in frank and fearless ways. That’s actually what they’ve always done. In doing so they are serving the government of the day and playing a stewardship role for the country. The difference is that it now happens in more public ways and in the middle of the most turbulent period in British politics in living memory. No one is saying it’s easy. •

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That scepticism is a healthy ingredient of any vibrant democracy — but only up to a point. When the assumption that government is stupid, arrogant and perfidious becomes ingrained, healthy scepticism gives way to damaging and self-perpetuating cynicism. By that measure Australia may well be “at risk,” if we’re to believe recent figures about public attitudes towards public office-holders and institutions.

For those still sitting on the fence, our new book, Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand, may be a welcome antidote to the barrage of negativity. It presents twenty chapter-length case studies of governments getting it right and doing valuable things on both sides of the Tasman. For Australia, think Medicare, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and programs to combat smoking — not to mention the Child Support Scheme, gun control, curbing HIV/AIDS and, yes, even the GST.

Success is often attributed to the right people doing the right thing in the right place at the right time. That sentiment might contain a seed of truth, but associating success with serendipity, luck or the perfect confluence of disparate threads heavily discounts the careful and detailed work that goes into creating momentum, identifying the opportunities and seizing the moment.

One recurrent theme in our case studies is importance of pacing in turning an idea into a smart, fair and effective policy intervention and catalysing broad support. Our cases suggest at least three scenarios for smart timing and pacing.

First — in stark contrast to the current culture of frantic, real-time “issue management” in government — good things often come to those who have the resolve to persevere and the wisdom to wait, to bide their time while preparing the groundwork, and to strike when the iron is finally heating up again. Take the GST story, for example. For a long time it was a tale of false starts and roadblocks. And yet, beneath the ebbs and flows of political manoeuvring, work continued on building an ever-stronger case, ever so gently crowding out the space taken up by its opponents, until Liberal prime minister John Howard felt confident enough to bite the bullet and press ahead.

Likewise, the 2010 announcement that Australia would become the first nation to adopt plain-packaging laws for tobacco was the product of a long journey of evidence-building. The recommendation that tobacco be sold in standardised packaging, without any branding, had a firm evidence base assembled over two decades. But certain conditions needed to be created to allow the idea to gain broad acceptance. By recognising that plain packaging was both legally possible and politically desirable, the government was able to enact a policy that was previously considered too extreme.

The second route involves aligning separate streams of policy work. Take the development of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. This highly innovative proposal was advanced on the basis of equity and access, but there was no solid international evidence of how it would work in practice. But when the scheme’s architects became aware of the Australian Taxation Office’s mechanism for collecting child maintenance payments, they were able to draw on that experience in responding to any doubts about the scheme’s feasibility.

The third scenario involves thinking strategically about how to respond to adversity. Being caught up in a crisis like the spread of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s or the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 can be a dreadful experience for people directly affected. But by their very nature these circumstances generate focused attention on hitherto hidden or stalemated issues among the public and policymakers. The need to do something big becomes a moral imperative and a political opportunity. Key figures in the bureaucracy and civil society keep their bottom drawers well stocked in case such a window of opportunity comes along, and this is precisely what enabled the speed and effectiveness of Australia’s gun-control scheme, which continues to be held up as a model worldwide.

So, yes, governments do get it right at least some of the time. As our study shows, the ballot box and the rhythms of rotating governments are not the only sources of policy innovation. Other levers can be used by those ambitious and courageous enough to embark on change that will make a difference. •

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Multiply that across the public service and you can see why staff numbers are no longer anything like a reliable indicator of the size and scope of federal government departments and agencies. The role of public servants in supporting government functions has been cut back by a more extensive use of consultants and contractors (for reasons including government and ministerial distrust of government organisations at all levels) combined with an ideological faith that private sector organisations can do things better and a craving for the alleged benefits of greater flexibility.

Last year the Australian National Audit Office, or ANAO, analysed AusTender data to estimate the extent to which the Commonwealth relies on services from organisations other than its own agencies. Between the financial years 2012–13 and 2016–17, for example, the Commonwealth spent $39 billion (yes, billion) on external “management and business professionals and administration services,” $36 billion on “information technology, broadcasting and telecommunications” and “engineering and research and technology-based services,” and $17 billion on “politics and civic affairs.” There was more, and it all added up to enough money to build twelve new submarines and, with luck, have billions left over.

Most of this spending is likely to be entirely warranted. It includes a few very large but entirely reasonable amounts, including a National Blood Authority contract with the Red Cross to supply blood. And besides, few government agencies were ever entirely self-reliant. (In its heyday, the postmaster-general’s department used staff not employed in the public service to provide postal services in country areas.)

Reflex opposition to outsourcing is as often mistaken as it is justified. No one with a due sense of the proper use of public money would want to revert to having relatively highly paid military staff wasting their professional time on grounds maintenance, catering and cleaning when those things can be done more efficiently by private providers. But outsourcing on purely ideological grounds, on the other hand, often goes wrong. In the 1990s, against the wishes of just about all other departments, the finance department persuaded the federal government to outsource a large range of IT functions — a disaster for which no heads have ever rolled.

So it was no particular surprise when last year’s ANAO report on contracting confirmed that all was not well. No overall data is collected on outsourcing, so the ANAO was forced to trawl through the government’s AusTender listings, which are opaque, not necessarily complete and often tardily updated. There, it found evidence of “contract splitting” to avoid full, open tendering, and discovered that around half of all contracts are let by limited tender.

In all, the ANAO report detected an odour strong enough for the parliamentary public accounts and audit committee to establish an inquiry. Before the federal election was announced and the process came to an abrupt end, it had attracted fifty-eight submissions and held several days of hearings.

To hope that improvements in contracting might be generated from within the bureaucracy is to hope against hope. Departmental and agency submissions to the inquiry were, at best, models of complacency. Finance and the attorney-general’s department offered only modest suggestions about certain definitional matters, while the prime minister’s department, whose secretary has attracted the informal title of “head of the public service,” hardly managed to get even that far. The Public Service Commission, more on which a little later, washed its hands of all responsibility or interest.

The two best and most useful submissions to the inquiry came from Paul Barratt, a former secretary of the defence department, and Paul Munro, a former presidential member of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (and its successors) and a member of the famous 1970s Coombs royal commission on federal government administration.

For Barratt, who saw a considerable amount of outsourcing at first hand in defence, pushing core functions out of the public service “inevitably results in deskilling.” He warns that the “successful definition and management of contracts requires… an understanding of the subject matter at least comparable to that of the service provider.” In other words, outsourcing — especially of more complex functions — can lead to what economists call “information asymmetry”: with officials lacking the knowledge to write a satisfactory statement of requirements for contracts, providers are given scope for exploitation. Barratt also says that ministers and officials can use outsourcing to evade responsibility when things go wrong.

Munro’s submission is a telling analysis of the staffing consequences of contracting, which he says has hastened a trend away from “a standing, strong, professional corps undertaking administrative services” for governments. The “move away from… a strong, responsive, merit-based public service is very marked,” he says, and the downgrading of integrity and resilience has provided “opportunities for corrupt practices.” He points to a 2007 ANAO estimate that some 19,000 workers had found their way into the federal public service other than through the merit recruitment provisions of the Public Service Act. That number is now likely to be much greater. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand? No one seems to know.

The rules that are being circumvented can be traced back to the Northcote–Trevelyan report on the British civil service in the middle of the nineteenth century, which attempted, largely successfully, to root out the nepotism and corruption in staffing that had become a devastating blot on British public administration.

There is nothing untoward, of course, about consultants providing one-off policy or management advice for departments, or contractors being used for cleaning, building maintenance or even call centres. But when consultants, contractors and labour-hire staff are used to perform work indistinguishable from that of public servants — when they effectively occupy public service positions, supervise public servants, exercise financial and staffing delegations and the like — then the relevant constitutional and legal provisions are abused and bypassed and the doors are left open for a return to the bad old days of nepotism and corruption.

It’s easy to imagine how this works. Consultants are engaged on contract to occupy line-management positions. Faced with the need to fill subordinate positions, they can either go through the exacting legislative procedures to ensure merit recruitment and promotion or, without undue fuss, bring in on contract people they know or people employed by the same consulting firm. Serving public servants can be sidelined because the consultants simply don’t like them. Nepotism returns and grows, the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity of the merit system goes up in smoke and we’re back in the British civil service of the 1840s.

It’s not simply that tens of thousands of consultants and contract staff are being brought in to the public service outside the employment provisions of the Public Service Act. These people owe their primary allegiance to their separate employers and they’re not covered by the Public Service Act code of conduct and its associated disciplinary provisions.

This is what is happening in the federal public service, and yet the Public Service Commission, the nominal guardian of its merit system, doesn’t seem to care. When the parliamentary committee asked if it had undertaken assessments of “the impact of the growth in the use of on-hire labour contractors” and “the use of consultants to deliver core public service functions,” the commission replied that it “has not undertaken such assessments.” When asked what should be done to track the use of “contractors and on-hire labour contractors,” the commission said that “this is a matter for agencies” and that it does not itself “gather data or analyse statistical data about consultant and non-consultant numbers.”

This issue should be dealt with prominently in the recommendations of the current Public Service Review, being conducted by a panel lead by former Telstra chief executive David Thodey. But it would be unwise to hold one’s breath on that count.

Paul Munro would like to see a new, independent review of Commonwealth public administration “with powers commensurate with those of a royal commission.” Given that the Thodey review is not independent and its track record thus far has been unimpressive, there’s something to be said for that idea.

Regardless, whoever gets control of the parliamentary public accounts and audit committee in the next parliament should revive its inquiry into the ANAO’s report on contract procurement, and attempt to bring greater integrity and discipline to this major area of government activity. Most importantly, any new government and its ministers should, in their own interests, get on to it too. •

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Prominent in the saga leading up to last week’s vote were prime minister Scott Morrison’s claim that he “stopped the boats” and secured Australia’s borders from asylum seekers. These claims have been systematically debunked by a former immigration department head, John Menadue, and two former deputy secretaries, Abul Rizvi and Peter Hughes, on Menadue’s website, Pearls and Irritations. Their rebuttal has been ignored by the mainstream media to the point where the journalist Peter Hartcher recently told his readers that “Scott Morrison was the immigration minister who restored control of Australia’s borders.”

The truth is somewhat different. In September 2011, Morrison, opposition leader Tony Abbott and the Greens blocked Labor legislation that would have implemented the “Malaysian Solution.” In all likelihood, those new laws would have significantly deterred asylum seekers from attempting the dangerous journey by boat. Without the legislation, 591 boats brought 39,070 people to Australia from October 2011 to July 2013. Tony Abbott has since expressed some regret about his role in blocking the plan; as far as I can tell, Scott Morrison hasn’t joined him.

In July 2013, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that no people who arrived by boat would be settled in Australia. His government accelerated the assessment of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, quickly returning many of them home, and Indonesia slowed the arrival of people on its shores by introducing visa requirements. Immediately the number of boat arrivals fell dramatically. When the Coalition took government towards the end of September that year, 829 people had arrived by boat in that month compared with 4230 in July. In December, after he became immigration minister, Scott Morrison began turning boats back.

By knocking off the Malaysian Solution, the Coalition might well have allowed about 30,000 extra asylum seekers to arrive by boat. As Menadue has written, Morrison (and Abbott) didn’t want to stop the boats; they wanted to stop Labor from stopping the boats. Morrison then adopted Rudd’s policies and added boat turnbacks, and the supply of asylum seekers evaporated, as it almost certainly would have done without him. In large part, Morrison’s Operation Sovereign Borders was a PR stunt.

Nevertheless, asylum seekers are now arriving in greater numbers and at an increasing rate by the safer and cheaper means of the aeroplane. In the year ending June 2018, 27,931 people with visitor visas, the bona fides of which may be difficult to assess at points of departure to Australia, applied for protection visas, compared with the 18,365 boat arrivals who made such claims in 2012–13. The backlog of applications for protection visas at June 2018 was 177,140, and the backlog of appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has increased from 17,480 in 2016 to 52,491 in 2018.

In other words, Morrison and Peter Dutton have allowed the arrival of asylum seekers to spin out of control. By not clearing visa applications quickly, and so allowing people to remain for long periods without a long-term decision, they have provided additional incentives for people to try their luck as visitors. More asylum seekers are arriving by plane than did by boat, and delays in finalising their cases have provided an immense amount of work for those assisting them to get the visas they desire. As they wait in the queue, many seem to fall into the hands of unscrupulous Australian employers who sweat the devil out of them. It’s a considerable achievement and one diametrically at odds with the government’s excited rhetoric.

And it’s not as if that rhetoric is simply being used to hide the truth. It is also being used as a political lever to encourage fears about outsiders that make the effective settlement of the current high number of migrants more fraught.

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton uses alleged crimes by a few to tarnish whole groups of people. Morrison and finance minister Mathias Cormann rattle on about rapists and murderers in detention centres, as if most of the people in these hellholes are guilty of such crimes. The secretary of the home affairs department, Mike Pezzullo, plays up the threat of terrorists operating in a “dark universe” of “global contract hit men” and “fly-in assassins.” (Could Mr Pezzullo tells us how many “fly-in assassins” have plied their trade in Australia over the past five years?) Most recently, of course, having failed to get his way with laws on the medical evacuation of detainees in Nauru and Manus Island, the prime minister unconvincingly alleged that the boats will start arriving again, indulged in the kind of hyperbole that might just encourage some to give it a go, and then said that if they do he’d blame his political opponents.

The thinking behind this language not only has a political impact; it also has consequences for the institutions of government — and most notably for the home affairs portfolio, now not long past its first birthday.

The creation of this portfolio offended just about every generally accepted principle of machinery of government. Departments should be built around services to be performed rather than groups or individuals to be served. Like functions should be grouped together. Police, prosecutorial and intelligence gathering should be kept apart from related policy functions. And major responsibilities, like immigration, should have standalone departments.

But when ministers and Mike Pezzullo made their case for the department, they sidestepped those principles. “We are all one function,” said Pezzullo, “wielding state power to keep our fellow citizens safe and secure.” Such glib rhetoric exposes a pattern of empire-building at both political and bureaucratic levels.

The home affairs portfolio includes immigration, customs and multicultural affairs, and a range of security-related functions — including what its website weirdly refers to as “countering terrorism policy.” Organisationally, there are an astonishing ten deputy secretaries, some of them responsible for only one division. Deputies are supposed to relieve heads of departments from difficult spans of supervisory control; this department has used them to create that very problem.

Border Force contains customs and other functions, and its staff members are uniformed and in some cases armed. Notionally “operationally independent,” its budget and employing authorities are held by the secretary of the department. The Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC and ASIO are also in the portfolio.

In its short life, the home affairs portfolio has racked up an impressive number of administrative bungles, not just on Fijian citizenship and Interpol red notices, but on major matters exposed by the Audit Office. The main strike against it, however, is that it has allowed a range of unrelated functions to smother and corrupt the development and administration of immigration policy.

Immigration is about people; customs and excise administration is about goods. While immigration authorities need to exercise a quasi-policing role and be able to detain people who arrive in the country without their claims and fitness having been assessed, the government’s immigration function is fundamentally about bringing in people the country wants and needs, and helping them to adapt quickly. Immigration is not essentially about “keeping our fellow citizens safe and secure”; it’s about nation-building in many guises, including supporting the labour market, economic growth and prosperity.

Notwithstanding its infancy, it is time to call the creation of the home affairs portfolio for what it is — a failure that should be unpicked before it gets worse, regardless of who wins the forthcoming election.

The first step should be to create a Department of Immigration and Citizenship, headed by a senior cabinet minister. It would contain all immigration functions, including visa compliance, together with migrant settlement, language education and other migrant-support programs that have been dispersed to other departments.

Second, a Customs and Border Agency should be created to house most of the functions of the existing Border Force, perhaps with staff clothed in uniforms of a less martial shading. The agency would be well placed in the attorney-general’s portfolio.

Third, as political policy imperatives can skew police and intelligence functions, the AFP, ACIC, AUSTRAC and ASIO should be placed back in the attorney-general’s portfolio. Facts should inform policy, not be made to fit around it.

Fourth, remnant home affairs functions should be distributed to other ministers and their departments and agencies in accordance with generally accepted principles of machinery of government.

It’s unlikely the present government, either now or if it is re-elected, would have the slightest interest in such changes. It seems keen to keep immigration where it can be used relentlessly for political advantage. Scott Morrison’s recent disclosure of advice from officials about the reopening of detention facilities on Christmas Island following the medivac legislation is just the latest example of such impulses, which politicise and discredit agencies.

Labor, however, should reflect closely on the damage being done to immigration by having it in the home affairs portfolio. It should also think closely about the political dangers of maintaining an accident-prone organisation based on little more than empire-building by members of the old regime. A major reshuffle has risks, of course, but they are unlikely to be as great as the risks and costs of maintaining the present structure.

Fixing the machinery of government will not of itself restore sanity, decency and honesty to immigration policy and administration. Indeed, the parlous condition of that machinery is in many ways a symptom of the appalling way immigration is too often discussed. The most important thing is to lift the standards and quality of debate so it becomes an effective influence on policy instead of being used as a political meat grinder.

It follows that there would be value in establishing a royal commission on population policy and Australia’s immigration future, with the usual powers to require the production of documents and take evidence under oath. The commission should take into account regional geopolitical and population trends, including Australia’s labour market needs, and environmental considerations. It should recommend longer-term population policy and propose how immigration could support that policy consistent with broad economic goals.

At times immigration has been lucky enough to be based on genuine bipartisanship rather than the current rough consensus forced by political opportunism. Immigration needs to be renewed around a new consensus based on the public interest. A royal commission could help to do that in ways that seem at the moment to be beyond the will or ability of politicians left to their own devices. •

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In the American parlance, Massachusetts is a deep Democrat blue. It was the only state not to vote for Richard Nixon in his landslide re-election victory in 1972 (a fact that, with the benefit of hindsight, might reflect uniquely good judgement). When American think tank Data for Progress modelled state-by-state support for progressive policy ideas using a combination of polling and demographic data, Massachusetts unsurprisingly polled well. Support for policies like a federal jobs guarantee for all Americans, extending public healthcare to cover all citizens rather than just over sixty-fives, and paid family leave to cover childbirth and medical emergencies runs between 60 and 70 per cent.

The interesting thing isn’t that Massachusetts supports these ideas — it’s that Massachusetts is far from alone. “Medicare for all” registers majority support in a total of forty-two states, including Texas, Florida, Ohio and Indiana. Expanded family leave is supported in all but one — Wyoming (where support runs to 48 per cent). And the biggest idea, a federal jobs guarantee, is stunningly popular, with majority support in every state, from “ruby red” West Virginia (62 per cent) to California and New York (71 per cent).

Victorians do support big-picture policies but, like their counterparts in Massachusetts, this doesn’t make them outliers — they are both in good company.

What do Australians want?

It’s hard to find a common thread through the political wreckage of the post-Howard years. If there is one, it might be this: Australians expect their governments to take responsibility and deliver results. And over the past decade they have been disappointed. No Australian wants the farcical bickering over other people’s lives that ended the federal parliamentary year yesterday.

Our research reveals a staggering and growing gap between what Australians want and what their government is delivering. More than two-thirds of Australians don’t think their elected representatives act in their interests. An even larger proportion perceive fundamental problems with how our system of government works in practice: three-quarters say that ordinary citizens should have a greater say in policy, that politics is fixated on short-term issues instead of long-term challenges, and that parliaments should better reflect community diversity on ethnicity, culture, age, profession and education.

Source: CPD attitudes research conducted by Essential in September 2017 and September 2018 of 1025 and 1030 respondents respectively.

Similar views have been reflected in other Australian studies, including the latest Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion Survey released this week. Since 2009, respondents have consistently identified “the quality of government and political leadership” as the second or third “most important problem facing Australia today.” This year only 29 per cent of respondents believed they could trust the government “almost always” or “most” of the time.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Australia. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index shows a decade of “democratic recession” worldwide. But while this trust deficit is something we share with the rest of the world, there is a strong ray of hope at home. Our research suggests something distinctive about how Australians view their democracy. It’s a matter of what they think the primary purpose of democracy is.

Surveys in the United States and Britain show that their citizens tend to see the processes that underpin their political systems (free elections, representative political institutions) as the most important aspects of their democracy. Australians, on the other hand, or at least a sizeable chunk of us, are more focused on the quality of the outcomes. When we asked Australians what they thought was the main purpose of democracy, the response twice as popular as any other was “ensuring that all people are treated fairly and equally, including the most vulnerable in our community.”

Source: CPD attitudes research conducted by Essential in October 2017 and October 2018 of 1025 respondents each.

This result is significant: it means many Australians want their democracy to be purposeful — about ends, not just means. They want their democracy to be bold, with government as an active and effective partner. And they want a fairer society where all Australians can live flourishing lives.

Victoria’s election was carried by a government that took an unapologetically forthright role in providing infrastructure, enhancing key public services, and tackling important social and environmental issues. This sort of agenda is popular, and open to parties and political leaders of all ideological stripes, but not everyone has got the memo. (In Massachusetts, five of the last six governors have been Republican. The Victorian Liberal Party, out of government for all but four of the last twenty years, should be so lucky.)

This is not to say that Australians don’t also want substantial reforms to the way our democracy works. Surveys show significant majorities favouring big changes to institutions and processes, including fixing federal–state relations, establishing a national anti-corruption commission, moving to four-year parliamentary terms at the national level, embedding the public sector in more parts of Australia, and putting citizens on parliamentary committees.

The business of business

Government is only part of the story: trust in business is also on the decline. The banking royal commission has shed light on serious misconduct in our financial system, where the customer was often all but forgotten as institutions chased short-term profits for their shareholders. As NAB chair Ken Henry said in his testimony last week, “the public tolerance of that model of accountability has been pretty well eroded to zero.” For Henry, that is the “principal reason” for “a loss of trust in business.” In his view, boards should be accountable “to the country, and for the country’s future,” not just to shareholders.

This is a debate that started after the global financial crisis but has not gained much traction in Australia. Should corporations only act in the interests of shareholders, or should they have a broader purpose? Should we be satisfied with rent-seeking from some major corporates, as opposed to genuine value creation and the appetite for risk it requires? Our research suggests Australians expect businesses to uphold their end of the social bargain, with a clear majority favouring a model that places long-term social impacts on par with profits and productivity. Far more people believe it is “very important” for corporations to make a positive contribution to society than believe they exist simply to create value for shareholders.

There are some encouraging green shoots here. Some leading Australian companies are taking climate change and sustainability more seriously, driven by mounting pressure from regulators, institutional investors and shareholder activists — as well as a more enlightened view of their social licence and self-interest. But, like government, business has a long way to go to get back in step with community attitudes. The recent revelations from the royal commission, and the spectacle of revolving door politics in Canberra, can hardly be helping to overcome the sense that our leaders in both fields lack a sense of wider moral purpose.

Rebuilding confidence

There’s no easy way to restore people’s faith in government, but a good place to start is to restore government’s faith in itself.

As complex policy challenges have been piling up, governments have been stepping back. We are all familiar with the narrative that has guided public administration over the last several decades: the best thing the public sector can do is to clear the field. Government services have been outsourced, creating immense new markets, and profits, for private providers. Major assets and utilities have been sold off, often in a way that has allowed private operators to corner lucrative, uncompetitive markets. Responsibility and accountability have been dissipated.

Headcounts don’t tell the whole story, but the public service workforce Scott Morrison inherited when he became prime minister was 5 per cent smaller than it was in the last year of John Howard’s administration, and 10 per cent smaller than at its 2011 peak. Recent staffing and funding cutbacks have been indiscriminate. Agency staffing and budgets have been squeezed, and expertise contracted in at great expense. Over the five years to 2017, government work generated $1.7 billion in revenue for the Big Four accounting and consultancy firms. Along the way, the creeping politicisation of public service appointments has served to undermine independent advice.

Belief in government capability isn’t merely an academic issue. How can we expect people to trust that the CSIRO is ready to produce Australia’s next scientific breakthrough, or that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission is properly policing corporate misconduct, or that the Tax Office can crack down on tax avoidance, when governments won’t provide agencies with the resources they need to do their jobs? Even the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s submission to the inquiry into the use of consultants and contractors said that “with the implementation of staffing caps in the Australian Public Service, agencies have more frequently needed to engage external contractor and consultancy services to fill key roles.”

If this model were delivering the goods, all this might be fine. But the poor results — not least in Jobactive, vocational education and training, and aged care — have undermined public trust in government. Procurement-based policy has become a poor substitute for experience-based service design and delivery. According to our research, three-quarters of Australians think it’s important for government to maintain the capability and skills to deliver social services directly rather than pay private companies and charities to deliver them. Fewer than one in ten think this is not important. What’s more, Australians rate services delivered by government as more accessible, more affordable, of higher quality and easily more accountable than those delivered by private companies and even by charities.

This shows there is a real opportunity to turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one. The big policy opportunities of our time — the issues where the public is crying out for better outcomes — are precisely those that require a more creative, constructive role from governments. Governments shouldn’t be afraid of thinking big. In fact, it is only in doing this that we can effectively turn the complex challenges of twenty-first-century life into benefits for Australia. These could include harnessing a technological revolution in energy and transport to drive clean jobs and economic development; rebuilding government systems and services for a data-driven but human-centred age; reshaping business and finance to be genuine drivers of long-term value; managing the impact of an ageing society; and reinvesting the fruits of our material prosperity into the things we value most, including health, learning, meaningful employment and protection of our environment.

Given all these potential benefits, you could be forgiven for asking: why aren’t governments already working on this? The short answer is that in many countries, including Australia, they are. But in most cases, they’re doing so within a paradigm that undermines policy ambition and undercuts governments’ ability to deliver. This makes the downward spiral of trust and capability even harder to arrest.

Governments promise agility and opportunity but struggle to deliver. Innovative programs and funding commitments are only one budget measure or ministerial reshuffle away from the scrapheap or the pork barrel. We prosecute an Australian ideas boom while those on the losing end of the disruption “bargain” spend hours trying to get through to Serco-staffed Centrelink call centres. We announce trials but fail to consolidate the evidence of what works. Is it any wonder people have lost faith?

Missions not half-measures

To rebuild the faith in government that people are craving, and to give government the confidence to take on the big challenges, we first need to change our mindset about what governments can do. Policy-makers could do well to listen to economist Mariana Mazzucato when she visits Australia next week. In a trio of books, Mazzucato powerfully and provocatively articulates things we forgot we knew: that government research and investment have historically been key drivers of wealth creation and innovation, including in Silicon Valley; that growth has not just a rate but a direction; and that the contours of long-term development have always been shaped by policy and strategy, or their absence.

For Mazzucato, a big part of the problem is that governments have internalised the prevailing narrative about their own limitations, and as a result have become “hesitant, cautious, careful not to overstep in case [they] should be accused of crowding out innovation, or accused of favouritism, picking winners.” The story matters: “we need a new vocabulary for policymaking,” she says, that can reduce the timidity which has for decades kept politicians from funding big-picture investment.

Mazzucato wants to push our current thinking about the role of government beyond the usual one of fixing market failures: “It is about shaping a different future: co-creating markets and value, not just ‘fixing’ markets or redistributing value. It’s about taking risks, not only ‘de-risking.’ And it must not be about levelling the playing field but about tilting it towards the kind of economy we want.” As shadow finance minister Jim Chalmers said last year, citing Mazzucato, this isn’t about dismissing “the power of markets” but about “directing economic growth towards an intelligent, sustainable and inclusive model.” Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, or CEFC, is a standout example of this strategy in action, where the private and public sectors “nourish and reinforce each other in pursuit of the common goal of economic value creation.”

But the scale of our ambition can go well beyond that. Mazzucato urges governments and industry to identify core “missions” where catalytic, value-creating roles are most readily within our grasp — and go for them. What might this look like? Well, the CEFC could be seen as a down payment on a “Green New Deal” that puts zero carbon and renewable energy right at the centre of Australia’s strategy for employment and economic development. We could have missions for Australia to be a net exporter of renewable energy; build cohesion and multiculturalism through the world’s best settlement services; provide universal access to early childhood education; be a custodian of the rules-based international order; preserve our greatest natural assets like the Great Barrier Reef and the Ningaloo Reef; and drive extinction rates of native plants and animals to zero. All of these are worthy goals. All would be popular. All would have wide spillover benefits. And all are examples of where our current approach is failing to deliver and, in so doing, is eroding our collective faith in our system.

Such a shift in thinking would face a familiar critique: that more government intervention means more corruption and more inefficiency; that picking winners in the marketplace really means picking losers; that well-meaning attempts will crowd investment out rather than crowd it in. These are real risks that we’ve been hyper-attuned to over decades while policy capacity and purpose has atrophied. Mitigating these risks requires an excellent public service. Without this expert, engaged public sector, we run the even greater risk that events will set a direction of their own, and lead to disaster. Again we can take our cue from Mazzucato, who says, “The economy can indeed be made and shaped — but it can be done either in fear or in hope.” Hope isn’t enough on its own, but it is a far better starting point.

Our vision splendid

The late Indigenous activist Tracker Tilmouth was fond of Banjo Paterson’s reference to a “vision splendid” in his famous poem “Clancy of the Overflow,” and frequently asked people what their vision splendid was. Which vision splendid can we use to guide us in rethinking government?

Of course, a new Australian vista won’t be delivered overnight — the thunderstorms of the past decade are still clearing — but David Thodey’s current review of the Australian public service, running alongside the banking royal commission, provides a perfect launching pad for some big ideas on rewiring government and finance.

There are several opportunities that government could grasp right now to get things moving in the right direction.

The first is to invest in the ability of the public sector to fulfil a more dynamic and demanding role. This is in Thodey’s domain: he has signalled his panel’s desire to think big, and over 700 submissions have risen to that challenge. It will take time for the next government to review the findings and plan implementation of the most important reforms, but what it should prioritise are the investments and capabilities that will support a more innovative, mission-led approach to the public sector’s work. These might include new approaches to project evaluation and a move beyond static cost–benefit metrics that discount long-term benefits and underplay the dynamic role the state can play in shaping new markets, services and technologies. It might feature new forms of public–private partnerships, with government playing a more active role as a lead investor and risk-taker, and taking a correspondingly larger stake in any upsides from successful investments. It might also include investment in experience-based policy design and service delivery at the local level.

Above all, however, Thodey must reinforce the need for the public service to be funded and empowered to think for itself in a way that extends our horizons and brings policy development closer to the people. Without that independent heft, Australia and its governments suffer. It isn’t enough, as Mazzucato has written, “to talk about the ‘entrepreneurial state’; one must build it — paying attention to concrete institutions and organisations that are able to create long-run growth strategies and ‘welcome’ the inevitable failure this will entail.”

The second opportunity is to appoint an Australian Sustainable Finance Taskforce. Over the past two years, government-appointed panels in the European Union, Britain, Canada and elsewhere have produced far-reaching policy road maps for receptive governments that are looking for ways to support more sustainable, socially aligned financial systems. Australia has an immense amount to gain by replicating a similar approach here, given the size and sophistication of our financial sector and its endemic issues with governance, culture and trust laid bare by the royal commission. Joining the global conversation on new taxonomies and standards for sustainable financial products and projects is the bare minimum for ensuring the next generation of trade and investment opportunities do not pass Australia by.

Ultimately, the ambition should be to reorient finance to better serve the long-term objectives (as well as manage the short-term needs) of societies that the sector serves. A government-backed Sustainable Finance Taskforce that crystallises the early efforts of industry and regulators to lead this conversation won’t provide the last word, but it would be a practical, principled first step towards a system that is more aligned with the real drivers of long-term value.

The third opportunity is to engage fully and respectfully with the enormous chance for democratic innovation provided by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, produced as it was by those who had come from across our sunlit plains “from all points of the southern sky.” This is where the vision splendid for Australia can start in a way that empowers all Australians, from first to last.

The bigger task — piecing together the capabilities and coalitions needed to bridge the trust deficit and set out on missions to tackle those areas where our country falls short — is not for the faint-hearted. The pace of change and the magnitude of the challenges ahead are daunting for the public and policy-makers alike. There is always the risk of failure, but we can’t let that stop us. We need to rebuild confidence that we can take on even the biggest of challenges. As the most famous Massachusetts politician of all time put it when he was laying out NASA’s mission to land a man on the moon: “It is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait.” But Australia, like the United States that president John Kennedy was referring to, “was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them.”

In our increasingly complex world, we need to broaden our view of what government can achieve, and build a vision splendid that is uniquely Australian. It is precisely this new mindset that could spark a fresh era of development for a confident, smart nation of compassionate and sustainable communities engaged with each other, their region and their world. •

Mariana Mazzucato is visiting Australia as a guest of the Centre for Policy Development.

The post On a mission to save democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

A small Department of External Affairs was created in 1935, its staff drawn from the prime minister’s department. The new department accelerated through infancy and adolescence as Australia faced a new world, shaped by war and the rise of the United States, the challenge of communism and the end of colonialism. Asia grabbed for independence as Australia groped towards diplomatic adulthood.

Those who joined the fledgling department were present at the creation of an Australian view of the world and the diplomatic instrument to serve its interests. The new institution was a milestone in the transition to an Australia that looked to itself rather than to the mother country.

Even as the war taught Canberra that what Britain wanted wasn’t always what Australia needed, the British manner still influenced the way External Affairs thought of itself and selected its people (and rewarded its stars with knighthoods). Habit, sentiment and culture meant that London still loomed large.

But the diplomatic posts that quickly came to matter for those building the new department were in Asia and the capitals of the cold war superpowers. The list of key missions — Washington, Moscow, Korea, China, Japan, India, the United Nations — is a rollcall of the posting career of two of that first generation who rose to be diplomatic mandarins: Sir James Plimsoll and Sir Keith Waller.

Plimsoll and Waller both headed External Affairs — and Waller was secretary when the name changed to Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Amid the tides of the cold war, each of them served as Australia’s ambassador in Moscow and Washington.

These biographies of the two mandarins record the travels, travails and alarums of the diplomatic life. Each book demonstrates the fundamental truth that an ambassador’s most important diplomatic relationship is with his or her own minister and the prime minister, and that the hardest fights are waged back at home base.

Each book draws on deep research. Each is well written. Each presents a private man who had an important life of public service. And each tells the story of the foundation of Australian diplomacy understood through the life of a diplomat.

Fewster quotes Lord Balfour’s three duties of diplomats: to be accepted by the country to which they’re accredited; to interpret for their own government the policy of the country they’re posted to; and to interpret their own government for the state where they are ambassador. To this trio of often conflicting duties, he adds the dry dictum offered to ambassadors by the bishop-turned-diplomat Talleyrand: “Above all, not too much zeal.” As Waller, who judged that Talleyrand’s dictum holds good, commented, “People with passionate feelings make great national leaders. They make very poor diplomats.”

The conceptual frame that the journalist-turned-diplomat Alan Fewster uses in the title of his biography of Waller is equally useful in reading diplomat Jeremy Hearder’s biography (seventeen years in the making) of Plimsoll. Plimsoll and Waller both understood the tensions of the dictum — the need for judgement, the need to offer your government counsel as well as commitment. They trod similar paths but were vastly different men. They brought equal intelligence but contrasting skills to the creation cause.

Plimsoll was a “monkish” intellectual who never married, the better to serve his unstinting marriage to External Affairs. Waller was a harder, more forceful player. Plimsoll, a tall, rumpled figure, was happy to function with just one suit. The “suave” Waller — sardonically nicknamed “spats” for his “sartorial elegance” — had a mind and a tongue as sharp as the cut of his suits.

Plimsoll was a superb diplomat but a poor manager. Waller was a consummate bureaucrat, well able to fight Canberra battles.

Plimsoll started work in the 1930s as a bank clerk and spent eight years studying part-time at Sydney University. After war broke out he became an economist with the army’s think tank, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, an odd-ball collective of intellectuals that honed his talents. He was a captain with an untidy uniform that contrasted with his elegant mind, then a major who couldn’t salute, employed to think about Australia’s war aims and aspirations in the South Pacific and Asia.

Major Plimsoll joined the Australian military mission in the United States in June 1945. His career was transformed when he switched to a diplomatic role, “plunging into an international conference to discuss high policy relating to Japan.” Working with Dr H.V. Evatt, Australia’s external affairs minister from 1941 to 1949, his career took off.

Like many others who dealt with the Doc, Plimsoll had a close-up view of the flaws of a politician with an ambition as towering as his intellect. “Evatt’s ability was outpaced by his complete lack of principle,” Plimsoll judged. “He saw everything in terms of his own interest.”

Plimsoll’s intellect and total devotion to work quickly made him one of the elite of the diplomatic service, and he was knighted at the age of forty-five. He was no dashing diplomat — rather, he was a non-drinker who didn’t dance and was shy around women. Avoiding golf, he aimed to read one or two books a week and delighted in art. Hearder describes Plimsoll as “disciplined and monastic,” although capable of being “quietly devious.” His photographic memory was joined to “an ability to explain complex matters quickly and clearly both on paper and face to face.”

Plimsoll didn’t drive and liked to live in hotels so he could walk to work. When he was secretary of External Affairs, he lived in the Hotel Canberra, a five-minute stroll from the department. It was as though Canberra was just another posting.

Hearder illustrates this “certain otherworldliness” by telling a delightful story of Plimsoll visiting a colleague’s Canberra house and looking at the backyard with bemusement. “What are those round metal frame things?” Plimsoll asked. He was informed they were rotary hoists for drying clothes. “Oh,” said the secretary. He had deep knowledge of Australia’s world, but not much experience of the Australian backyard.

His ministers paid warm tributes to Plimsoll but none claimed to know the man. Richard Casey, external affairs minister from 1951 to 1960, was close to Plimsoll personally and professionally and once joked to him, “Heaven knows, you may be a dyed-in-the-wool dangerous radical, under the guise of a moral, balanced and intelligent individual. I don’t think you are — but who really knows?”

Paul Hasluck, Plimsoll’s minister from 1964 to 1969, called him “one of the most puzzling men whom I have met and I really don’t know whether I understood him. Yet we always worked well together.”

Our longest-serving foreign minister (1996–2007), Alexander Downer, who served as a junior diplomat under Plimsoll in Brussels in the early 1970s, acclaims him as Australia’s greatest-ever diplomat.

Like Plimsoll’s, Keith Waller’s career was boosted by working closely with Doc Evatt. Waller acknowledged Evatt’s drive to develop an independent international stance for Australia, his dogged internationalism in the creation of the United Nations, and his seminal role in the rapid growth of External Affairs. But he disliked Evatt more than anyone he ever worked for, describing his minister as “vain, venal, without honour, without principles, unscrupulous, surrounded by toadies, mean and cruel.”

The young Waller had double exposure to the great men and egos and invective of Australian politics, serving for two years as the key aide to the irascible former prime minister, Billy Hughes.

Fresh from Melbourne University, Waller arrived in what he described as a “bitterly uncomfortable” Canberra in early 1936, among the second intake of graduates recruited to the Commonwealth public service. Joining External Affairs, he later recalled, he found a “puny department without any muscle at all.” Other public servants advised him the new department was a doomed experiment that would quickly vanish — he should shift to one of the bigger bureaucracies “where the action is.”

When Billy Hughes became external affairs minister in 1937, Waller was appointed his private secretary. Waller thought the seventy-five-year-old took little interest in his department, and judged the Little Digger “capable of being both mean and dishonest.”

Waller’s first posting, in 1941, was to Chungking, the wartime capital of the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Waller’s sensory memory of his three years in Chungking was of heat, garlic, smoke, decaying vegetation and human excrement. Much of the transport around the capital was by sedan chair, and Fewster reproduces a picture of Waller sitting, working on papers, as he’s carried on a chair and poles by four men.

First posting: Frederic Eggleston, head of the Australian mission at Chungking, presents his credentials, c. November 1941. Keith Waller is standing behind his left shoulder. Sir Keith and Lady Waller Collection, National Library of Australia

By 1945, Waller was in San Francisco serving as the secretary of the Australian delegation at the conference to negotiate the formation of the United Nations. Waller proved his diplomatic skill by handling what he called “a madhouse” delegation subject to two senior politicians who both thought they were in charge. Prime minister John Curtin had sent to San Francisco both deputy prime minister Frank Forde and external affairs minister Evatt but had been “deliberately vague” about which man was the delegation leader.

Waller gave Forde and Evatt equal status and treatment, finessed conflicting orders, and kept business moving. One of the other Australian diplomats at the conference, Paul Hasluck, paid tribute to the skill of the delegation secretary: “If ever Waller dropped a slice of toast, I feel sure that he could arrange that it would not fall with the buttered side down.”

At the summit of their careers, Plimsoll and Waller ran in parallel. Plimsoll was secretary of External Affairs (1965–70) while Waller was ambassador to Washington (1964–1970). Then they did a direct swap, with Waller becoming secretary (1970–1974) while Plimsoll went to Washington (1970–74).

Giving Washington to Waller broke the tradition that Australia’s ambassador to the United States was always a politician. As usual, the ups and downs of Canberra politics played a part in this great professional compliment to Waller. At a farewell meeting before he left for Washington, prime minister Robert Menzies was characteristically wry about the choice: “I’ll tell you quite frankly that this is a position in which I would prefer to have a cabinet minister, but the ones I consider suitable I can’t spare, and the ones I can spare are not suitable.”

The biographies do tandem duty in discussing the role of the two diplomats in running the department and the part they played in the wrenching policy challenge of the era, the Vietnam war.

In the role of departmental secretary, Plimsoll and Waller were contrasts of style and intent. Jeremy Hearder judges that Plimsoll’s five years as secretary “was the least successful appointment in his career up to that time.” Plimsoll aimed to keep External Affairs running rather than trying to run it. He wasn’t decisive enough, says Hearder, and he couldn’t delegate. He lamented the “layered bureaucracy” he had to direct, looking back fondly to the department he first knew when it was “small and personal.”

Moulderer: Sir James Plimsoll on 1965. National Archives of Australia, A1200, L52865

“On the other hand,” Hearder writes, “Plimsoll was more accessible than previous incumbents. He liked to walk the corridors, especially on evenings and weekends, talking to people. He did not convey a sense of being under pressure. He asked for views and listened, although without indicating if he agreed… He made time to see every departmental officer of diplomatic rank, including the most junior, on departure or return from postings.”

Plimsoll had a wait-and-see approach to his ministers and to policy questions. Rather than the usual bureaucratic alternatives — muddle on or move differently — Plimsoll preferred problems to moulder. The moulder method is easily mocked but often effective.

In preferring moulder, he was “a master of benign neglect.” A new personal assistant joining the secretary’s office found four in-trays laden with papers: “Many were marked ‘urgent’ or ‘decision required in four days,’ going back years.” A decision not to make a decision most definitely ranked as a decision. Plimsoll once quoted approvingly a line from a British prime minister, Lord Salisbury: “The time for change is when you can no longer resist it.”

Hearder offers one example of how Plimsoll could moulder-away an idea that he saw as difficult or wrong. In 1966, Hasluck was worried about the foreign policy impact of Radio Australia’s shortwave broadcasts to Asia. He sought to have the international service removed from the Australian Broadcasting Commission and placed under the control of External Affairs. Hasluck instructed Plimsoll to prepare a submission to that effect. Plimsoll got a draft submission then put it in his filing cabinet and waited. Hasluck didn’t raise the matter again.

Plimsoll once commented to a colleague: “Inactivity can be a policy.” It was the worldliness and wariness of a diplomat who served as an ambassador eight times. He understood that getting agreement inside a government is extremely difficult, and getting a deal between nations is even harder. Energy isn’t enough — timing and judgement are paramount.

When the moment demanded it, Plimsoll could be decisive. In a panicky Seoul in 1951, with advancing Chinese troops pushing back UN forces, he got a call in the middle of the night informing him that South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, “had gone to the airport intending to flee the country. Upon hearing this, Plimsoll, clad only in his pyjamas, pursued him to the airport and persuaded him to remain.”

In a different setting, in Washington in 1970, Plimsoll seized the moment by physically seizing his minister. Foreign minister William McMahon, in Washington for an ANZUS council meeting, attended a dinner in his honour at the ambassador’s residence with the secretary of state and the director of the CIA. Towards the end of the meal, McMahon left the table. Plimsoll followed him out and the minister told Plimsoll that he was tired and was going to bed. Plimsoll replied that the guests included a number of important, busy people who had come to meet him. McMahon replied, “Some other time.” He had turned to go up the stairs, when Plimsoll seized him by the back of his coat. “All right,” McMahon conceded. “I’ll stay.”

When Waller swapped Washington for the secretary’s job, he was determined to run the department in new ways, not merely keep it running. Waller admired Plimsoll but described him as an “appalling administrator” who left the department “a mess.” He found that the secretary’s office still had the same furniture and antiquated switchboard it had used when he joined in 1936. One of his first changes was to refurnish his office.

Plimsoll had loved the old department, so it was appropriate that Waller was in charge when the name of External Affairs was changed to the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Waller also won a battle to end the unique status of the Australian High Commission in London, which was still administered by the prime minister’s department.

Waller brought Australia House under the effective control of Foreign Affairs, launching his campaign with a letter to the secretary of the PM’s department: “The time has probably come when we need to deal with the United Kingdom in much the same way as we deal with other countries of real importance to us like the United States and Japan.”

See this as a beautifully weighted public service sentence: a polite declaration of bureaucratic war, plus a reference to the “real importance” of the United Kingdom that is capable of different readings.

Waller remade the structure and administration of Foreign Affairs. He aimed to do away with the “sheep and goats approach to service in the department”: a divided culture where the diplomats were officers while consular and administrative staff were the lower ranks.

Fewster offers a vignette of Waller meeting junior diplomats to talk about his plans for change, “speaking concisely but in somewhat condescending tone.” He referred staffing questions to a personnel officer sitting beside him, but “tapped his cigarette holder sharply against his ashtray” if the personnel man’s responses were too long.

He wanted diplomats with the management skills to run a major public service department. “You would be surprised at the number of heads of mission who are brilliant but administratively inept,” he wrote to his old minister, Richard Casey. “The trouble they cause the department is endless.”

Like many of his generation and education, Waller spoke with more of an English drawl than an Ocker twang. When the Foreign Affairs head rushed to brief Gough Whitlam the day after Labor won the 1972 election, he was wearing a tweed suit. “Keith,” Whitlam boomed, “you look like an English duke!”

“Both men” — Waller and Whitlam — “belonged to a generation that was made to learn passages of the classics by heart,” writes Fewster, “and Whitlam could generally cap any quotation in English or Latin that Waller might throw at him. ‘This sort of thrust and counter-thrust can be enormous fun,’ [Waller] would write, ‘but the minutes would slip by and I would become increasingly conscious that there were many things we should have been doing instead of exchanging rather scholarly witticisms or arguing whether Thucydides was a better historian than Heraclitus.’”

Waller had started out on the Vietnam road in the 1960s every bit as hawkish as his minister, Paul Hasluck. The bitter journey made Waller rueful, if not dovish. His doubt grew during his time as Washington ambassador while Plimsoll, the dutiful External Affairs head, diligently pursued the Vietnam policy of the Liberal governments of Menzies, Harold Holt and John Gorton.

Hearder detects private reservations in Plimsoll’s approach to Vietnam. Yet Plimsoll shared the belief that a communist triumph in Vietnam would be disastrous for Southeast Asia and “tip the balance for the Communist Party in Indonesia.” Plimsoll’s general approach was shaped by a view of China as “unpredictable and a potential threat to the region.”

In checking the proposed text of his speech to parliament in April 1965 announcing the dispatch of the first Australian infantry battalion to Vietnam, Robert Menzies felt it didn’t adequately explain why Australia was making the military commitment. Plimsoll immediately wrote the outline of what became a famous passage on “the downward thrust of Chinese communism.”

In December 1964, Waller wrote a cautionary Vietnam letter to Hasluck, saying he didn’t want to put such a “gloom view” in a cable that would be shared throughout the Canberra system. “I believe I should tell you frankly,” he wrote, “that the signs of a robust and possibly successful policy in South Vietnam are vanishing rapidly.” With plenty of urging from Australia, America did adopt a more robust approach to Vietnam, but failure still arrived.

Waller was at the White House in July 1966 to hear Harold Holt, as prime minister, depart from his prepared speech and declare to president Lyndon Baines Johnson that Australia was the staunch ally that will be “all the way with LBJ.”

Channelling Talleyrand’s dictum about too much zeal, Waller was appalled by the pledge. Even the American president “shuddered” at the line, Waller later wrote, noting that LBJ “was a good enough politician to see that whilst it went down quite well in Washington, it wouldn’t be popular at home” in Australia.

In April 1972, Waller told his ambassadors that government ministers had developed a deep disillusionment with the United States, feeling that American policy was “something on which we cannot any longer rely.” The idea that America was Australia’s best friend was no longer the universal view of Australians. Waller described a “general sense of bewilderment” about “where America is going.” Accepting that there’d be a cooling in the US relationship, he wrote, “I don’t mean that anyone is thinking of denouncing ANZUS, but I think we are moving from a period when the US was the be all and end all of our existence.”

The issue of how much pressure the alliance could bear confronted the new Whitlam government only weeks after its election. The Nixon government responded to the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations with North Vietnam by resuming bombing raids on Hanoi. Waller told the US embassy in Canberra that the Labor government felt the bombing was morally wrong and politically indefensible.

On 28 December 1972, Whitlam sat down in Kirribilli House with his two senior foreign policy advisers, Waller and Plimsoll, who was visiting from Washington. With a detailed note of the conversation from the archives, Fewster puts the three men on stage and plays out the scene — the cut and thrust of their dialogue at the crossroads where politics, policy and diplomacy meet.

The prime minister, foreign affairs secretary and ambassador to the United States wrestle with the frustration of Vietnam, rehearsing the lines Whitlam will use at a scheduled press conference in a few days’ time. Whitlam must preserve the alliance while dissociating Australia from its ally’s bombing campaign. He must criticise Washington’s policy yet not inflame already strained relations with the Nixon administration.

Add to the policy conundrum the political dimension. Whitlam has to speak to Australian voters and hold together angry elements of his own party. There’s potential here for a divide between people and party. Senior members of the Labor Party are keener on breaking away from the United States than many of the voters.

In balancing these forces, Whitlam comments that he’s dealing with a US president, worried about losing face, who has already lost the war.

How should the PM respond to journalist questions about condemning the bombing? Plimsoll suggests that Whitlam might condemn bombing on this scale; the United States would not like the comment but could live with it. Waller says the government could express regret at the bombing of cities, whoever did it.

Whitlam worries about seeming to gloat about the previous Australian government’s Vietnam failures, although Plimsoll suggests that the PM could take the line that, “if there had been a Labor government in power, we would not have had forces in Vietnam.”

Whitlam has to walk a line between expressing his true views and wiping his hands “of a situation the Australian government of the time had helped to produce.” If the aim is to keep the United States interested in Asia, though, “the longer the Americans were involved in Vietnam, the worse the humiliation would be.”

Drawing on this debate, Waller was blunt in expressing the change in Australia’s perspective on Vietnam in a back-channel message to Washington the following month. The Whitlam government, he wrote, wanted good relations with the United States, “but not if the price for this was that they must remain silent in the face of an act which they regard as one of horrifying barbarity.”

Waller retired from Foreign Affairs at the age of sixty in 1974 and died in Canberra in 1992. After Washington, Plimsoll served as ambassador to Moscow, Brussels, London and finally Tokyo. He left Foreign Affairs in 1982 to become governor of Tasmania. Plimsoll died as he lived, hard at work, found in an armchair in Hobart’s government house, in 1987, with a briefing paper on his lap, taken by a heart attack at the age of seventy.

Today in Canberra, Plimsoll and Waller are remembered in the new northern suburb of Casey, named in honour of the minister they both served. All the streets of Casey are named after Australian diplomats and public servants: Plimsoll Drive winds through the centre of the suburb, while one of the streets heading to the heights, off Plimsoll Drive, is Keith Waller Rise.

Plimsoll would note that the backyards are smaller these days, so few have that suburban totem he found so puzzling, the rotary clothes hoist. From the top of his rise, Waller could look down the valley to see the city that has blossomed from the cold and uncomfortable place he first saw in 1936.

Following that valley to Canberra’s centre, the parliamentary triangle, leads to the truest memorial to these two great diplomats. Just down the hill from the parliament is the Casey building, the headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the service that Waller and Plimsoll helped create. ●

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The ICAC commissioner, Bruce Lander QC, has repeatedly asked for the right to conduct some of his hearings in public. He isn’t seeking to use that power in cases of corruption in the strict sense — where it involves suspected criminal offences — but he does want the discretion to convene public hearings when serious misconduct or maladministration is at issue.

The timing of the commissioner’s latest request was fortuitous. It came in his much-awaited report on the Oakden institutional care facility, which revealed shameful treatment of aged and mentally ill people under previous governments. Nationally, the royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse had recently completed its work  and the royal commission into the financial services sector had begun to expose deep-seated transgressions with wide consequences. With ICACs and royal commissions attracting broad and generally positive coverage, the commissioner’s request no doubt fell on sympathetic ears.

Neither anti-corruption commissions nor royal commissions have unblemished public records, of course, but they are generally considered to be highly effective instruments of accountability. When they are seen to be performing well, proposals to expand their powers are likely to gain extra traction. But an unqualified belief in their virtue is not necessarily a good starting point for adding to powers that can achieve laudable objectives yet also cause unnecessary harm, including to the innocent.

It’s important to remember that while ICACs and royal commissions share many features, there are important differences between the two — differences that are especially evident when the powers of South Australia’s ICAC are contrasted with those of the recent national royal commissions.

As inquisitorial processes, ICACs and royal commissions are subject to many of the same legal standards, and their key figures are often drawn from the same professional coterie of lawyers and former judges. Both are granted investigative powers that are denied to the police and other agencies. Because they investigate specific, pernicious subjects, they can force people to give evidence — including evidence against themselves — despite the traditional legal safeguards that limit this power in courts and other settings.

ICACs and royal commissions also generally use a combination of coercive and non-coercive powers to gather evidence and build investigative theories. Certain cases are then escalated to hearings in which testimony given under compulsion can be used to reach findings against individuals (subject to the limits of procedural fairness). Those findings might not have immediate legal effects, but they can be humiliating for their subjects and also have other serious consequences.

When South Australia’s ICAC investigates matters that fall outside the legal definition of corruption, it exercises powers annexed from the state’s Royal Commissions Act 1917. It can then make public findings of serious misconduct or maladministration, much in the manner of a royal commission, but with the crucial difference that the ICAC must exercise all of its powers in private, with only its final report released to the public. As a helpful point of comparison, this places the ICAC in a situation analogous to the state’s ombudsman.

By requesting the power to hold public hearings, Commissioner Lander is essentially suggesting that if South Australia’s ICAC is to behave like a royal commission, it should do so with the transparency traditionally associated with such inquiries. This would bring the ICAC into alignment with other legal proceedings that employ court-like methods of examining evidence and that likewise mirror courts by allowing public scrutiny. A concern for integrity lies at the root of this position. Decisions of great consequence to those affected — the prime example being a criminal conviction — must be reached with scrupulous impartiality and fairness, and the public is entitled to verify that fact.

Commissioner Lander doesn’t seek to downplay the potential consequences of scrutiny by the ICAC. The sanitised legal language often used to describe the dangers of investigative commissions — that they can cause “reputational harm” — woefully understates their effects. The stigma of having to answer allegations publicly and the humiliation of adverse findings can be devastating, ruining not just reputations but also careers, relationships and livelihoods. Commissioner Lander is right to suggest that any institution that wields such powers must act with unimpeachable integrity.

But whether integrity and publicity are synonymous is a complicated matter, especially when the consequences of commissions start accruing as soon as public allegations are made, not just when formal findings are released.

Here, the distinction between ICACs and royal commissions is important. ICACs are permanent investigative agencies whose officers, and ultimately the presiding commissioner, decide when to commence an investigation, when to escalate to formal hearings, and when to otherwise activate the institution’s coercive powers. Royal commissions are temporary agencies appointed by cabinet. Their appointment requires at least the tacit assent of parliament, since parliamentarians hold to account (or should hold to account) the cabinet members authorised to appoint a commission. While that process can be abused politically, the appointment of a royal commission normally signals an exceptional crisis of confidence in some field of public life. It may also signal that permanent mechanisms have been exhausted or are inadequate to the task.

Permanent agencies are limited by their mandates and jurisdictions; royal commissions are designed to transcend those limits, allowing them to draw links between issues that would otherwise be parcelled out among agencies. Royal commissions operate in public not just to ensure procedural integrity but also to deal very visibly with a crisis of public confidence, facilitate public participation, contribute to resolving systemic problems, and compensate for the limits of standing regulatory mechanisms. Anti-corruption commissions, on the other hand, are part of those regulatory mechanisms. They exist within a matrix of institutions — like the ombudsman, the police, and various specialised agencies — that work together to secure government accountability.

What does this perspective mean for the proposal that South Australia’s ICAC be given new public hearing powers? It raises the question of whether a permanent agency, driven by the judgements of independent officials in pursuit of relatively focused mandates, should be empowered to initiate public processes that have consequences similar to those of a royal commission.

Put another way, did the fact that the Oakden inquiry took place in private diminish the public’s right to be informed of its outcomes or to reach informed conclusions about the integrity of the process? No process can perfectly honour both the laudable qualities of transparency and the imperative of minimising unnecessary harm to individuals. Given the fact that the commission, those under its investigation, and the public at large will be affected in different ways by an investigation, the important question is where the balance should lie.

In an appendix to the Oakden report, Commissioner Lander reproduces a ruling denying the assertion by several witnesses that he lacked legal authority to criticise them in a public report. Avoiding such challenges would be one benefit, he suggests, of granting him discretion to conduct certain hearings in public. The public might thereby avoid having to judge criticism of the ICAC’s reports after the fact, without the benefit of having viewed the process. But might the public be willing to bear this burden given that the guilty and the innocent alike can have the misfortune of falling under an ICAC’s scrutiny?

Anyone reading the commissioner’s ruling might consider how the complex questions of statutory interpretation it considers — questions that involve cross-referencing three different pieces of legislation that govern one, discrete aspect of the commission’s power — might appear to a lay witness compelled by the ICAC to appear, especially someone unassisted by counsel. Whatever the legal merit of the ruling, it reveals an unacceptable lack of clarity in the legislative conception of the ICAC’s potentially harsh powers.

Accepting the commissioner’s request for a new power to hold public hearings will certainly bring clarity to the situation, but it will also allow the legislature to dodge having to define the limits of the watchdog’s powers. With that decision given to the watchdog itself, we must hope that future commissioners conduct themselves with the same concern for integrity that Commissioner Lander shows. ●

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No nation can be that great all of the time. And Germany isn’t. We can see its once relentlessly centrist politics being split open by the centrifugal forces of anti-immigrant sentiment fuelled by a hitherto taboo form of populist identity politics. Its enormous car manufacturers embarrass themselves by fraudulently doctoring environmental impact tests. Its much-vaunted Energiewende (the radical shift from nuclear and fossil-fuelled power generation towards renewables) is proving a lot harder to put into practice than it was to conceive. Even German soccer supremacy has come under challenge from the same Southern European nations whose out-of-control economies it has resolutely curtailed over the past decade.

In a revealing new book, Verwaltungsdesaster (“Administrative Disasters”), long-time observer of German public administration Wolfgang Seibel and his colleagues Kevin Klamann and Hannah Treis have laid bare the fact that, at least from time to time, German governments fail to perform even the most basic function of the state: to protect the lives and limbs of people who reside on its territory. Through four in-depth case studies they provide a sobering account of how lives have been lost because local, state and federal government authorities failed to exercise their responsibilities effectively.

Some of these cases made for global news. One was the crowd disaster at the Love Parade festival in the city of Duisburg in 2010, during which twenty-one people lost their lives and a whopping 652 were badly injured. Another was the case of a murderous trio of young neo-Nazis who managed to go undetected for seven years, during which they killed nine immigrants and a police officer as well as injuring twenty-two in a nail-bomb attack.

The book’s other two case studies are less dramatic, exemplifying the kind of “normal accident” that the media and the public briefly note, shake their heads over in disbelief, and rapidly forget. One involved the collapse of the snow-covered roof of an indoor sports and recreation centre in a small town (claiming the lives of fifteen people, twelve of whom were children). The other involved the death of a three-year-old toddler at the hands of her parents, whose tumultuous relationship and chronic inability to care for their child had occasioned the involvement of a host of agencies right from the point of birth.

Each of the cases is dissected forensically. The authors skilfully reconstruct the course of events in the weeks, months and sometimes years leading up to the eventual incidents and their effects. They meticulously detail the decisions and actions of the relevant political office-holders, public officials and other stakeholders that in combination produced these tragedies, and identify the causal mechanisms at work.

It makes for sobering reading. We might perhaps have assumed that the various governments failed to protect their citizens because their capacity to do so was undermined by cutbacks, downsizing, neoliberal outsourcing and ill-regulated competition for public service provision. This has been a constant refrain in the plethora of post-mortem reports of similar disasters in Britain since the 1980s. From the Kings Cross Station fire and the Clapham Junction train collision all the way to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the systematic erosion of the British public sector’s regulatory and administrative capacity has been named by a whole series of inquiries as a chief contributor to avoidable losses of life. But that’s not the culprit in the cases investigated by Seibel and his colleagues.

Alternatively, we might expect these tragedies to be unfortunate by-products of governments’ earnest efforts to cope with “wicked problems” in complex, multi-level governance arenas — think climate change adaptation or managing Germany’s massive immigration flows. Or of the difficulties of managing highly complex public infrastructural projects, such as the ill-fated, millions-slurping and politician-devouring effort to build a new state-of-the-art airport for Berlin. But again, none of these challenging issues is at play in these four instances.

What we have here is basic public administration done badly. Ensuring that safety and security standards are met in the organisation of a big government-sponsored pop and cultural festival. Connecting the dots between investigations of what became a whole series of murders of mostly Turkish-born immigrants. Ensuring that adequate maintenance is performed on an ageing public ice rink and swimming pool complex. And case-managing a problematic young couple so that no harm befalls their at-risk child. To be sure, not all of these tasks are outright simple, but they are hardly unique, unpredictable or inherently complex. So why did German authorities stuff up, regardless?

The authors’ answers are withering. They demonstrate convincingly that even in the early twenty-first century public administrators in Germany have not come to grips with the in-built and self-evident risks and pathologies of bureaucracy. The bureaucratic form of organisation was a mid-nineteenth-century invention that helped propel what was then Prussia into modernity and became a pivot for Germany’s famous — and at times notorious — efficacy. Its strengths derived from rule-based recruitment, promotion and decision-making, carefully tiered hierarchies, specialised expertise, functional division of labour, and a strict separation between “political” and “administrative” roles and responsibilities. It made government effective by driving out the feudalism, corruption, favouritism and dilettantism that had plagued it.

Taken too far, though, those beneficial features have their dark sides: adherence to rules for rules’ sake; “stove piping” and silo mentalities; undue deference to hierarchical superiors; turf politics; backdoor politicisation; and, perhaps most importantly, institutional indifference to the ultimate goal of the whole exercise — namely, to work for the safety, prosperity and wellbeing of citizens.

In the four cases, these workaday pathologies of public bureaucracies played a pivotal role. And what they conspired to produce were massive errors of omission: not paying due attention to safety considerations; not exchanging information or coordinating across sectional, departmental and jurisdictional boundaries; not challenging erroneous assumptions creeping into the official view of the world; not calling out bad practices in the making; not caring about the human equation in the decisions that were being made. And, pivotally, not speaking truth to power.

So when the mayor of Duisburg insisted that the Love Parade event be held even though the organisers’ informal estimates of expected attendance crept up as high as a million spectators — a million spectators to be hosted in a space that could at best safely handle about a fifth of that number — none of the municipal and regional civil servants in the various planning committees spoke up. In fact, one section head explicitly referred to the mayor’s publicly stated wishes to put pressure on other sections to stop being bureaucratic and help the (private) organisers get on with things.

These are stories that Australians can relate to. After all, this country was effectively founded and run by bureaucracies before democracy took hold. The Australian form of government, too, has been struggling to responsibly move towards post-bureaucratic forms of organising the public’s business, and to combine the necessary emphasis on procedural rationality with the substantive imperatives of its cherished “fair go.” Speaking truth to power has gradually become a bigger challenge, too, as the era of the powerful mandarins has given way to that of frenzied and imperial ministerial offices. So let’s hope that this book is translated into English soon so it can serve not just as a careful study of German administrative woes but also as a cautionary tale for Australian public administrators. ●

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Of course, it has shortcomings. They’re the result of lots of things, not the least of which is the poor quality of many of the reviews inflicted on it, especially over the past twenty-five years or so. The latest in this lamentable line-up is a “workforce management contestability review” sponsored by the Department of Finance, written by businesswoman Sandra McPhee and pretentiously titled Unlocking Potential: If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?

Whatever her qualifications for the task, and they’re not apparent, McPhee’s report displays a marked insensitivity to the specifics of personnel management in the public sector. Its fundamental method is to pile cliché after cliché on top of motherhood statements and mix up the brew with dozens of abstract nouns that could mean everything or nothing (but mostly nothing). McPhee is keen on “driving high performance,” for example, along with “workforce agility,” a “compelling employee value proposition,” “portfolio careers,” “linear upwards promotion” (could there be a downwards promotion?) and “sophisticated data analytics.”

Yet when she gets to “data analytics” she makes a hash of it. Her calculations about productivity losses on account of delays in recruitment, for example, are not worth a pinch of salt.

The report is larded with silly statements. The APS “needs to attract the very best people” is an impossible objective if it means it always needs to get the very best. It never has been able to do so and it never will. We are now in an “environment of increasing complexity” – compared to what? The environment Australia faced during the two world wars and their aftermaths, or faced with the 30-plus per cent unemployment of the 1930s? There’s real complexity for you. McPhee also says that the APS “needs to get smaller.” That’s just ideological thinking. The public service needs to be the minimum size necessary to do what governments want it to do efficiently and effectively.

McPhee also takes it upon herself to redefine the meaning of words. For example, she says that “agile employees are problem solvers, collaborative and resilient through change.” Steady up. Agile simply means nimble or quick-moving. This doesn’t mean that agile staff are good problem-solvers, and they may well be less collaborative than others because of their impulsive urge to do something, anything, so long as it can be done quickly. Resilience? There’s no reason to think that the agile are any more resilient than any others. McPhee looks as if she’s mimicking a prime minister who likes agility, but that’s no reason to give the word a vogue it can’t support.

The report not only gets many big things wrong, it also errs on smaller stuff. For example, McPhee says that the 1984 policy and legislative changes in the APS “had the catchphrase ‘let the managers manage’.” They did not; indeed, they were in some ways hostile to that notion. Further, she says that enterprise bargaining was introduced to the APS in 1997. In fact, it was introduced in the early 1990s by the Keating government. In themselves these errors are trivial, but they raise doubts about whether McPhee has failed to compensate for her lack of public sector experience by studying basic documentation relevant to her review.

While most of McPhee’s review is bad, it contains fragments of good. For example, she wants probationary service after appointments to be taken more seriously. She also recommends a more centralised approach to graduate recruitment, which is what applied until the 1980s. (But did McPhee use any “sophisticated data analytics” to discover whether recruitment delays, something she ardently opposes, are a feature of centralised versus decentralised methods?) In another return to the past, the review suggests more centrally designed and conducted induction training, especially for senior staff. That’s sensible, but again there’s no sign that any effort was made to discover why this practice withered on the vine.

McPhee is right to urge a better approach to something called “talent management.” The methods she recommends to achieve this noble aim are, however, a mass of further process and red tape. She believes that departmental secretaries should be “accountable for talent management,” which seems right; they’re responsible for selecting staff, after all. But then she says in relation to SES Bands 2 and 3 that “the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the public service commissioner should lead talent management for these critical cohorts.” This is to confuse responsibility. Moreover, how the prime minister and the cabinet secretary and the public service commissioner could properly “lead talent management” for some 650 staff at the Band 2 and 3 levels is impossible to imagine.

Further, McPhee recommends the creation of an unspecified number of “talent councils” composed of agency heads and Band 2 and 3 staff, which would “make decisions about developing and deploying critical talent across the APS.” But hang on, by law, departmental secretaries are responsible for making decisions about “deploying critical talent” in their departments. There’s no rational reason why the law should be changed to require them to bow to the will of “talent councils” wishing to put Jack or Jill in their organisations, or take them away. In effect, McPhee is proposing any number of new interdepartmental committees, bodies that have traditionally had all the agility of woolly mammoths. How these groups of busy people could effectively come to grips with partly managing the placement and development of tens of thousands staff (if, as McPhee suggests, graduates are to come within their purview) is unimaginable.

Talent management (let’s say it means the best possible placement of staff in jobs, and making sure they’re trained and developed, including by different work experience) should remain an essential responsibility of heads of agencies and their line supervisors. A more systematic approach to senior staffing aided and assisted by advice from the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the public service commissioner, or secretaries of other departments, may be useful in helping to provide wider experiences for senior staff, for example, including secondments for special tasks. Agency heads could also provide information in a more organised way about those who may be suitable for secretaryships and other top positions. But the suggestion that “talent councils” should “make decisions” about the placement and development of staff is nuts, contrary to current law and wholly inconsistent with McPhee’s recommendation that secretaries should “be accountable for talent management.”

McPhee’s consideration of merit in staffing is the darkest part of her report. “The legislative description of merit is unclear,” she says, and she would like it to be reconsidered. She doesn’t explain or analyse her assertion and she makes no suggestion as to how the definition might be improved. A clever drafter may be able to devise a sharper legal version, but mucking around with it risks giving the impression, for scant benefit, that merit is a mutable plaything of legislative drafters.

However that be, it should not be redefined to fit with McPhee’s thinking. She gives the game away when she says that “a modified approach to merit should be deployed… where an employee has already established their credentials as the best person for the job.” But how can anyone be confident that any individual is the “best person for the job” without an open competition? If McPhee’s recipe were to be adopted, it would be open to agencies to manipulate merit by, for example, arranging for a person to act in a job for a year or so then, if his or her performance is satisfactory, put their hands on their hearts and assert, without justification, that this person is the best for the job. That’s not a “modified approach to merit”; it’s an abrogation of it. It would open the door to cronyism and patronage, reducing efficiency and effectiveness, and public confidence in the integrity of the public service. Quite a recipe.

McPhee’s report is also startling for what it doesn’t say. In ninety-odd pages on personnel management, including recruitment and staff mobility, she makes no reference whatsoever to a core element of her subject, the system for fixing pay and conditions of employment. This is a striking omission, because at the moment this system is a gaping wound. Policy requires any improvements in remuneration to be 100 per cent offset by gains in productivity.

Because productivity cannot be measured in almost any public sector organisation, increased pay or conditions cannot be justified and management and staff and unions are left with nothing they can realistically negotiate about. Without an end in sight, more than two years of agonising, sham negotiations have put great strains on levels of trust between agency managements and their staff, and left some 80 per cent of public servants without a pay increase in that period. McPhee’s failure to address this shambles leaves us only to speculate about how she might square it with her “compelling employee value propositions.”

Further, as industrial relations negotiations are now conducted on an agency basis, pay and conditions are a crazy quilt of inexplicable and significant differences. Thus, people at the same classification are paid quite different amounts according to where they work. One of McPhee’s concerns is to promote greater mobility between public service agencies, but differential levels of remuneration almost certainly inhibit it.

Space is too scarce to comment on many more of the McPhee report’s failings, including its unjustified calls for more fixed-period appointments and temporary employment, and its potential undermining of the classification system in ways that would cause another bout of classification inflation. But enough is enough.

Except to mention that McPhee seems to have a quirky sense of humour. She calls for “blame free” sacking of the incompetent or those whose talents are thought to be no longer required, and suggests that those in the firing line (no pun intended) see it “as a normal part of the employment cycle.” She also latches onto an idea, supposedly from New Zealand, that the dispossessed might become “ambassadors” for the organisations that gave them the flick. Those affected might be disappointed that, having had a shadow cast over the rest of their working lives, attempts might be made to deny them the chance to be angry.

Finally, McPhee’s report, which was signed off at the end of last year and has only just seen the light of day, has apparently been agreed to by the Secretaries Board, one of whose legal responsibilities is to “model leadership behaviours.” Irony rarely comes with a sharper barb. •

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As you might expect, Parliament House’s gift shop sells souvenir teaspoons, magnets, prime ministerial mugs, and so on. But what struck me was that it also offers a remarkable selection of recent books on Australian politics, including many volumes quite critical of current occupants of the building. On sale, for example, were all of the recent books on the fall of Tony Abbott and his lieutenant Peta Credlin. A hemisphere away, Canada’s counterpart on Parliament Hill in Ottawa sticks to selling innocuous trinkets and picture books; it’s inconceivable that it would stock anything remotely vexing to either visitors or parliamentarians.

And the differences at Parliament House don’t stop there. While I never sprang for the enhanced, paid tour during my occasional visits in Canberra, one day I stood at the edge of a group that had just watched question time. Listening to the group leader’s blow-by-blow recap and editorial commentary (“the prime minister was looking pretty rattled with that question”), I assumed this was a teacher, but was shocked to learn that the guide was in fact a parliamentary employee. That may have been a fleeting moment, but Canadian parliamentary tour leaders, in my experience, stick strictly to highly sanitised comments.

For me, these became small examples of the greater outspokenness and candour of politics and public affairs in Australia, something I had certainly noticed in past visits and watching from afar, but in which I had never been fully immersed. Both elected and non-elected officials are much more outspoken, and I was amazed by how much was leaked every day in the papers and other media. While it almost certainly doesn’t add up to a full or accurate version of events, there is certainly much more sense of what is going on beyond closed doors, including in cabinet and party-room meetings. In Canada, things were particularly tight-lipped during the Stephen Harper years, but even the new light-and-goodness Trudeau government operates more secretively and leaks less, at least so far, than its Australian counterpart.

For Westminster-watchers, Australian-Canadian comparisons have long been a gold mine. The two countries offer the ideal scholarly conditions: a strong control baseline of similarities – federations with parliamentary systems; British colonial legacies; disenfranchised Indigenous populations; vast geography but small populations – and yet also clear differences – in electoral systems, for example – that produce outcomes worth analysing and explaining. And there are other general similarities: Malcolm Turnbull’s quick slide from exciting political juggernaut to dithering disappointment, for example, is remarkably similar to the demise of Canadian prime minister Paul Martin in the early 2000s. But ultimately it is the institutions and rules, often similarly labelled but different in practice, that make for the most meaningful comparisons.

Australian politicians are very direct in speech, without the veil of courtesy often found in Britain that makes it difficult sometimes even to realise one is being insulted. In contrast, Canadians – on top of their general reputation for politeness – produce a species more like politicians in the United States, who even in the most polarised moments will veer into euphemisms about their great personal regard for their opponents. (Part of the great novelty of Donald Trump is that he constantly professes contempt for his opponents.) In contrast, the personal vitriol I saw expressed by Australian politicians – the current race between Barnaby Joyce and Tony Windsor being a particular highlight – is striking.

Nothing beats watching a legislature for real, and my occasional glimpses of Australia’s parliamentary question time by video did not sufficiently prepare me for the full spectacle. In most ways, it is procedurally similar to Canada’s; the full cabinet attends daily, for example, unlike in Britain, though Canadian prime ministers typically skip one or two days a week. The Australian prime minister takes far more questions than in Canada (while ministers take fewer) and the whole atmosphere seems more lively and responsive than in Canada. It was particularly fascinating to watch the opposition frontbench (and sometimes the PM and cabinet too) huddled in discussion over tactics in the middle of question time; in Canada, the parties set a script and almost always stick to it.

The level of heckling and general noise in the House of Representatives also seems similar to the Canadian House of Commons, though it has been declining in Ottawa in recent years. But Australian heckling seems more barbed and personal, and the constant and repeated warnings by the speaker to specific MPs contrasts with the Canadian speaker’s more general (and usually ineffective) calls for order. Ejections from the Canadian chamber are unusual and newsworthy; in Australia they are clearly part of the daily routine and I had to pay attention even to notice them.

I was also amazed to see MPs in political purgatory – such as the turfed minister Jamie Briggs, not to mention Tony Abbott – spending time in the chamber and, in Abbott’s case, quietly shuffling papers. In Canada, MPs in disgrace or exile often stay away from the chamber for months or even years, since their attendance is not recorded (as it is in Australia). Indeed, Canadian prime ministers and party leaders, including Justin Trudeau, often have spotty attendance records, though Canada’s lower house has more sitting days overall.

Even more striking than the vehemence of Australian politicians is the outspokenness of unelected officials. It is especially tricky to give examples here since certain individuals and incidents may be exceptional or their statutory basis may be different than that of their Canadian counterparts. But one example that floored me was a column in the Australian by John Lloyd, the Australian public service commissioner, criticising the bargaining intransigence of public sector unions. This was “nothing new,” he declared, and the Community and Public Sector Union had never embraced “genuine reform initiatives.”

While senior Canadian officials may well hold similar views, it is difficult to think of them voicing them publicly, and certainly not in a newspaper opinion piece. This sort of directness – along with the richly stocked parliamentary gift shop and the talkative tour guide – was fascinating and refreshing compared to the often excessively cautious Canadian attitude, in which the smallest hint of an opinion by unelected officials is seen to imperil the foundations of responsible government.

Over time, though, I began to feel that this directness and transparency had a certain toxicity, especially at the political level. This was compounded by a rapacious media, far more aggressive and gossipy than Canada’s. While Australia has an admirable volume of quality political and public affairs coverage, including the journal you are currently reading, I became dismayed by the number of stories and columns at the other end of the spectrum parsing the latest gossip and greedily feeding on all the openness and candour (when they weren’t attacking each other). Coverage quickly blurred together in my eyes, and while particular mention must be made of the army of political writers at the Australian – far in excess of anything I have seen in a Canadian newspaper – the Fairfax press, the ABC and other outlets were not immune.

One example struck me on 20 March, when Malcolm Turnbull announced a recall of parliament as prologue to a double dissolution. Great attention was paid to whether Scott Morrison had been informed of the change in budget dates before he went on live radio to deny a change was coming. Was this a deliberate attempt to embarrass a political rival, the treasurer? Or just sloppy execution of a secret plan? I don’t know, but while tidbits like these are fun and fascinating, they shouldn’t be the basis of serious analysis.

This is not necessarily to defend the Canadian media, which also loves gossip and juicy details, but simply to contrast the amount of intensive daily coverage. It could be that Australian politicians have thicker skins and can ignore this magnified scrutiny, but it doesn’t strike me as enhancing democracy or good public policy. In the cacophony of outspokenness and chronic leaking that is Australian politics, the distinctions between transparency, analysis and gossip seem very blurry. It is hard for observers to tell what is truly significant, and I wonder if the participants can tell either.

Ironically, much of this candour and seeming openness appears to be a function of the byzantine nature of Australian political parties and the many shadowy corners that make Canadian parties seem as transparent as sunlight. While I was well aware of the general structure and characteristics of the Australian party system, the sheer complexity still overwhelmed me, even after four months of casual observation. Labor’s factional system at least has a long and reasonably consistent history; the Liberal Party, even apart from any Turnbull–Abbott rivalries, seems truly impenetrable, with its shifting camps and opportunists.

Admittedly, Canadian political parties are also complex organisations, and a lifetime of observing Canadian politics equips me to more or less make sense of them. But there are at least two crucial differences between Canadian and Australian parties that may contribute to this shadowy and toxic culture – the selection of leaders, and the selection of local candidates.

A few years ago, Canadians were infatuated with Australian leadership spills. The dispatch of Kevin Rudd in 2010 was intriguing because of its sheer impossibility in Canada, where party leaders are elected by the mass party in all-member votes and can only be deposed by similar mass means. Canadian parties have no quick mechanisms for challenging leaders; often the only way to get rid of a perceived underperformer is to wage an extended and divisive insurrection over many years (though New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair was recently deposed at a party convention after the party’s poor results in the 2015 election).

This insulation against challenge has been used to explain the power of Canadian prime ministers compared to their Australian, British and New Zealand counterparts. (According to a famous line from the Jean Chrétien–era 1990s, prime ministers are so entrenched that cabinet is no longer a decision-making body but merely a focus group to test decisions made in the PM’s office.) Power within the black box is notoriously difficult to study, but scholars generally agree that the Canadian prime minister and his or her personal staff hold more personal power than their Australian or British counterparts, especially over cabinet ministers, while being far more insulated from challenge. Indeed, Peta Credlin’s alleged reign of terror sounded to me like a typical PM’s office (though the phenomenon is equally lamented in Canada).

The power of Canadian PMs and the difficulty of getting rid of them led recently to a serious effort to institute Australian-style mechanisms to allow leaders to be challenged by the parliamentary party, though typically with replacements still chosen by subsequent mass votes. I have to confess I favoured those reforms, but my time in Australia may have changed my opinion – and, indeed, many Australians told me they felt things had got out of hand.

Australian party leaders now seem to live in a permanent state of advanced paranoia, with their parties full of churning intrigue and perpetual challengers, making it difficult to think much beyond surviving the next week. This situation is fuelled by the remarkable attention given to even slight shifts in two-party-preferred poll numbers. A more complicated array of parties and leaders coupled with non-compulsory voting means that in Canada polls are generally viewed with a large grain of salt. In Canberra, it was strange to see blazing headlines every time the numbers shifted even a digit or two, and hints that party leaders could soon expect a knife in the back.

Ongoing preselection battles in various constituencies, including the slow demise of Bronwyn Bishop, were equally interesting. Again, while I was reasonably well read on the subject, I was fascinated by the constant, speculative references to factional intrigue, the varying and impossibly complex rules, and the mysterious regional “powerbrokers.” In Canada, local candidates are nominated through mass votes by members of the local association, typically with only nominal involvement by the central party office. Membership rules are lax and winners inevitably prevail by signing up as many brand new members as possible to support them. (This is also the chief tactic in party leadership races.)

The phenomenon of “instant members” with no previous attachment to the party has obvious downsides, but it operates with comparative openness, brings new blood into Canadian parties, and at least rewards candidates for their political skills of organising and community mobilisation. In contrast, the more fixed, top-down methods of Australian preselection seem tailored to reward closed-door deals and factional payoffs – again, belying the impression of a truly open and transparent political system.

Still, while Australians are as deeply cynical about their politicians as anyone else, they do seem basically content with their political institutions, notwithstanding areas such as the recent and divisive tinkering with Senate voting preference rules. In Canada, by contrast, political dysfunction is often attributed to institutional design flaws, with Australian practices commonly the recommended solution. In addition to the fleeting fascination with leadership spills, electoral reform bubbles up from time to time, and the Trudeau government is moving ahead with proposals to change the electoral system, probably to a preference system based on Australian lower-house practices.

The Australian Senate is also the dream institution for many local critics of the peculiar unelected Canadian upper house; yet Australia’s deadlocks and occasional strange crossbencher bargains make it the bogeyman for many others, contributing to the continuing paralysis of Canadian Senate reform. Voter turnout has been on the decline in Canada for years (though with an uptick in the last election), and this has led to occasional musings about adopting compulsory voting. (Late in my stay, I was thrilled to get a letter at my Canberra rental home from the Australian Electoral Commission, enquiring why I was not registered to vote.)

In contrast, I was impressed by Australians’ seemingly greater confidence in their political institutions and system; certainly, I encountered few musings about the need to adopt Canadian-style reforms, though it was pleasant to see envy of our celebrity prime minister. Perhaps Australians have intuitively grasped that every country develops its own unique political system, for better and for worse. It certainly escapes many Canadian institutional tinkerers that individual political rules and practices are part of broader institutional frameworks and political systems, and are often less transferable than they might think. The names and labels are indeed similar, but subtle differences count, and seeming advantages in one area are outweighed by deficiencies elsewhere.

As my immersion in Australian politics ultimately convinced me, the comparisons and contrasts between our two countries are even richer and more intriguing than I had thought. But neither country necessarily has much to learn from the other when it comes to politics. There are exceptions of course, but in general the two political systems operate with similar core frameworks but in distinctly different environments, demonstrating the flexibility of the Westminster model and democracy as a whole. •

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The Kemp review highlights dysfunction at the heart of the Liberal–National government: an inability to manage the business of government and a failure to develop and communicate a persuasive narrative – a failure that fed perceptions that it was a “do nothing” government.

The report argues that these problems were entrenched from the beginning. They can be attributed to the lack of “a satisfactory transition to government plan” and to a defensive and cautious premier’s office that distrusted the capacity of ministers and sought to limit their autonomy by imposing centralised control and approval processes. Inevitably, this led to delays in decision-making as the leader’s office struggled to cope with the volume of work its own processes generated, and to disenchantment as ministers bridled at being “managed” by senior ministerial staffers who, though unelected, seemed to enjoy higher status.

The report details problems with the operations of cabinet as a forum for deliberation and debate, with the result that the bureaucracy was “completely in charge” of Ted Baillieu’s cabinet of 2010–13. It cites a lack of leadership, the tendency of the leader’s office to “shut down debate,” and a more general isolation and lack of engagement. But the most striking conclusion of the Kemp review relates to the question of philosophy: what a Liberal Party government stands for, its public-interest framework and the values it brings to the task of governing. This, of course, is well-worn ground for Kemp, a former academic and federal minister who has long emphasised philosophy and purpose, invoking party founder Sir Robert Menzies. But that he thought it necessary to reprise this in his final report is revealing – perhaps of the tribal and careerist nature of the contemporary party and those coming through its ranks seeking preselection.

Aside from being an antidote to the paranoid tendency of Australia’s political parties to prevent the detailed findings of internal reviews from becoming public, the Kemp review warrants close examination for two reasons. It comprehensively explains the failure of the government of Baillieu and his successor Denis Napthine, and identifies the work needed for the Victorian Liberal Party to be competitive at the 2018 election. The second reason, more compelling for my purposes because its diagnosis is so eerily familiar, is that its findings could be applied almost verbatim to the experience of Queensland under Campbell Newman, and in Canberra under Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and, most recently, Tony Abbott.

Kemp himself raises the question that has confounded me this past year: why, if the Coalition knew how to run a successful government federally for nine years under John Howard, was that knowledge and expertise not available to colleagues in Victoria? The same question applies to the Liberal National Party, which won a landslide victory in Queensland in March 2012, and also to Tony Abbott, who knew from as early as the 2010 election that he would likely win the September 2013 federal election. Why couldn’t relevant lessons be learned and applied to the preparation for government? What are the barriers and impediments to learning among Australia’s political professionals?

Learning demands the capacity to interpret and reflect on experience. For the political scientist Daniel Ponder, who has applied concepts of organisational learning to the American presidency, learning implies the ability to use insight to make changes to the way an organisation (in his case, the institution of the presidency) approaches its work. Learning becomes evident if new ways of thinking are absorbed into an organisation’s “procedures, rules, routines, informal communities of practice, the collective memory and the agency culture.” In the presidential context, learning can be thought of as lessons adapted for different tasks at different times. Ponder cites Julianne Mahler’s three elements of learning: problem perception; reflection, analysis and action to address perceived deficiencies, and evidence of a change of mind. Learning can only be said to have occurred if the change is institutionalised – that is, incorporated into the routines and practices of the organisation.

Each of these elements was apparent in the way John Howard adapted his leadership style during his second incarnation as Liberal leader. By contrast, there is little evidence that Campbell Newman or Tony Abbott exhibited any of them. Neither man seemed to perceive there were problems with his leadership or management of his government. Even if they reflected on and analysed their situations – as both were forced to do, after Newman’s resounding by-election defeats, and in Abbott’s case when he retained the prime ministership after the February 2015 leadership ballot – there was no evidence that they (or their courts) changed either their minds or their modus operandi. Nor did those events, party-room murmurings, leaks, or consistently poor opinion polls prompt fundamental changes to the structure and operations of their private offices, or their approach to cabinet government.

It seems to me that the barriers and impediments to partisan learning – the ability and willingness of political leaders and their parties to learn from experience – exist at two levels. The first is in the pathway to attaining government. This encompasses the career backgrounds and experiences of political leaders and their (now many more numerous) fellow travellers, the experience of opposition, and how transitions of government are managed. The second impediment is embedded in the hybrid advisory model that has evolved to support political leaders. It deprives them of institutional memory and the capacity to learn. At the same time it allows a leader like Abbott, Newman or Rudd to develop relatively insular and self-reinforcing networks of advice and support until, inevitably, the party room revolts.

It is the performance of political leaders, not of officials, that has fostered the elite consensus that Australia’s political culture is broken – that the nation’s leaders are incapable of governing, let alone of delivering genuine reform. This lament began in the Rudd years, rising to a crescendo under Gillard and Abbott. It was graphically illustrated in August 2015 when leaders of business, unions and community groups joined together to debate the options for long-term reform at the National Reform Summit – a process organised by the Australian Financial Review and the Australian that specifically excluded politicians. The post-summit analysis confirmed the central premise. Fairfax journalist Peter Hartcher described the summit as “a heartfelt cry for national leadership,” a “spontaneous rebuke to the political parties,” and as an attempt by the nation’s elites “to goad Australia’s political leaders into doing their jobs.”

The nature of opposition can also impede learning along the pathway to government. An election loss (particularly one that is expected) often triggers the departure of longstanding ministers and MPs and the staff who support them. It deprives the parliamentary party of knowledge and understanding of the business of governing, and of access to public service experience and expertise. This gap only grows during its time on the opposition benches, as does the tendency to rely on political staffers for policy advice. Prime ministers determine the allocation of staff resources – by convention, an opposition receives around 21 per cent of the staff available to the incumbents. These factors foster close relationships between opposition staff and shadow ministers, and account for at least some of the difficulty in accommodating the wider group of advisers that accompanies the transition to government; the volume of work shared across a fairly lean operation participating in the “permanent campaign” leaves little time for learning or reflection.

Recently, because parties have been unable to reconcile internal tensions, or find an experienced candidate capable of “cutting through” with the public, they have resorted to candidates from outside the leadership mainstream. For Labor, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd fall into this category. For the Coalition, Tony Abbott’s one-vote ascendancy emerged from the vacuum that followed John Howard’s defeat, the instability that followed Peter Costello’s refusal to take up the mantle, and Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull’s inability to unite the disparate interests that comprise the Liberal Party’s “broad church.” The same was true of Campbell Newman in Queensland, who was drafted in as Liberal National Party leader to campaign to become premier from outside the parliament. This resort to outsiders presents a problem for partisan learning. Frequent turnover of leaders (occurring often in opposition but, until recently, relatively rare in government) further inhibits learning, since such changes disrupt the composition of the leader’s staff and the knowledge and expertise available to the new boss.

One consequence of recent political volatility may be that political parties spend too short a period in opposition. Peter van Onselen noted this rather presciently in 2011, when he argued that Labor’s failures meant Tony Abbott may win power too soon. “The current Liberal Party hasn’t had the chance in the short time it has been out of office to move from acting like a de facto government to an alternative government,” he argued. “De facto governments act as if they have a right to rule; alternative governments develop a set of reasons why they should.”

In the United States, the transition to government spans a three-month period – from the day after the presidential election on the first Tuesday of November to thirty days after the inauguration. Public funding allows both candidates to form transition teams during the election campaign to develop comprehensive plans for taking over the reins of power. The situation could not be more different in Westminster-style systems, where people exhausted from an election campaign move overnight from opposition to being in charge. As Paul Corrigan, a special adviser to the Blair government, notes, “You do the most difficult thing in politics – which is to win an election – and then, without even time for a good night’s sleep, you start to do the second most difficult thing in politics, which is to run a country.”

Barriers to learning in government compound the deficits accrued in opposition. These obstacles are both embedded in, and a consequence of, successive waves of public sector “reform” and change over the past four decades. Ministers, and especially prime ministers, have driven many of these changes. Taken together, their actions and decisions have had the effect of undermining the quality of the advice they receive and the routines and processes that provide new ideas and options. Another consequence has been a reduction in opportunities to debate and contest such choices. Indeed, as recent experience shows, and the Kemp review carefully documents, centralisation and executive overreach, and their associated lack of transparency, have been a constant problem. Symptoms include a lack of coordination and coherence across the ministry; the tendency to unilateral decision-making (which has entered the lexicon as “captain’s picks”); poor communication and sequencing of decisions; and policy reversals in the face of apparently unexpected resistance and blowback.

Overcoming these problems would require politicians and their parties to adopt arrangements and frameworks that support rather than systematically undermine their capacity to focus on key priorities, to control the political and policy agenda, and to negotiate the many relationships and dependencies that characterise life at the centre of modern government. Importantly, political leaders and their parties would need to become more organisationally focused – more conscious of the governance arrangements needed to achieve desired outcomes. They would also need a level of self-awareness and a capacity for self-reflection to which career politics seems inherently hostile.

In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that “scarcity,” whether of time or money, tends to focus the mind on immediate challenges. The authors describe a “scarcity trap” where people experiencing any form of poverty (of food, of love and company, of time or material resources) become intently focused on their urgent needs. They show that scarcity “captures the mind.” The mind’s focus on one thing steals cognitive and attentional “bandwidth,” impairing its capacity to perform other tasks, including the ability to make well-reasoned judgements and to assess the long-term consequences of current decisions. Just like the poor people in Mullainathan and Shafir’s study, chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, demonstrate similarly impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices.

The relentless focus on coping and survival among political-administrative elites is suggestive of a “scarcity trap.” It is perhaps no coincidence that these difficulties have been experienced by leaders bedevilled by the time compression and exponential demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and an increasingly globalised and interdependent leadership context. But the recurrence of the same types of difficulties suggests a structural cause that, I argue, is rooted in the dynamics of the hybrid advisory system that has developed to support Australian political leaders.

The loss of institutional memory in the public service and, by extension, the prime ministership has been one of the most damaging of the unintended consequences of what have become known as the “political management” reforms. Institutional memory is essential to any organisation’s identity and its ability to learn from past experience. In A Government of Strangers, Hugh Heclo describes government agencies as “bundles of memory and practices that are inherited from a particular past and carried forward.” Institutional memory resides in the stories people hear and tell one another. Stories that are told and retold “form an important part of the way that institutions remember their past and use that remembering to create identities for both the institution and its members.”

The decisions of Australian prime ministers to shift their main source of advice and support from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to the Prime Minister’s Office, and to staff the PMO with personal loyalists often from outside the public service, have had marked effects on the centre’s institutional memory. Partisan organisations like the PMO are inherently, indeed deliberately, temporary. They exist to serve a particular prime minister and are staffed mostly by people the prime minister has selected. PMO staffers’ backgrounds and preparation for the job differ from the traditional career pathway. As we have seen in recent leadership spills, their tenure is bound to that of the prime minister who chooses them.

Partisan organisations like the PMO lack the storage locations for institutional memory available to those that are more stable and continuing. Unlike public service departments, they do not inherit the beliefs and practices of a long-established organisation, which provide some certainty and an element of continuity. At the change of government, each new PMO starts afresh, perhaps not even conscious that “institutional amnesia” is built into their design. The likelihood of pathologies associated with “organisational forgetting” has increased because the flow of departmental officers to ministerial offices has declined. From the mid 1990s public servants began to fear that working in the PMO could limit their future public service careers. There may be more continuity in the PMO after a leadership succession, but even then only a few former staff are likely to remain to serve a new prime minister.

If turnover is a problem for institutional memory in the public sector, it is especially a feature of partisan organisations. Their culture of intense pressure, long hours and, in Australian federal politics, long periods away from home travelling to and from Canberra leads to “burn out” and people moving on. Partisan organisations live in a world where time is compressed. The haste and busyness of pressured work environments lead people to attempt to cope with impossible work demands by taking shortcuts. So, in Ida Sabelis’s words, they “leave things aside or out.” They are selective, focusing only on “headlines,” with bad results for memory. In such workplaces, remembering may be seen as “a time-consuming activity and not appreciated, or maybe not functional.”

The lack of institutional memory available to Australian prime ministers is comparatively recent; and it is a problem of their own making. Their reasons for relying on their private offices are clear enough: the pressures to cope and survive are intense and public servants cannot do many of the things that personal staff can. But the lack of institutional memory and the associated failure to learn from experience is a problem that recurs. The dilemma is illustrated by the experience of prime ministers Rudd, Gillard and Abbott and by premiers Baillieu, Napthine and Newman.

Malcolm Turnbull’s rhetoric since becoming prime minister and some of his early actions suggest that he and those around him – most significantly, Arthur Sinodinos – understand the problem and are taking steps to address it. Interestingly, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has made a similar commitment to reject the centralised and secretive style of his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper. Whether these two newly minted leaders can maintain a more collegial and consultative style remains to be seen. •

This is an edited extract from an essay published in Griffith Review 51: Fixing the System.

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Have we learned anything from this? Listening to the state treasurer, Tim Pallas, and his opposite number, Michael O’Brien, trading blows last week, it was hard to believe we have. Both deny responsibility and point the finger at the other, cherrypicking findings and vying to appear the most outraged. More surprising, however, is the battle over the role of the public service in this billion-dollar fiasco. Behind all the bluster is a serious debate, not just about the quality of officials’ advice about the project but also about their role in our system of government.

Touted as the missing link in Melbourne’s freeway network, East West Link would tunnel under the city’s latte-sipping inner north to connect the Eastern Freeway with CityLink, then continue to the Western Ring Road. The Baillieu government adopted the link as its signature project in 2011 and just two months before the 2014 state election Baillieu’s successor, Denis Napthine, signed contracts with the East West Connect consortium to build the link – despite a pending court challenge and Labor’s commitment to can the project. On winning the election, Daniel Andrews’s Labor government did just that, paying out $643 million (and counting) in compensation. Add to that all the money spent by the Coalition on the project – give or take how many acquired properties can be resold – and that’s a fiasco well worth an independent audit.

While the auditor-general finds the Coalition and Labor governments guilty of ignoring advice, rushing processes and taking huge risks with state funds – findings echoed this week in a review of the Abbott government’s funding of the project – the real focus is on the state bureaucracy and its role in all this. “Over the life of this costly and complex project, advice to government did not always meet the expected standard of being frank and fearless,” he writes.

At every stage, the bureaucracy gave “too much emphasis to the benefits of approaches that were in line with the government’s preferred outcome and little emphasis to alternative options that could be argued were more aligned with the state’s best interests.” Some officials admitted they thought giving advice that went against what the government wanted to hear could jeopardise their careers and influence. More than that, it would be plainly naive.

The auditor-general fears this attitude poses a serious threat to the integrity of the service:

It is not sufficient for public servants to avoid providing advice or recommendations simply because they believe the government of the day does not want to hear them. Doing so is at odds with the Public Administration Act 2004 and the Code of Conduct for Victorian Public Sector Employees, which require the public service to act impartially and achieve the best use of resources.

The state bureaucracy vigorously denies this interpretation of the debacle and has rejected the audit entirely. In fact, Chris Eccles, secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, argues the audit mistakes the role of the bureaucracy:

Since the earliest articulation of a professional, apolitical public service in the 1850s, the role of the public service has been to serve, and act as an instrument of, the government of the day… For a public servant to hinder progress to implement a lawful decision, constantly recontest that decision, or refrain from actions that follow from a lawful decision of a minister, would be to fundamentally undermine the Victorian Public Service as a trusted and apolitical institution, undermine the integrity of our democracy, and erode longstanding conventions that are at the heart of the Westminster system of government.

In other words, the public service has to do what it is told. We can’t have Sir Humphreys white-anting ministers and their policies. If the government’s preferences are understood and explicit, bureaucrats have an obligation to go with them. They can’t repeatedly “recommend courses of action that are contrary to the government’s settled policy” – that would subvert democracy.

The auditor-general is unimpressed by this line of argument. He argues that the public service can’t cater its advice to suit the preferences and biases of the government of the day. When advising on a decision, it has to make recommendations based on what the evidence shows is in the best interests of the state. “At critical points in this project,” the auditor-general writes, “this did not occur.” That is to say there weren’t enough public servants saying things like, “Minister, with respect, I would advise against that” during the whole fiasco. Instead they were taking hints and working to them, at least according to this report.

So is the public service’s role first and foremost to turn the government’s every wish into reality? Or do we want a more independent, feisty service, one that says, “No, Minister”? Would that jeopardise democracy, or is that a necessary check on the whims and petty interests of governments?

These are big questions. How they’re handled is not a merely abstract issue. In the case of East West Link,  the public service’s advice could have been a key reason Victorians lost a billion dollars down the drain. Indeed, it could cost us a whole lot more yet. We may have a new infrastructure authority vetting projects, but the board includes the same officials who worked on East West Link. The same people, the same departments, the same overall system are handling the $11 billion Melbourne Metro and the $5.5 billion Western Distributor. What reason is there to expect these won’t fall victim to the same pitfalls as plagued East West Link? None of the auditor-general’s recommendations have been accepted by anyone; if the report is right, that means none of the lessons have been learned.

As the blame game whirs on, the question remains: how did Victoria get itself into this mess? Was this a one-off fumble? Or are there deeper cultural and structural problems in our government, problems that threaten to derail future projects? What really went wrong with East West Link? That’s still the billion-dollar question. •

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When foreign minister Julie Bishop can claim – as she did earlier this year – that terrorism is “the most significant threat to the global rules-based order to emerge in the last seventy years,” something is clearly awry. It means that Laura Tingle’s new Quarterly Essay is a very timely attempt to come to grips with the consequences of political and governmental forgetfulness.

Tingle has been in the Canberra Press Gallery since the mid 1980s and is currently the political editor of the Australian Financial Review. She is one of the best and most perceptive political journalists in the land.

She says her essay is about “the role of memory in politics and policy-making” and “the dangers of having little, if any memory.” Asking the question “Why is our politics unable to deal with the pressing issues of the country?” she says the problem partly reflects a growing “loss of institutional memory.”

Politicians, of course, are often tempted to massage memory. They like to exaggerate the best of theirs and scoff at the efforts of their opponents. To paraphrase Mark Twain, they are often able to recall with the utmost clarity lots of glorious achievements that never happened.

But what about the institutional memory of government? A big slab of it is made up of those things public servants can remember along with the vast and growing pile of information in “the files,” those formal records of the actions of departments and ministers.

Tingle pays virtually no attention to the files, even though they contain the greater part of government memory. Files are largely unaffected by the frailty of human memory and, courtesy of technology, they are now more numerous than ever, and in many ways more accessible than the hard copy records they are replacing.

Tingle focuses on the memory of public servants. She says it has been greatly diminished over the past twenty-five years or so as a consequence of the privatisation and outsourcing of functions, the rise and rise of ministerial staff and the exclusion of public servants from some areas of policy development, large-scale redundancies, the increasing use of consultants, and the sacking of departmental secretaries for no stated reasons or because they’ve been associated with policies disliked by new regimes.

The combined effect of these phenomena, Tingle says, has “largely left the public sector without an institutional memory.” In the end, however, she doesn’t do her topic full justice because she accepts too much anecdotal evidence without checking it against readily available documentation; because some of her conclusions are overstated and others are wrong; and because, as a consequence, she ends up falling prey to the thing she laments in others – a touch of amnesia.

Let’s consider a few specifics.

First, there’s no doubt that institutional memory has suffered from the privatisation of Telstra, Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, the airports and much of the defence industry, and the outsourcing of the Commonwealth Employment Service and a range of defence support functions like grounds maintenance, cleaning and even mess catering. Access to written records for these functions has diminished, as has the information that resides in public servants’ minds. But have these changes affected the public service’s ability to provide effective advice about these activities? Possibly, but probably not significantly in most instances.

A more serious problem, to which Tingle refers, arises when institutions take steps to erase memory. In the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, for instance, staff who are unable to match “organisation suitability profiles” have been shunted aside in the interests of a brave new world. Functions not dissimilar to those of prison guards have been outsourced and the resort to “on-water matters” has reduced accountability to a shameful trickle.

Second, how have redundancy programs affected institutional memory? This is not easy to assess, but in the most important area of human memory – the Senior Executive Service, or SES – the number of staff has increased from 1507 in 1998 to around 2500 in 2015. In 1998 the median length of service at that level varied between twenty-one and twenty-five years; now it is twenty to twenty-six years. Redundancy has not affected the number of SES staff nor the length of the memories they can draw on.

Tingle worries that in 2014 the median length of service of “ongoing” public servants was 9.4 years. Reassuringly, this happens to be around the long-term average. Indeed, it’s likely the figure was lower when the public service contained more operational–industrial functions with high rates of staff turnover.

Third, Tingle accepts at face value a claim that “public servants will tell you that the best path to promotion is to switch regularly between departments… meaning that no one develops deep expertise in anything.” Could it really be that no one develops deep expertise in anything? Happily, the rate of staff movement between agencies may be at an all-time low. In 2014–15, 83 per cent of promotions were internal. If anything, the rate of staff movement between departments is too low and the stimulation agencies can get from “new blood” is insufficient.

Tingle rightly observes that the cultural revolution in Immigration saw the department’s secretary, Martin Bowles, move to the Department of Health, taking a number of senior staff with him. Tingle is wrong, however, to say that Health “is now being run by immigration experts.” Bowles was in Immigration for two years but he spent twelve working in health for state governments: he’s a health expert. Another senior Immigration official who transferred with Bowles had spent thirty years working in health. In total, the SES staff who moved over with Bowles now account for 10 per cent of Health’s SES. Rest easy, Health is not being run by “immigration experts.”

Fourth, Tingle says that when Tony Abbott took on responsibility for Indigenous affairs, his department had “no infrastructure” to help him, had no offices “around the country, let alone in remote localities” and had to “assign the delivery of Indigenous services to other parts of the bureaucracy.” But when Abbott took on these responsibilities, bits of eight government agencies were transferred to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, increasing its staff by many hundreds and giving it a presence in 110 locations around the country.

Tingle has written an interesting and timely essay on an important topic. Her basic line about the erosion of memory may be right but her conclusions are overcooked. A line she quotes from the former Treasury secretary, Ken Henry, that departments “have lost their memory” is unsatisfactory even as hyperbole. Among other things, such a bald assertion requires us to accept that the minds of the greatly increased number of SES staff, better-educated than ever before, are blanks and that all the files have been lost. Memory always fades and it may have done so at a greater rate in the public service over the past thirty years, but a large slab of it is sure to remain.

And whatever blows it might have sustained, institutional memory could certainly be used to better advantage if the government and parliament took steps to:

• ensure that cabinet is the primary means of major government decision-making and coordination, so giving departments a degree of inside running in the provision of advice

• arrange ministerial offices so they are able to relate more effectively to the public service

• only use policy and management consultants when the things they do can’t be done by the public service

• abandon fixed-period appointments for heads of departments

• refrain from sacking heads of departments for their associations with previous governments’ policies; not abuse and exclude those, like Gillian Triggs, who say uncomfortable things; and use proper merit procedures for all departmental secretary and statutory officeholder senior appointments.

While Tingle has a point about memory loss, the deranged behaviour of many of the main political players over the last generation has had many consequences and they all need to be reflected on. And it’s not just Rudd and Abbott, although their shenanigans would be a good place to start. •

The post A touch of amnesia appeared first on Inside Story.

As an alumnus of the Harvard Law School, Nader was one of their own, and the commonality was evident in a certain shared degree of acuity. Yet this concentration of America’s young elite included future Democrat and Republican senators, corporate leaders, speechwriters, policy-makers and think-tank aficionados. What they were applauding was a fiery condemnation of a state of affairs many of them would subsequently work to perpetuate.

“A rising tide lifts all yachts,” Nader declared at one point, to audible appreciation. He wasn’t talking about climate change: his theme was the great wealth divide in American society, and he was countering the neoliberal catchcry that a rising tide in the national economy lifts all boats. He spoke of the need to address a democracy gap, inveighed against government control by corporate extremists, and warned of a rising tide of poverty as a result of the political failure to establish a minimum wage.

With a rhetorical flair he may well have learned at Harvard, he invoked a spirit of nationalism to counter that of the American right, and called for a return of the courageous reforming spirit that led to women’s suffrage, unions, the abolition of slavery, civil rights. “You think they settled for the least worst? Somehow we live in a period of American history where we settle for too little.” The peroration echoed his landmark Minneapolis campaign speech. “The greatest asset that the concentrators of power in our country have is that they’ve been able to rely on our own feeling that we can’t fight them,” he said on that occasion. “We can’t build democracy, we can’t establish systems that will fulfil life’s possibilities for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.”

Evidently, he was right about that. It was stirring stuff, but in the event it stirred less than 3 per cent of the American electorate. Fifteen years later, Bernie Sanders is campaigning on much the same ground and so far his rallies have peaked at 10,000, exactly on a par with Nader’s. Since Nader’s run a decade and a half ago, the wealth gap has widened and the right has strengthened its hold on Congress. The systems of welfare, worker protection and financial regulation are in disarray. Few people seriously expect to witness President Bernie Sanders delivering the State of the Union Address.

But why not? Why, in the United States, Britain, Australia and other major democracies is so insignificant a portion of the electorate concerned by the shift in power to corporate interests and the consequent extreme wealth gap? Asked recently what he’d do to change the conversation on the US economy, Sanders said he would bring Joseph Stiglitz to the table. Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winner and former chief economist of the World Bank, has become the doyen of left-wing economists. His most recent book, The Great Divide, is a collection of articles originally written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair, most of which are concerned with the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis. It also includes some semi-autobiographical reflections on earlier periods: the postwar “dirty industrial America” in which he grew up, and the 1960s, when he was strongly influenced by the civil rights movement and was present at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963. Stiglitz’s PhD research at MIT was devoted to understanding the economic causes of inequality, and the essays here track those causes through changing cultural and political frameworks. It seems things are getting worse, and dramatically so.

Stiglitz directs his first salvo at the Bush administration. “Though conservatives rail against deficits,” he says, “they seem to have a particular knack of creating them.” Clinton turned Reagan’s deficit into a surplus, but Bush reversed this by paying for two wars on the national credit card and mounting a program of corporate welfare, with tax cuts for the rich. This was offset by welfare cutbacks for the poor, a fall in the median income level, increased job insecurity, reduced healthcare access and soaring levels of credit card debt.

The global financial crisis of 2008 happened on his watch. As Stiglitz sums it up, the GFC showed how “a combination of powerful wrong ideas can combine to produce calamitous results.” Post-GFC, the wealth distribution indicator has gone into the red zone. According to an Oxfam presentation at Davos in 2014, nearly half of the world’s wealth is now in the hands of just 1 per cent of the population. To put the picture another way, while those at the top of the rich list would fit into an eighty-five-seat bus, it would take some three billion people from the bottom end of the economic spectrum to equal their wealth. The six heirs to the Walmart empire have an aggregate worth of some US$90 billion, which is roughly the sum of the wealth owned by the poorest 30 per cent of Americans.

Stiglitz offers a good balance of information, analysis and rhetorical verve, but questions remain about where this kind of critique is actually getting us. He claims that there is a growing sense in America that the current disparity in income and prosperity is unfair, and makes a persuasive case that neoliberal economics has done everything to promote the disparity. So how do we explain the fact that the American people voted the Republicans back into a majority in Congress during Obama’s presidency? Do they really not know who their enemies are?

Like Nader, Stiglitz argues that ultimately the great divide is about more than economics, it’s about democracy. But if only around 3 per cent of the electorate are sufficiently convinced of that to cast their vote accordingly, we have hit a serious impasse. In the minds of the general public, not much has changed in fifteen years, even with the impact of the GFC. This is not just about economics and not just about democracy. It is about public understanding.

Norman Mailer once said that Karl Rove goes to bed every night and prays, “Please God, keep 51 per cent of the American people stupid.” Certainly large sections of the media are committed to making them so, but collective stupidity, however assiduously fed by misinformation and rabid slogans, is not a satisfactory explanation. There are real issues about what is evident to the average citizen in daily life, and what is not.

The bankable worth of the six Walmart heirs does not mean much to workers filling the shelves and swabbing the aisles in the stores. When peasants rose up against aristocrats in pre-industrial society, they were venting their hatred at people they saw riding through the village in fine clothes while they were in rags, or who horse-whipped them when they did not respond to commands. The super-rich of today are simply not visible to ordinary people. Their penthouses, helicopters, limousines, yachts, art collections and Hermès bags belong in a zone of unreality too remote to provoke resentment. The average supermarket worker is far more likely to flare up about the guy working the next aisle who keeps taking a smoko when the supervisor isn’t around. Ordinary people respond most angrily to other ordinary people who are getting something they are not entitled to, and the right’s propaganda is typically focused on providing targets for popular resentment: fellow citizens on welfare, refugees on boats, artists on grants.

Perhaps the strangest anomaly in all this is the growth of popular prejudice against government spending. Governomics, a new Australian study edited by Miriam Lyons of the Centre for Policy Development and public policy specialist Ian McAuley. They have their own take on yachts and rising tides. The book opens with a discussion of the Sydney–Hobart Yacht Race, which they present as a case of government services quite literally coming to the rescue. Corporate financiers fund the yachts (well, most of them), but government-funded agencies, including the Bureau of Meteorology and the Rescue Coordination Centre in Canberra, provide critical monitoring of the race conditions. In 1998, when a major storm developed on the second day of the race, fifty-five people were saved in acutely dangerous search and rescue operations, also funded by government. “We are inclined to forget about the public sector,” say McAuley and Lyons, “until we find we need it.”

But a great deal of political rhetoric is directed towards ensuring that the public sector and its costs are constantly on people’s minds. A few years ago I was approached outside a Toowoomba polling station by an LNP supporter who was running a line about government wastage. “Name me one thing,” he said, “that the government’s ever done that actually did any good.” “Schools?” I suggested. “Hospitals?” Without missing a beat, he launched into an invective about the state of both. If only I had had Noel Pearson’s gift for oratory at that moment:

What did these Romans ever do for us? Apart from Medibank and the Trade Practices Act. Cutting tariff protections and no fault divorce and the family law act. The Australia Council. The Federal Court. The Order of Australia. Federal Legal Aid. The Racial Discrimination Act. Needs based schools funding.

Pearson was speaking at Gough Whitlam’s funeral, and that was only the half of it. Much of Whitlam’s legacy of public policy and infrastructure is already under threat.

Concerned as they are about this, McAuley and Lyons don’t have Pearson’s gift either, and theirs is at times a somewhat pedestrian account of the benefits of government-funded programs. For those with an economy-first mindset, they argue, it is just good economic sense. An OECD report issued in May this year corroborates their case. Major infrastructure projects produce employment and enhance the environment for small business and tourism. A strong public education system prepares citizens for employment in higher-end jobs in a continually evolving job market. Good healthcare helps to keep us off the sick list and maximises the number of people fit for work.

Stiglitz makes similar arguments. Essentially, the more money circulating in the real economies of everyday life, the better. The 1 per cent problem means that disproportionate amounts of capital are circulating up in the stratosphere of the financial markets, or are attached to assets in land and property whose value increases without contributing anything to the dynamic economy. There are signs that increasing property values in Sydney have a directly adverse effect on local economies. House prices in the suburb of Leichhardt have been at a premium because the inner-city hub of Norton Street was a lure to buyers who love the cafes and cinemas and local shops. On my most recent visit, Norton Street was a sad shadow of its former self. With all those sky-high mortgages, it seems, the disposable income has dried up. No amount of inventive free-marketeering can revive an economy in which no one has anything left to spend.

The authors of Governomics believe there is “a pent-up desire for a return to a more pragmatic and inclusive approach to economic policy.” At the same time, though, they are concerned with an equal and opposite tendency to be persuaded by the convictions of small government ideologues, with their talk of nanny states and bloated welfare systems. In Australia, this debate reached a crescendo with Joe Hockey’s proclamation of a national budget emergency and the suite of radical cuts to government-funded services in his 2014 annual budget. Hockey’s approach threatened to widen the equality gap that had been reduced during the Rudd government’s term of office after the stimulus package helped increase the income of the poorest 10 per cent of households by 2 per cent.

McAuley and Lyons are persuasive about the necessity of “paying for civilisation” and offer a forceful conclusion about the urgency of “reclaiming the public good.” This means getting beyond dogma, and they quote French economist Thomas Picketty’s view that the “democratisation of economic knowledge” is of the essence in breaking down the culture of the great divide.

But when it comes to forming opinions, a little knowledge goes a long way for the average citizen. The comment lines following any major article on economic policy are riddled with furious convictions. Few of us are immune to the delusion that our opinions are “informed,” and a good hard look at where they actually came from may reveal nothing more than a legacy of assumed knowledge from assorted media commentators whose accounts offer a shallow and biased grasp of so-called “facts.”

A few weeks ago, shortly after Governomics came out, Miriam Lyons was asked by an audience member on the ABC’s Q&A which “socialist paradise” she wanted us to copy. “Singapore has shown the world how undeveloped nations can climb out of poverty by having small, honest and efficient government,” said the questioner. Lyons responded that she was not advocating any extreme model of government control, but rather contesting “an equally extreme and dangerous idea” that we can solve every problem by putting it into the domain of private corporations and free markets. She didn’t get time to say much more than that before the question was thrown to another panel member. Q&A aims to provide a high-quality forum for public debate on major issues, but its treatment is necessarily summary, brief and oppositional (“putting both sides” being a survival imperative for the national broadcaster). This may do much to stir up public opinion, but it rarely contributes to any kind of substantive public understanding.

Views on the health or otherwise of Singapore’s economy, and the government’s role in this, differ widely. At one end of the spectrum, Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute (a foundation funded by the Koch brothers, joint sixth on the Forbes world ranking of billionaires) launches a polemic against big-spending governments, and cites economic growth in Singapore as a triumph for small government. “The next time politicians tell you they are going to spend more of your tax dollars to create jobs and increase your income,” he concludes, “ask them whether they are ignorant of the facts or they think you are.” Rahn’s “facts” are some broadbrush figures in a short article: enough to appeal to a reader who wants to feel informed and immune to being taken for a ride by opposing arguments. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Stiglitz credits Singapore with “having prioritised social and economic equity” through quite high levels of government intervention, including a compulsory savings scheme for young workers, welfare programs that are “universal but progressive,” strong environmental controls, housing programs for the aged, and heavy investments in science and education.

Attempts to extrapolate a one-line message from Singapore’s experience do nothing to clarify Australian perspectives on small government, but if one-line messages are dominating the market in public opinion, how can those who write books expect to have any effective influence? Nader, for all his warning cries about how democracy was on the line, could not lock in even 3 per cent of the vote. Bernie Sanders has an estimated 3 per cent of support in the ranks of Democrats. During the current controversy over the Greek debt crisis, Stiglitz and his European counterpart Thomas Picketty are also running the democracy-at-stake line. Both are mounting cogent attacks on the narrative of Greek profligacy, identifying pathologies of EU financial management as the appropriate target for moral outrage. Their commentaries are going viral, some generating comment lines with over 8000 entries (many of them hostile), but in electoral terms this, too, may be quite insignificant.

If the future of democracy depends on the majority of voters actually wanting to contest the great divide, an entirely different approach to public communication and public persuasion is called for. The strangest paradox in the blogosphere’s responses to the Greek bailout is the readiness to condemn the crimes of big government and national profligacy, set against a lack of apparent concern for analogous behaviour among the banks and financial institutions requiring the same level of bailout.

The parallels between the charges laid against Greece and those levelled against the German banks are striking: mismanagement, corruption, cronyism, fraudulently concealing their real financial status, and dangerously overextending their commitments. In a New York Times article published in August 2013, Jack Ewing speculated about why there was so little appetite in Germany for changing the banking system. The German bank bailout following the GFC was one of the biggest in Europe, amounting to over €640 billion, and five years on it remained “a dead weight on the eurozone economy.” Ewing quotes Jörg Rocholl, president of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, who finds debate on this problem “alarmingly non-intense.”

Why is it that the average citizen is so readily angered by stories of Greek hairdressers retiring at fifty on public pensions, while there is barely a shrug of the shoulders at the thought of German bankers being chauffeur-driven around town when they have yet to repay massive loans from the public purse? Why are Greeks who have defaulted on their taxes so much more infuriating than financiers who have always avoided them? Ordinary people who have been plunged into the direst financial states are regarded as deserving of whatever further privations are coming (and they are surely coming), while most corporate defaulters are not suffering at all.

Before we can get any traction for the logic of a democratic economy, we have to address the bizarre asymmetries in public opinion. As the Greek debt crisis rolls on, it seems increasingly clear that the European Union would rather see a nation broken than a sophisticated banking system forced to reassess its modes of operation. Austerity by public demand is a phenomenon of our times. Perhaps those who are its advocates fail to see how easily they, too, could come under its reign. •

The post The rising tide that lifts some yachts appeared first on Inside Story.

Political attention over the past few weeks has been fixed on the drama of the Abbott government’s first budget – the winners and losers, the broken promises, the prospects in the Senate. Beyond that, though, the budget reinforces a trend of potentially greater significance for the quality of Australian democracy. Since its beginnings, this government has systematically made scrutiny of its policies and their implementation more difficult.

As soon as the Coalition took government last September, it set about distinguishing itself from its defeated, discredited predecessor. It would be a “no surprises, no excuses” government, Tony Abbott promised, and his first weeks in the job were designed to project an image of methodical deliberation. “Never before in Australian history has there been such a quiet transition to a new administration,” veteran correspondent Laurie Oakes wrote admiringly. “Abbott and his team ignored the hungry media beast’s demand to be fed.”

Within months, though, Oakes was accusing the Coalition of “thumbing its nose at voters” by avoiding media scrutiny. The new government, it soon became clear, was even more determined than its predecessors to control the flow of information to the media and the public.

The earliest decisions set the tone. All requests for interviews with Coalition frontbenchers would need the approval of the prime minister’s office. MPs were banned from engaging in political commentary on Facebook and Twitter. The code of conduct for ministerial staff gained a new clause, also banning political commentary on social media. One disenchanted senator, Ian Macdonald, accused Abbott’s office and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, of “obsessive, centralised control.”

Next, the government introduced rules covering public servants’ use of social media in their official and private capacities. “The sweeping new rules will even cover public servants posting political comments anonymously, including mummy bloggers on parenting websites,” marvelled the Daily Telegraph. Public employees were expected to report breaches by their colleagues.

The move was supported by the Human Rights Commission’s new “freedom commissioner,” Tim Wilson. “Ultimately,” he said, “public servants voluntarily and knowingly choose to accept these limits on their conduct when they accept employment.” In other words, if they didn’t like the new restrictions, they had the freedom to resign.

The government also tightened freedom of information, or FOI, procedures. After the previous election, in 2010, at least seventeen departments released the briefs they had prepared for the incoming government, providing valuable information to journalists and the public about policy positions and challenges. No such release came after last year’s election, reported Crikey’s Bernard Keane, and officials were unable to explain the logic behind the reversal. FOI requests for the briefings were also refused.

In May, the attorney-general’s department declined to release a $400,000 report by KPMG examining three of Australia’s federal courts. According to the Australian’s Sean Parnell, it justified its decision on the novel grounds that to make it public “would have an impact on the proper and efficient conduct of the department” because “it would impede the provision of frank, independent advice from professional services firms to inform policy.” Such an open-ended exemption would justify withholding any consultancy report to government. As Parnell put it, “tactics of secrecy and obfuscation have returned to the fore in Canberra.”

Meanwhile, the under-resourced Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was taking 250 days, on average, to finalise requests for external reviews of decisions to refuse FOI requests. On budget night the government neatly disposed of this problem by abolishing the office. In future, appeals against FOI refusals are to be handled by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Attorney-General’s or the Commonwealth Ombudsman. The office was created in 2010 to address the long turnaround times and expensive appeals in the working of the FOI system; its abolition is likely to make it harder and more expensive for FOI users to extract information.

The government’s resistance to disclosure is having an impact not only on what information is released but also on what is produced, and by whom. Recent conservative governments have been much more active than the Rudd–Gillard government in moulding the senior sections of the public service to their liking. The most disturbing example is the Abbott government’s insistence, immediately on taking office, that Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson resign his position, with effect later this year. Both John Howard and Peter Costello advised against the forced resignation, and Parkinson’s predecessor, Ken Henry, described it as unprecedented in the department’s 113-year history. “No government has ever thought it appropriate to remove the head of the Treasury,” he said, “and put in somebody who they think is of… a more comfortable political character.” If that was Abbott’s motive, he said, then it was “disappointing” and “a historic action.” But according to the Conversation’s Michelle Grattan, a key factor was Parkinson’s earlier role as head of the Department of Climate Change.

Silence on the water

The first and most obvious transition from demanding information in opposition to containing it in government involved the contentious area of asylum-seeker policy. Immediately after the election, as Fairfax’s Dan Harrison reported, immigration minister Scott Morrison “stopped the practice of allowing officials to provide information to the media on boat arrivals in real time.” Instead, he began holding weekly briefings, and these were soon moved from Canberra to Sydney, making it harder for the Canberra press gallery to attend. On the Friday before Christmas, he told journalists at the briefing that it would be his last for the year, and that he would be issuing written statements instead. In the Christmas–New Year break, reported the Guardian, “Morrison’s spokesman refused to confirm whether these weekly briefings would continue after the holiday period.” Later it was announced that Morrison had abandoned regular briefings and would now only make ad hoc appearances.

Morrison not only reduced opportunities for the media to interrogate him, he also frequently declined to answer the questions they did get a chance to ask. His rationale for silence lay in the military rhetoric with which the government framed its policy. Controlling information in order to deny people smugglers the opportunity to use that knowledge is “not uncommon with military-style operations,” he said soon after the election. It wasn’t the government’s job “to run a shipping news service” for people smugglers. “The battle is being fought using the full arsenal of measures,” he assured parliament. The navy, which was conducting what the government called Operation Sovereign Borders, said that it, too, could not discuss “on-water” matters. The definition of “on-water” matters has proved to be enormously elastic.

The government has used the military not just to carry out policy but also “as a political shield,” argues Michelle Grattan. Military personnel refused to tell the Senate what training they had received, because that would involve revealing “on-water” matters. Nor would they reveal whether their vessels had GPS devices; to do so would be inconsistent with “the information requirements across the battle space,” according to defence force chief David Hurley, and would constitute information “likely to be sought by adversary intelligence elements.” Gallery reporter Bernard Keane judged “the evasion, casuistry and outright refusal of officials to allow any aspect of Operation Sovereign Borders to be scrutinised, no matter how far removed from ‘on-water operations’” to be “a new low in Australian government transparency.”

The military’s intransigence in the Senate culminated in a frustrated shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy haranguing General Angus Campbell. “You can’t tell the Australian public the truth because you might upset an international neighbour,” he charged during a Senate estimates hearing. “That’s called a political cover-up.” Conroy invoked the Tom Cruise–Jack Nicholson exchange in the movie A Few Good Men: “You want the truth. You can’t handle the truth.” In this spectacularly counterproductive move, Conroy turned the spotlight from the military onto himself, and a chorus cried for him to apologise or resign.

But Conroy’s anger may have played a role in forcing the military to reveal that personnel involved in Operation Sovereign Borders had been excused from key clauses of the Work Health and Safety Act, which requires workers to take reasonable care of their own and of others’ wellbeing. The government argues that this is justified by the hazardous nature of the work they are doing – even though no such exemptions applied to Australian troops in Afghanistan and in operations against Somali pirates.

Making “stop the boats” the sole measure of policy success demands very focused public attention and highly circumscribed public sympathies. Information about Indonesia’s objections to Australia’s policy of intercepting boats at sea and towing them back to Indonesian waters creates unwelcome complexity. In combination with ludicrous and unsavoury spying by Australian intelligence, the government’s actions have brought the bilateral relationship with Indonesia to its lowest ebb since the Australian military was battling Indonesian-backed militias in East Timor in 1999.

Nor does the government want close scrutiny of how the boats are turned back. This is likely to be a much messier, and potentially nastier, process than the military jargon would suggest. On the few occasions when this process has attracted media attention – from the ABC and Fairfax, in both cases deriving from work done by their Jakarta-based correspondents – the government’s determination to shut the story down was evident. Ministers not only denounced the news organisations involved – the ABC is taking “everyone’s side but Australia’s” charged the prime minister – but refused to hold any inquiries. According to the Age’s Michael Gordon, “no attempt” appeared to have been made “by Australian officials to interview those making claims.”

Sticking with the single goal of “stop the boats” also involves drastically restricting information about what is occurring in the detention centres. “In line with its wider secrecy policy on border protection, the government is trying to suppress information about self-harm incidents,” reported Michelle Grattan. “Publicity only encourages such incidents, it says.” In late December, according to the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland, “Morrison was silent on a letter sent from fifteen doctors describing in chilling detail a raft of medical failings in detention centres on Christmas Island.” A Commonwealth ombudsman’s report in 2013 confirmed that detention for longer than six months has a significant impact on mental health.

The operation of all the detention centres, onshore and offshore, is outsourced. Transfield has a $1.22 billion contract to run the centres on Manus Island, which was formerly run by G4S, and Nauru. Beyond those facts, “Australia has deliberately cloaked its detention centre archipelago in so many layers of secrecy that we know almost nothing about what goes on there,” argued Jeff Sparrow in the Guardian. “The camps are the equivalent of private businesses remotely located in foreign countries, and everything about them is designed to frustrate journalists seeking to report on them.” The virtues of privatisation are usually presented in economic terms, but sometimes they have benefits for a government seeking to evade accountability. All staff for Serco, which controls the onshore detention centres, sign a confidentiality agreement.

There has been little first-hand reporting of what occurs in the camps. The UNHCR described “harsh physical conditions” that don’t meet “international standards” on Nauru, but foreign minister Julie Bishop praised the conditions and said they were “certainly better than in Australian mining camps.” The government blocked a proposed visit by the Human Rights Commission to check on child asylum seekers in Nauru on the grounds that the “commission’s jurisdiction did not extend beyond Australia’s borders.” Nauru itself raised the price of a journalistic visa from $200 to $8000, and the fee is non-refundable even if the visa application is rejected.

The lack of independent access became an even more urgent issue after riots at the Manus Island detention centre on 18 February left one asylum seeker, Reza Berati, dead and another seventy-seven injured. Scott Morrison and G4S initially alleged that the killing and most of the violence took place outside the compound, despite reports to the contrary. “If people chose to remove themselves from that centre then they are obviously putting themselves at a place of much great risk…” Morrison said. “I can guarantee their safety when they remain in the centre and act cooperatively with those who are trying to provide them with support and accommodation…”

At nine o’clock on the following Saturday night, however, Morrison issued a media release revealing that his comments had been wrong. His most explosive admission was that most of the violence probably took place “within the perimeter of the centre.” At a hastily convened press conference in Sydney the following day, he said he had only found out the full facts on the Saturday, and so had sent out the correction that night. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea launched inquiries into the violence, although the governments agreed that only a “merged” report would be published. Despite the remarkable reversal, prime minister Abbott defended Morrison’s handling of the Manus Island incident with the words, “You don’t want a wimp running border protection.”

A PNG Supreme Court judge, David Cannings, then initiated an inquiry into human rights on Manus Island. To the annoyance of both governments, he took along journalists and observers when he visited the detention centre in mid March. One of them commented that although he had read every report on conditions there, he “was still absolutely shocked and confronted by what I saw… chronic overcrowding… poor toilet and sanitation facilities.” With the support of the Australian government, the PNG government decided to stop the judge’s inquiry. It also denied access to a human rights lawyer wanting to visit the centre.

Morrison’s combination of belligerence and ineptitude would be politically damaging in almost any other policy area. Instead, the Liberal Party room sees him as a hero. Asked about future leadership of the party, he said he was “up for any challenge” and found such speculation “encouraging and flattering.” Attorney-general Brandis described him as one of the stars of the government.

Green information blackout

Although Tony Abbott campaigned long and hard against that “toxic tax,” Labor’s carbon-pricing scheme, he also says that he recognises the reality of human-induced climate change. But it is notable that he always restricts his expression of that belief to a single sentence, without elaborating on what convinced him of its reality, or exploring with any urgency its causes and consequences.

Whether or not Abbott really does believe in anthropogenic climate change, it is “extraordinary,” according to Professor Ross Garnaut, that the four business leaders the government has appointed to senior advisory roles – Dick Warburton on the inquiry into renewable energy, David Murray on the financial system inquiry, Maurice Newman to chair the PM’s Business Advisory Council, and Tony Shepherd to head the Commission of Audit – all share a strong view that the science on climate change is wrong.

Since the election, writes leading business journalist Giles Parkinson, the government has sought to close or reduce funding to many of the agencies whose work relates to climate change. Its first, and highly symbolic, move was to disband the Climate Commission, whose main purpose was to communicate facts about climate change to the public.

Its next target, the Climate Change Authority, might prove more difficult to get rid of. As a statutory agency established by parliament, it can’t simply be closed. “The CCA was intended to be a non-partisan, expert body,” wrote New Matilda’s Ben Eltham, “a little like the Reserve Bank or the Productivity Commission, that would review the best available scientific and economic evidence and recommend a consensus position on Australia’s carbon reduction targets.” When it handed down its report on how Australia should address global warming – by cutting emissions to 19 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 – environment minister Greg Hunt didn’t hold any sort of event to mark the report’s release. He simply issued a media release, full of misleading statistics and claims, whose key point was to rehash Coalition criticisms of Labor’s carbon tax.

Earlier, the Climate Change Authority’s review of Labor’s renewable energy scheme had concluded that the current targets should be kept. Although it had the statutory obligation to undertake the next review, the government moved quickly to appoint its own inquiry. Its members included a climate change denier, a fossil-fuel lobbyist and the former head of a coal-and-gas generation company, all with an “antipathy to renewable energy,” according to Parkinson.

Environmentalists’ fears that this inquiry was set up to reach a predetermined conclusion were strengthened by the government’s rapid moves to cut funding in this area. The budget recommended the abolition of the $3.1 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency, or ARENA, an institution formed to help bring new technologies into production and deployment, and to fund Australia’s world-leading solar research. While it retained funding to meet its existing contracts, it had almost no funds to enter into any new agreements. Abolishing ARENA requires Senate approval.

The most tangible effect of these measures is to dampen activity in the area. But they will also minimise the flow of information about climate change and policy responses. The government’s resolve even extends to organisational names: the Australian Cleantech Competition was renamed Australian Technologies Competition, and the words climate, clean energy, or clean tech are considered non grata.

Unusually, Australia was not represented at ministerial level at the UN climate summit in Warsaw in November, which was working towards the global agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Australia’s recent performance and changes drew some criticism at the meeting. The government also decided not to send a representative to the World Bank–supported Partnership for Market Readiness assembly, despite the fact that Australia had previously co-chaired three assemblies. Some EU diplomats have criticised Australia for “not including environment issues on the G20 conference it is hosting later this year,” reported Parkinson.

Unhealthy secrecy

A bizarre and politically counterproductive case of the government blocking transparency in order to cater to narrow vested interests involved taking down a new healthy food ratings website, which had been two-and-a-half years in the making. The site, endorsed by Choice, the Heart Foundation and various health organisations, was designed to help consumers make informed choices using information about saturated fat, total sugar, sodium, fibre, protein, and fruit and vegetable content. The Ministerial Council had voted its approval in December, and all public stakeholder groups had been told the website was about to be published.

On the same the day the site was launched, however, it was taken down on the order of the assistant health minister Fiona Nash, and the public servant who had been leading the project, Kathy Dennis, was redeployed. Nash’s justification shifted over subsequent days. First, she claimed the website had been suspended because it had been launched prematurely. Later, she cited the Ministerial Council’s decision to undertake a cost–benefit analysis as the reason, despite the fact that the minutes of the meeting showed the Council wanted the website to proceed.

It was revealed that the Food and Grocery Council had opposed the star rating system, and its CEO had contacted Nash’s office the day it was put up. Sixty-six public health professors from around the country signed a letter to the health ministers calling on them to reinstate a healthy-food star rating system, saying health problems posed by obesity needed urgent action.

The controversy escalated sharply in the following days when it was revealed that Nash’s chief of staff, Alastair Furnival, who had been centrally involved in the decision to close the site, had been a partner in a lobbying company that worked for the junk food industry. The hapless Nash told parliament, “There is no connection whatsoever between my chief of staff and the company Australian Public Affairs.” In fact, he had a half interest in the firm with the other half owned by his wife, and he had failed to declare conflicts of interest at relevant meetings. It was reported that the firm’s clients included Kraft, Cadbury and the Australian Beverages Council.

Eventually, on 14 February, Furnival resigned. He left Nash’s office, he said, to avoid the “political distraction” of the “smear campaign” against him, but continued to insist there had been no conflict of interest. Of course, there were News Corp columnists ready to spring to the government’s defence. For Nick Cater, the episode represented “a pattern of blatant defiance by bureaucrats that requires a tough minded ministerial response.”

While the closing of the website received considerable publicity, another move received less. Without warning, the government decided to abolish the Alcohol and Drugs Council of Australia, the most important agency in this area, ending a history of almost fifty years. Furnival also had links to the alcohol industry, and played a key role in defunding the council, which costs between $1.3 million and $1.6 million a year. Its chair, former Liberal MP Dr Mal Washer, said he had contacted Senator Nash’s office about the decision on several occasions, but had only been able to speak to Furnival. “Normally when you contact them, they will have a yarn with an ex-federal colleague,” said Washer. “There was no reason given [by Furnival] for the cut except for ‘We don’t have enough money and have a nice day.’” Washer called it a dumb decision and “a bloody tragedy.”

Seeking information on the decision, the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education put in an FOI request, which was denied on the grounds it was “not in the public interest.” The foundation then accused the government of an “appalling level of transparency.” “Included in the list of unreleased documents are representations from more than 200 individuals and groups that have contacted the government to express concern,” reported Fairfax’s Amy Corderoy. Nash refused a request to meet with a delegation of representatives of drug and alcohol bodies to discuss a way forward after the foundation’s axing.

Abbott expressed confidence in Nash. “With the staff member now departed,” he added, “the matter has concluded.” Although she had misled parliament, and displayed a worryingly uncertain grip on her portfolio, she survived because of that time-honoured tenet of cabinet government, never give a scalp to the other side.

Another surprise decision came in the May budget, when the government abolished the Australian National Preventive Health Agency and absorbed its functions back into the department. This brought to three the number of decisions that deprived consumers of officially generated sources of information about health issues.

Opaque advice

Paul Keating introduced compulsory superannuation in 1992 as a means of coping with the financial challenges of an ageing society and spreading the benefits of income security associated with retirement savings to all sectors of the workforce. Currently, employers must contribute 9.25 per cent of an employee’s salary to a superannuation fund. As of 2013, the system had created a pool of $1.7 trillion in savings, more than 100 per cent of GDP.

Managing these funds has become a major industry. According to figures released by the Labor government, 18,000 financial advisers or planners give advice to one-in-five Australians, with four in every five advisory firms either owned by or affiliated with the major banks. Last year, $23.6 billion was syphoned out of the compulsory super system in fees. The Grattan Institute released a report in April concluding that superannuation fees in Australia were around 50 per cent – or in total $10 billion a year – higher than they should be, and that the fee structures eat into savings, leaving superannuees with 20 per cent less retirement income than they would otherwise have. “Last year the big four banks generated more than $2.6 billion through their so-called wealth management arms,” reported Fairfax’s Georgia Wilkins. “Much of this – particularly relating to insurance – was sold through bank branches, while customers were inquiring about another product.”

Labor introduced “a raft of consumer protections,” wrote Michelle Grattan. “Advisers must act in their client’s best interest. They have to get clients to ‘opt in’ every two years to continue to receive their service. Annual statements disclosing fees and details of services performed are required. ‘Conflicted remuneration’ is banned – for example, commissions paid by product advisers to financial advisers.”

The Coalition came to government committed to reversing some of those reforms. The main changes championed by assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos included scrapping the two-year opt-in for financial planning clients, and again allowing commissions and other conflicted remuneration for “general advice” while continuing to ban them for “personal advice.” The proposed changes would have narrowed the obligation for the financial planner to act in the client’s best interests, and removed the obligation for clients who began before Labor’s reforms were introduced to receive an annual disclosure of fees charged.

The main winners from these changes would have been the big four banks and AMP, who had previously dominated the financial advice market. The changes would have allowed the reintroduction of commissions and reinstituted the gravy train of trailing commissions, which are typically worth 0.5 per cent of the funds under management. As the fund grows, and contact with the planner recedes into the past, the payments get bigger. Meanwhile, the client is paying an annual fee to the fund for actually managing the money. Providing one statement a year was considered too onerous, commented the Age’s economics editor Peter Martin, “even though it’s probably the least that could have been expected from a planner who actually was providing on ongoing service.” Clients are not reminded that “trailing commissions” on their investments are still going to the person who signed them on, and many contributors end up paying hundreds of dollars every single month for little discernible service.

The greatest reaction centred on the reintroduction of commissions. ASIC, the financial services watchdog, said: “Remuneration structures used in the financial advice industry create real and potential conflicts of interest that can distort the quality of advice.” These are often not evident to consumers, and the only way to deal with the problem is to remove the remuneration structures that give rise to these conflicts. As leading business journalist Alan Kohler argued, “The fundamental problem is that the term ‘sales’ is simply incompatible with the word ‘advice,’ and can never be reconciled. When someone goes to a financial planner seeking advice, they are not expecting to be sold something instead.”

Perhaps recognising that it would be a hard argument to sell to the public, the Sinodinos strategy was to “try to do as much as possible by regulation rather than legislation and sneak a package out over summer in the hope that it would garner as little attention as possible,” wrote Crikey’s Bernard Keane. He made his first move on Friday 20 December, but a backlash gradually developed despite the timing.

Groups including National Seniors, the Council on the Ageing, Choice and Industry Super Australia came out in opposition in early 2014. The Financial Planning Association, which had supported the Coalition’s proposals before the election, said it was opposed to the reintroduction of commissions under the general advice exemption. Industry Super Australia urged the government to retreat because “the risks are too great.” “Both National Seniors Australia and the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association of NSW weren’t merely concerned about the FOFA repeal,” reported Keane, “they had actually launched campaigns against it.” Important parts of the business press, guided by the precept that the best market is the best-informed market, savaged it.

As the scale of opposition became clearer, there were rumours that the government would move by regulation rather than legislation. But Industry Super Australia presented legal advice to the government that if it moved to institute changes by regulation rather than legislative change, they would be invalid and susceptible to challenge in the courts. The government said it was still intent on legislating the changes, but froze its plans to implement them immediately, saying it wanted further consultation.

In March and April, it had tried to paint the changes as part of its push to abolish red tape. “Regulation suppresses innovation, raises consumer prices, ties the sector down in compliance costs, and opens up opportunities for rent-seeking,” argued one of its proponents, the Institute of Public Affairs’ Chris Berg. It is not only wrong to state this as a universal truth, but in the case at hand the reverse is true. The Labor regulations reduced the scope for rent-seeking, and by opening up the market would have encouraged innovation, and certainly lowered costs and provided better service for consumers. As Kohler commented, “banning sales commissions and other conflicted remuneration to financial planners was never a red tape burden – it was the outlawing of a corrupt practice that has cost consumers billions of dollars and lowered trust in the entire financial advice industry.”

Echoing Berg, Sinodinos argued that Labor’s measures, introduced in the wake of the Storm Financial Crash in early 2009, were “unwieldy, burdensome and unnecessarily complex,” a considerable exaggeration of the regulatory burden. “No amount of regulation can prevent another financial collapse,” he went on. “You can never regulate away all risk. Neither our reforms nor Labor’s can prevent a possible future financial collapse.” At one level this is a truism. But the global financial crisis, which was triggered by problems in the American housing market, was fundamentally caused by a lack of transparency: investors didn’t know what debts they were taking on because financial institutions had become very sophisticated at hiding their liabilities. Transparency is a precondition of a well-functioning market; if the Sinodinos reforms succeed, Australian consumers will have less transparency and less capacity to make informed decisions.

More red tape rather than less

Another pre-election promise made in the name of cutting red tape was to abolish the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission, or ACNC, set up by the Labor government in 2012. Two years earlier, the Productivity Commission had concluded that “there is an urgent need to bring together the multiplicity of governance, taxation and fund-raising arrangements, especially at the Commonwealth level. While reducing compliance costs is one motivation, improvements in the regulatory regime are important for maintaining trust in the fidelity and integrity of the not-for-profit sector.”

The not-for-profit sector has an estimated annual revenue of $100 billion, and many argued that its special nature needed its own regulator, which would bring greater accountability, transparency and efficiency. In its first sixteen months the ACNC received 1.3 million visits to its website, registered 3000 organisations, received 686 complaints of which 272 warranted investigation, and had 400,000 visits to its register of organisations.

Abolishing the national body would mean a return to the previous regulatory maze at state and federal level. Rather unusually, the great bulk of the sector supports the ACNC. “Last year, a survey by Pro Bono Australia found that of 1500 stakeholders surveyed, about 80 per cent supported the ACNC,” reported Fairfax’s Judith Ireland. More than forty charitable organisations, including several of the biggest, wrote an open letter to the prime minister asking that the government scrap its plan to abolish the commission, saying that it has won the confidence of the sector and its abolition would lead to more rather than less red tape. Very few argued for the abolition plan; notable among them was Cardinal Pell.

Given the extent of the opposition, social security minister Kevin Andrews’s determination to close the ACNC seems misguided, and is likely to be thwarted by the Senate. It is another case of the government acting in ways that would reduce the amount of information available to the public. Material published by the ACNC allows potential donors to make more informed decisions; as its senior officers told a Senate committee, scrapping it would undermine the public’s ability to track what the not-for-profit organisations are doing.

Checks and monitors

Although there is a bipartisan consensus about not commenting on intelligence and security matters, the Abbott government’s efforts in this area have been particularly absolutist and hamfisted. When Edward Snowden revealed that the Australian Signals Directorate had spied on Indonesian officials in trade talks over prawn exports, and had then offered the information to the US National Security Agency, who passed it on to interested US customers, Tony Abbott said, “We use [surveillance] for the benefit of our friends… to uphold our values… to protect our citizens… and certainly don’t use it for commercial purposes.” Given that its breach was apparent to all, this response was not only mendacious but silly.

One of the very few checks in this area is the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, which was set up to review Australia’s anti-terrorism laws. When it moved to abolish the office in March, the government argued that “all relevant legislation has already been reviewed.” But the key point of the Monitor is “to provide continuing review” of whether the legislation “remains proportionate to any threat of terrorism.”

The budget continues the trend

All governments engage in spin control for partisan benefit. They seek to contain negative news, working on the presumption that what they (members of the public) don’t know can’t hurt us (the government).

Among the telling omissions in this year’s budget papers was the data comparing Australia’s deficit and debt with those of other countries, presumably because it showed Australia in a relatively good position. All budgets since 2005, when Peter Costello introduced the practice, have included a table showing how different family types on different incomes will be affected by the spending and taxing decisions outlined. This year, that table was missing. On the spending side, the sharpest cut was to foreign aid. In the past, governments have released a “blue book” outlining precise aid allocations; this year, for the first time in much more than a decade, the document didn’t appear.

Similarly, all governments seek to manage the public agenda. The Abbott government’s efforts to have as little attention to climate change issues as possible are an extreme case of agenda management, but far from unique. In the quest for electoral advantage, and to promote its policy priorities, it directs the public spotlight towards some issues and away from others. Thus, it mounted a very high-profile Commission of Audit to highlight where it thinks government spending should be cut. It was less keen to identify gaps in revenue. Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh criticised the government’s decision to abolish Labor’s tax transparency reforms “which would have ensured the public could see how much tax Australia’s largest companies are paying.” Leigh argued that Labor had required 200 of Australia’s largest firms to disclose their total income, taxable income and tax paid and this would now cease. He quoted assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos as saying, “We don’t want to get into a situation where we’re putting more and more information out there.”

The government isn’t only being secretive about its own activities; its decisions are also having a detrimental impact on institutions that produce knowledge about our society and environment. The efforts to shut down official sources of information about preventive health and nutrition, financial planning and the charitable sector make it more difficult for consumers to make informed decisions. In each of these cases, the government has favoured narrow sectional interests over the broader public interest.

The budget also foreshadowed the privatisation of the ASIC register. As Paddy Manning pointed out in Crikey, of the two million companies in Australia only 2000 are listed on the ASX and subject to continuous disclosure obligations. Information about the rest can only be unearthed through searches of the ASIC registry. A typical search now costs between $20 and $50, and makes a tidy profit for ASIC. A privatised registry could use its monopoly to raise prices, making public scrutiny more expensive.

Cutbacks elsewhere in the public sector will impinge negatively on public knowledge. Treasury, according to its secretary, Martin Parkinson, will lose one in three of its staff because of funding cuts, and staff will also be reduced at the Tax Office. Cutbacks like these are unlikely to cause much public outcry, but they are also unlikely to help economic policy-making or maintain a more durable revenue base. Up to 1000 science and research jobs are also at risk; the CSIRO is the hardest hit, with 420 further jobs scheduled to be lost, in addition to 300 already cut.

What is at stake in these moves to reduce public transparency and public knowledge is not only who gains partisan advantage, but also, and much more importantly, the capacity of citizens and consumers to make informed choices. As they proceed, Australian democracy will become the poorer. *

The post The Abbott government’s war on transparency appeared first on Inside Story.

LEGAL scholar Savitri Taylor is frustrated. As one of Australia’s leading researchers on refugee issues, the associate professor of law at La Trobe University maintains a keen watch over Senate estimates hearings, which often provide important insights into the operation of Australia’s asylum seeker policies. This is particularly true of responses to questions on notice – questions that government officials can’t answer on the spot and undertake to respond to at a later date. Senate committees set deadlines – generally about seven weeks after the hearing – for the answers.

Taylor’s frustration stems from the fact that over the past year, with increasing boat arrivals and major policy shifts putting refugee policy in the spotlight, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s record on answering those questions has deteriorated. In fact, Immigration has consistently and repeatedly failed to answer many important questions in a timely manner, if at all.

Since October 2012, at three separate hearings of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, departmental officers have taken a total of 1722 questions on notice. So far, the committee has only received answers to about half of them, though the deadline for responses has long expired.

Questions on notice are often pointed and specific, and they can elicit information about government policies and practices that is revealing in substance and detail. Some of Immigration’s unanswered questions go to the heart of contentious policies, including the reopening of detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. As Taylor puts it, “Far more questions have been asked about regional processing at Senate estimates than have been answered.”

In October 2012, for example, WA Liberal senator Michaelia Cash asked Immigration officers a series of questions about the transfer of asylum seekers to Nauru and Manus Island. How many flights had the department chartered to Nauru and Manus and at what cost? What airline has been contracted to move freight to Nauru and Manus and what is that contract worth? How did the department establish that it was getting value for money? Has the department had any discussions with the International Organization for Migration about the establishment of centres on Nauru and Manus? Was the IOM invited to tender for any aspect of the management of these centres? If not, why not?

These were some of the 647 questions taken on notice by Immigration at the supplementary budget hearings of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee in October 2012. The committee set 7 December 2012 as the date by which responses were expected. Almost nine months after that deadline had passed, however, about one in five questions remained unanswered.

The department has exhibited similar tardiness in subsequent estimates hearings. At the additional estimates hearings in February 2013, 509 questions were put on notice with answers due on 30 March. At the time of writing, 176 of those questions – just over one in three – remain outstanding. Not one answer was provided before the due date, and more than 300 answers were received in one batch on Saturday 25 May, just two days before the 2013 budget estimates meeting of the committee. The volume of material made it difficult for senators to effectively process the answers and use them to inform the hearings.

The May estimates hearings resulted in another 568 questions being taken on notice by Immigration, with answers expected by the committee by 12 July. So far not one answer has been provided. At that hearing the secretary of the department, Martin Bowles, admitted that the department had “dropped the ball a little bit” in this regard. “In fairness,” he said, “the number of questions we get is escalating. Nothing we deal with is simple. Everything is complex. We try to get these things through the system, but Senate estimates is not the only list of questions we get. We get them from other Senate and joint committees and all sorts of other processes. The number we are getting is, unfortunately, escalating quite significantly. These people are doing their day jobs as well.”

The multicultural affairs minister, Kate Lundy, has offered a similar defence of the department in parliament. “Over the past seven hearings since the supplementary estimates hearings in October 2010 there has been a significant increase in the number of questions on notice,” she said. “They are doing their utmost to respond to those questions.”

Senator Cash is unimpressed. She points out that other departments seem better able to respond to questions from senators. She says, for example, that at the additional estimates hearings in February 2013 Treasury took 1180 questions on notice from the Economics Committee. Only thirty-nine answers remain outstanding. “In terms of where the Department of Immigration and Citizenship sit on the leader board of tardy responses to questions on notice,” says Cash, “they lead it, by a long shot.”

The senator says there are three possible reasons why the department had failed to provide answers: “They don’t know the answers, they’re too embarrassed to give the answers or they do not want the Australian public to know the truth about how far this portfolio has deteriorated under Labor’s watch.”

In defence of the department, it is true that it has been confronted with an avalanche of questions (particularly from the energetic Senator Cash). Some of the unanswered questions are detailed and could require staff to spend a significant amount of time searching through files or recalculating data. Other questions, however, appear almost ridiculously straightforward – for example, does the Nauruan public dental service have more than one dentist?

Some questions go to the heart of policy and potentially reveal major shortcomings and inconsistencies. How, for example, does the No Advantage principle work in practice? The idea of No Advantage is to remove the incentive to travel to Australia by boat by ensuring that it does not provide a faster route to resettlement than the processes on offer through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In October, Senator Cash asked how this would operate. Would No Advantage be applied differently for different cohorts of asylum seekers according to their circumstances? Would an Afghan asylum seeker who had made an application for refugee status in Pakistan, for example, be treated differently from an Afghan applying for refugee status in Malaysia or Indonesia? No responses have been provided.

Whatever workload pressures the department is under – and they are no doubt intense – it is hard to escape the conclusion that some questions are not being answered in a timely manner because they are politically inconvenient or because they would provide a level of openness and scrutiny that government would rather avoid.

In October 2012, for example, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked Immigration officers to provide a copy of the manual used by the private security company Serco to train its employees in how “to conduct themselves and run facilities in detention centres.” Almost a year later, this question remains unanswered. Presumably Serco has a training manual. If it does, then it is difficult to understand how it can take more than ten months for it to be presented to a parliamentary committee in response to a clearcut request. If no manual exists, then it should have been possible to answer the question even more promptly.

An exchange between Senator Cash and the secretary of the department, Martin Bowles, sheds some light on the process of answering estimates questions, and suggests that the hold-up may sometimes involve the minister’s office rather than the department. Bowles explained that when questions on notice are received they are farmed out to relevant line areas for a response. The responses come back to his office for clearance and are then sent to the minister’s office before being provided to the committee. Senator Cash pushed to know more:

Senator Cash: Do you track the date on which you send to the minister’s office the answers prepared by your department?

Mr Bowles: We just started that process.

Senator Cash: On what date did you provide the answers to the October estimates to the minister’s office?

Mr Bowles: It will be various dates, and I am not quite sure how far I can go back and track it. I can take that on notice and try to see where we can come up with the —

Senator Cash: To be fair to the department I am trying to work out if the tardiness is with the department or with the minister? If you can say to me, “We provided the October ones in November,” then I do not have any argument with the department.

Mr Bowles: I am being very up-front with you. We have been tardy in the department. There are some that we just have not got to. There is a range of reasons. In the minister's office, between February and now, we have had a change in minister and change in the minister’s office staffing. That plays into it as well, from that perspective.

To press her point further, the senator drew the secretary’s attention to the fate of a particular question – question AE13/0183, posed in February 2013, which asked about the blowout in budgeted costs for asylum seeker management since November 2007. The answer, provided in May, was “See answers to AE13/0016 and AE13/0017.” As Cash noted with some amusement, however, questions AE13/0016 and AE13/0017 did not yet have answers themselves:

Senator Cash: I am sure we all know where this is going, because then when you flick through your bundle and you find that those answers have not been provided, I think the obvious question arises. Why? And that is not the only example. I just want to see where the fault lies, and obviously I would like to see the answer to that question, because it is of particular interest to me.

Mr Bowles: Clearly they are in our system somewhere between us and the minister’s office. I would have to check specifically where they are.

Senator Cash: How does an answer get left —

Mr Bowles: Because they would all be done at a similar time, probably. This one has been released and the others have not at this point.

THE estimates process is one of the most important mechanisms of transparency and accountability in Australian democracy, because it allows senators to pose direct and specific questions to departmental officers who are obliged to provide truthful answers. The requirement to provide answers continues, even when parliament is prorogued for an election.

Unfortunately, though, when a department fails to answer questions, the remedies are limited and far from immediate. Senator Cash says the only action she can take is to raise the matter in the Senate chamber under standing order 74(5) and ask the responsible minister why questions have not been answered. (Clearly, this can only happen when the Senate is sitting.)

If the minister fails to provide an answer then the senator can seek to move a motion to debate the matter. As the deputy clerk of the Senate, Richard Pye explains, “This may be considered to be both an accountability mechanism and a procedural penalty, as it diverts scarce debating time from other matters, including from the government’s legislative program.”

If debate in the chamber still fails to elicit results, then a senator may move a motion to require the production of answers by a given deadline. Pye says that this “raises the profile of the matter from a committee concern to a concern of the Senate itself” and puts “further pressure on the government to provide answers.”

If the government still refuses or fails to respond then the Senate can use procedural penalties to escalate the matter one step further – “for instance,” says Pye, “in the Senate refusing to deal with related legislation until the matter is resolved.” The Senate resorted to this ultimate penalty in the first half of 2009, when the government failed to respond to an order to produce documents about the National Broadband Network, by postponing consideration of any government legislation relating to the project until the documents were finally provided.

If there is a change of government on 7 September it will be interesting to see how committed Senator Cash remains to pursuing responses to many unanswered questions. As Savitri Taylor from La Trobe University says, the failure to answer questions on notice goes far beyond political point-scoring or academic frustration. “The proper functioning of democracy depends on an informed citizenry,” she says. “If citizens cannot find out what their government is doing in their name, they are not in a position to hold government accountable for those actions at election time or any other time.” •

• The Department of Immigration and Citizenship was approached for comment during the writing of this article and undertook to respond to specific questions by the end of August. At the time of writing, no answers had been received. 

The post Immigration’s unanswered questions appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s a dark day for the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and not for the reasons parroted in the media about Allan Asher’s faux pas in collaborating with a Greens senator to raise questions about his resources. Rather it is because of the way in which the ombudsman has been harassed, even after apologising for his self-styled “unwise” conduct. That an ombudsman can be dressed down by the head of the prime minister’s department – an agency subject to his jurisdiction – and by minister Gary Gray, demonstrates his office’s lack of independence from government.

The office is one of the largest in the world in terms of the volume of complaints heard, and it has greatly enhanced the accountability of government to individual citizens. But a lack of resources has undermined its effectiveness and there are clear conflicts of interest in the current funding arrangements. Australia should follow comparable democracies such as Britain and New Zealand, and countries as varied as Norway, South Africa and Thailand, and make the ombudsman a statutory officer reporting to parliament, like the auditor-general. The budget of the ombudsman’s office should be approved by a parliamentary oversight committee.

THE Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman began operation on 1 July 1977, following the enactment of the Ombudsman Act 1976. The new agency was part of an administrative law package recommended by various committees between 1968 and 1973. The other elements of that package, also enacted in 1976, were the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, a new system of judicial review of administrative decisions, and the Administrative Review Council, whose job was to monitor and review the new structure.

During the 1960s and 1970s it had become evident that the federal government was having an increasing impact in the everyday lives of all Australians. Its increasing involvement in areas such as welfare, education and health, as well as in its more traditional areas – customs, immigration and taxation – resulted in calls for the level of government that seemed most distant from the populace to exhibit greater transparency and accountability. The ability to challenge administrative decisions and actions was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent in Australia before the 1970s. Reforms in this area had also been taking place at state government level.

For the ordinary citizen, the ombudsman’s office was the key institution in the new administrative law package. Its role was to investigate complaints, to undertake investigations of Commonwealth administrative actions on its own initiative, and to report, as necessary, on the public interest implications of matters of public administration. As the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, put it at the time, “The establishment of the office is directed towards ensuring that departments and authorities are responsive, adaptive and sensitive to the needs of citizens.”

Since then, the office has dealt with about 550,000 complaints, including 18,313 in the most recent reporting year (2009–10). It has jollied, cajoled and berated government agencies into accepting that they have a responsibility to account to the public. It has assisted those agencies to establish and improve their own complaint-handling mechanisms. It has forced governments to accept and develop a system for making ex gratia payments for those suffering financial detriment as a result of defective administration.

The office has exposed flaws in many operational systems, including the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, child support, immigration detention, employment, education, and family allowance payments, as well as deficiencies in administration of freedom of information legislation and failures in service delivery to Aboriginal clients. Increasingly, the office has contributed to the rethinking of policy approaches by virtue of submissions to parliamentary inquiries and by undertaking investigations into systemic problems in agencies or the administration of schemes.

Ultimately, the recommendations following an ombudsman’s investigation are those of the person occupying the position. Consequently, the personality of the occupant has been a major factor in the performance and direction of the institution itself.

The extrovert first ombudsman, Professor Jack Richardson, was ideally suited to take on the hitherto secretive mandarins who headed the major departments in the late 1970s. His public and private exchanges with the legendary Treasury secretary, John Stone, are now the stuff of history.

The doggedness and determination of his successor, Professor Dennis Pearce, in repeatedly making reports to the prime minister when agencies failed to implement his recommendations, eventually led to the parliament’s establishing mechanisms to consider the ombudsman’s work more fully, mechanisms that have sadly lapsed in recent years.

The fourth ombudsman, Philippa Smith, became probably the most public face of the office as she revitalised the organisation and undertook a major outreach program to ensure that those who often most needed its services were aware of the its existence. Her numerous public reports and public comment had a similar effect within the bureaucracy.

Professor John McMillan left an indelible imprint on the office. Undoubtedly the father of freedom of information in Australia, he added a different sort of intellectual rigour to the office and the setting of priorities for its work, and had to take on the onerous task of reviewing the circumstances surrounding the detention of immigrants.

Allan Asher recommitted to ensuring that those who are least able to deal with bureaucracy are better able to deal with agencies and to access his office.

Is the office independent? As this week’s events suggest, yes and no. Although there is no doubting the legislated independence and freedom from direction of the office itself, the office remains an agency of the executive government. Unlike many of its international cousins – and indeed some of its state counterparts – the ombudsman is not an officer of the parliament. He or she is nominated to the prime minister, generally following some form of selection process, by the head of the prime minister’s department (itself subject to the ombudsman’s jurisdiction and thus having a theoretical conflict of interest), who recommends the person to the governor-general for appointment. Parliament has no say in the process, not even a right of veto.

Even more worrying, perhaps, is the mechanism for funding the office. If one wanted to curb the ombudsman, the most effective way to do it, short of repealing the legislation, is to starve the office of resources. And this is what occurred during the Richardson, Pearce and Smith terms of office. In the last instance, immediately after the Howard government came to office, the prime minister’s portfolio was among those targeted for expenditure cuts. The head of the department selected the ombudsman for the bulk of the required savings. No less than $1.9 million, or 22 per cent of the annual budget, was cut by the head of an agency that was subject to the ombudsman’s jurisdiction – at a time when the number of complaints to the ombudsman was increasing at a rate of about 20 per cent each year. Was this perhaps revenge for the previous prime minister’s increasing the ombudsman’s budget by the very same amount a few years earlier despite opposition from the same agency?

To be truly independent, the ombudsman should become an officer of parliament and the budget for the office should be approved by a parliamentary oversight committee. As in New South Wales, the government would nominate a person to the parliamentary committee, which would then have the power to approve, or not approve, the appointment. The ombudsman would submit his or her proposed budget to the parliamentary committee for consideration at the same time as it considered the office’s annual report and plans for the forthcoming year, and the committee would then recommend a budget to the government. The New Zealand Ombudsman’s budget is dealt with in this way. Such a process has been supported by (the late) Jack Richardson, Dennis Pearce, Philippa Smith, John McMillan and Allan Asher.

The ombudsman’s office has been a resounding success. The fact that any person can make a complaint, at no charge, and have it resolved by an independent and impartial authority is a major tool for ensuring the accountability of government administration. That the ombudsman’s processes are themselves transparent is a further strength. The past thirty-five years have demonstrated that, when necessary, the ombudsman has stood up for the principles of fairness, equity and proper redress. Armed with extensive powers, the office can get to the truth of the matter, and thus has exposed flaws, negligence and defects and pointed to better policy directions.

Above all, perhaps, the ability of the ombudsman to determine a matter on whether the action complained about was “reasonable in all the circumstances” – irrespective of whether it was lawful – makes it a unique attribute of our system of integrity. It’s time to take a vital further step in ensuring the independence of the office. •

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THE DISGRACEFUL pursuit of the former customs official Allan Kessing over his revelation of serious security lapses at Sydney Airport highlights an official obsession with secrecy in Australia and a major deficiency in protection for whistleblowers acting in the public interest. Mr Kessing faces the possibility of further charges, having already been convicted under section 70 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act, for which he received a nine-month suspended prison sentence and was ordered to pay a $1000 good behaviour bond. The federal police are now considering whether to take further action after he admitted to leaking a report to a staffer of a federal Labor MP.

There is no doubt that Mr Kessing was acting in the wider public interest – and immediate action was taken to address issues subsequently revealed in newspaper articles based on the same report – and there is no suggestion that he acted for personal gain. Indeed, he now faces a significant debt as a result of his legal fees

Despite some perfunctory legislation, official Australia has always been reluctant to acknowledge that the willingness of public officials to disclose wrongdoing within their organisations is an essential element in a robust democracy, as important as the work of an auditor-general or an ombudsman. Although nearly all Australian jurisdictions have introduced relevant legislation for the public sector since 1993, both the content of the laws and the practice of handling whistleblowing continue to be vexed issues. Laws to protect whistleblowers are patchy at best, and the Commonwealth remains by far the greatest laggard, despite promises by Labor to address the issue. The fact that the sweeping provisions of section 70 of the Crimes Act, under which Mr Kessing was prosecuted, still remain on the statute books is a monument to inaction.

Existing federal protection for whistleblowers is limited in effect and narrow in scope. Restrictions on Commonwealth public sector employees disclosing government information are contained in a range of acts and regulations, including the Crimes Act, the Criminal Code Act, the Public Service Act, the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

The primary source of protection for whistleblowers is section 16 of the Public Service Act. This section notes that a person performing functions in or for an agency “must not victimise, or discriminate against, an APS employee because the APS employee has reported breaches (or alleged breaches) of the Code of Conduct.” (Section 16 of the Parliamentary Services Act provides the same protection for persons performing functions in or for a parliamentary department established under that Act.)

But a report tabled earlier this year by the House of Representatives Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee indicates that only two-thirds of employees in the Australian government are protected by section 16 of the Public Service Act; employees of agencies falling within the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act 1998 are not covered, and nor are former public servants, contractors or consultants. The committee, chaired by Labor MP Mark Dreyfus, made a series of recommendations for reform but the government has yet to respond.

As things stand, there is little incentive for an official to blow the whistle, no matter how serious the matter at hand. A study in 2007, led by Griffith University, surveyed public servants in the Commonwealth and three states and found that 71 per cent of the almost 8000 respondents had observed at least one instance of wrongdoing or serious maladministration in the preceding two years. Of those who reported wrongdoing, 22 per cent replied that they had been the victim of reprisal from managers or co-workers.

THERE IS NO universally accepted definition of whistleblowing, but one that has gained broad acceptance emanated from a Senate committee inquiring into whistleblowing in 1994: “The disclosure by organisation members (former or current) of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers to persons that may be able to effect action.” The report came at a time when whistleblowing featured prominently on the political agenda, in the wake of such well-publicised corruption investigations as the explosive Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland. In 1991, a review of Commonwealth criminal law went so far as to accept the broad principle that in a democratic society “the public should have access to as much information as to the workings and activities of government and its servants as is compatible with the effective functioning of government.”

As a result of this peaking of public interest, a raft of public interest disclosure legislation was passed – South Australia in 1993; Queensland, the ACT and New South Wales in 1994; the Commonwealth 1999; Victoria 2001; Tasmania 2002; Western Australia 2003; and Northern Territory 2008. There is, however, significant inconsistency in the types of wrongdoing about which protected disclosures can be made under these various laws. In some circumstances the conduct about which a disclosure may be made appears to be too general and to extend beyond what we might regard as whistleblowing. In other cases – where, for example, only unlawful behaviour is covered, not maladministration – the conduct is too narrowly defined.

Only three states – South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia – have seen fit to detail the types of public sector wrongdoing covered, and they are also the only jurisdictions that provide remedies for potentially or actually aggrieved whistleblowers. Only one jurisdiction, New South Wales, extends protection in certain circumstances to officials who make public interest disclosures to a member of parliament or the media.

Australia’s efforts in enacting effective legislation protecting public interest disclosure lag behind many comparable countries. In Canada, for example, the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act lists the “wrongdoings” that may legitimately be revealed, makes illegal any reprisals against public servants who disclose or co-operate with investigators and establishes the office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner. In the United States, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 –extended in 1994 to cover employees of some government corporations and employees in the Veterans Administration – prohibits from reprisals federal officials who blow the whistle on public sector misconduct and provides a means of redress, including financial compensation, for any loss suffered. Australia, it should be noted, also has an international obligation to protect whistleblowers, deriving from its signing of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, which makes specific reference to protection for public interest disclosure.

The reluctance to enact stringent legislation to protect public interest disclosures coupled with inadequate and compromised laws relating to freedom of information and an absence of shield legislation for journalists all serve the cause of maintaining official secrecy and denying the public’s right to know. •

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ONLY PEOPLE without shame and without memory could have concocted and participated in Canberra’s utegate debacle. In the fevered and frantic atmosphere of Parliament House they combined to cook up a crisis that proved to be a soufflé. The whole thing collapsed when police disclosed that an email allegedly revealing improper conduct by prime minister Kevin Rudd and treasurer Wayne Swan was a forgery.

Much about this political soufflé remains mysterious. Who produced the email on a Treasury computer and sent it to the Treasury official Godwin Gretch? How did the email find its way to News Ltd reporter Steve Lewis? What efforts did Lewis make to verify the document before reporting it in the Sydney Daily Telegraph? Who passed the contents of the email to opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and opposition senator Eric Abetz before it appeared in the newspaper?

For the moment the matter is in the hands of the federal police and the auditor-general, who has been asked by Rudd to report by 31 July. Questions are already being asked about the relationship between the unhappy Mr Gretch and Liberal politicians following reports, not denied by Turnbull, that Gretch had leaked information to the opposition over recent years. The police will investigate whether any criminality was involved in the production and transmission of the fake email and in other leaks; the auditor-general will analyse and assess the administration of the government’s OzCar scheme, designed to help motor traders through the global financial crisis.

In the meantime it seems salutary to note that the affair has most seriously damaged those who were the most shameless and those whose memories were weakest – notably the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and his frontbench team, whose egos and sense of entitlement drove their efforts to destroy the prime minister and the treasurer. Some among Canberra’s press gallery have also been acting as zealots, more anxious to practice “gotcha” journalism than to report and comment on the unfolding saga.

For Turnbull the collapse of the utegate soufflé has been particularly damaging. He has lost authority and credibility as well as the respect and support of his own party and the broader electorate. Rudd has inevitably mounted what will widely be seen as a justifiable political attack on Turnbull’s judgement and character. It remains to be seen whether Turnbull will be able to re-establish himself during the winter parliamentary recess as a credible opposition leader and alternative prime minister.

Viewed more broadly the whole affair has shown Australian politics and political journalism at their most parochial and inward-looking. It has coincided with the global financial downturn, which continues to be a serious crisis for world capitalism. At the same time China is looming as a potential challenge to US economic and strategic primacy; Australia has 1500 troops in a perilous and finely balanced war in Afghanistan; new turmoil is wracking Iran; and the paranoid North Korean regime may be preparing more nuclear and/or missile tests.

Yet attention has been focused overwhelmingly on phony claims by the opposition that the prime minister and the treasurer lied to parliament about their dealings with the car dealer John Grant. Turnbull belatedly conceded there was no evidence against the prime minister, then doggedly turned his attention to Swan. But the evidence was not strong enough to force the treasurer’s resignation given Australia’s slack tradition of ministerial accountability. In any case, the failed attack on Rudd ensured Swan’s safety.

Unhappily it appears that no Liberal politician or journalist tried to check the authenticity of the email on which they initially relied. Instead they rushed headlong into parliament or into print, intoning dire warnings about integrity and honesty and demanding answers to questions based on that dubious document. Since it was exposed as a forgery, parts of the media seem to have swung onto the Rudd bandwagon, relishing the prime minister’s campaign to force Turnbull to resign. Scenting blood in the water they are circling for a part in a possible kill.

The creation of this dismal spectacle required disturbing levels of political and journalistic shamelessness and myopia, all driven by vaulting ambition. Lack of shame and of memory may be abiding characteristics of Australian politics but they have rarely been on display more brazenly or with more lamentable consequences than in this debacle.

To lack shame is to be without the emotional restraints – guilt and embarrassment, for example – that prompt others to act or speak with some consistency and consideration for others and for evidence. As the utegate soufflé filled with hot air Malcolm Turnbull and other coalition politicians insisted that it was about Labor MPs doing special favours for “a mate.” According to deputy leader Julie Bishop, this is “in the Labor DNA.” So Mr Turnbull was not pleased to be reminded in parliament that as environment minister in 2007 he gave $10 million to a neighbour and political supporter, Matt Handbury, a nephew of Rupert Murdoch, to enable his company to trial an unproved Russian rain-making technology. “It’s a completely different issue,” he sniffed on 5 June. “The issue for today is simply this: the Prime Minister is in receipt of a free car.”

Perhaps. But it was shameless of Turnbull, a helpful mate to Matt Handbury, to claim that his actions were somehow different in quality to those he alleged against the prime minister and treasurer. He was, arguably, far more generous to a mate than he alleged Rudd and Swan had been to Grant. The fact is that all ministers do favours for “mates” (whatever a “mate” may be in politics); they always have and always will.

If Turnbull’s memory had been longer he might have recalled that nine years ago John Howard found himself battling claims that he did a favour for his brother Stan, chairman of National Textiles, when the government guaranteed full entitlements – worth some $6 million – to retrenched National Textile workers. Howard denied the charge of special treatment. But the point is that charges of favouritism are easy to make and hard to disprove (especially when forged email evidence is offered in support). Without the checks of memory and experience politicians are easily tempted into rash behaviour – as Turnbull was tempted when, at the Canberra press gallery ball, he gratuitously told Rudd adviser Andrew Charlton that he should always tell the truth.

Parts of the media were no less shameless and lacking in memory. The Daily Telegraph rushed the fake email into the paper. It was hardly the Zinoviev letter, but the Tele might have made efforts to check its accuracy. Not so. Reporter Steve Lewis had “a scoop.” The newspaper apparently made no more attempt to check the email than it made to check the fake photographs of Pauline Hanson it published only weeks ago.

Much of the media was also shameless in what it left out of its accounts of the unfolding drama. Little prominence was given to a statement by the head of the Motor Traders’ Association, Michael Delaney, that Treasury treated John Grant no differently from many other dealers. If anything, Delaney said, Grant received poorer treatment because he went through the treasurer’s office. This disclaimer seems not to have fitted the media’s sense of the story that Swan was in danger because he had done a favour for Grant. It was downplayed presumably because it threatened to undermine the “gotcha” scenario being set up by parts of the media to nail Swan.

Opposition senator Eric Abetz said that a journalist gave him the fake email before his Senate committee questioning of Gretch. If so, the journalist acted shamefully. It is not the role of the media to provide bullets for politicians to fire, and journalists undermine the credibility and independence of the media when they seek to be players rather than voyeurs.

With stronger historical memories press gallery journalists with ambitions to be political players would perhaps be restrained by the words of the former British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who famously said that the press sought “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Slightly overstated, perhaps, but an essentially true description of any journalist who would rush an unverified email to a senator to use as ammunition in a parliamentary hearing.

So where, after the tumult and the shouting, does the matter rest? Rudd is exonerated; Turnbull is damaged; Gretch is assisting police with their inquiries; the sea-green incorruptible auditor-general is preparing to probe. Swan has avoided scrutiny that might have caused him passing embarrassment but would not have destroyed him.

Overall, things have backfired badly on those pursuing political power and media notoriety without conscience or memory. Amid it all, the most effective news breaker has been ABC television reporter Chris Uhlmann – even if he and the rest of the pack were reporting little more substantial than the rise and the collapse of a Canberra soufflé. •

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IT WAS ONE of the nastiest witch-hunts conducted by a federal government department in recent years and it has cast a long shadow over the integrity and judgement of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, DFAT. The case was, of course, the $1.5 million three-year pursuit of diplomat Trent Smith following an unsubstantiated accusation by another diplomat, Matthew Hyndes, whose private and professional credibility was compromised and who was described by an arbitration commissioner as having “a lack of regard for the truth.”

While some of the issues are still murky or unresolved, enough is now known to argue that DFAT’s actions were driven by a self-serving and secretive institutional mindset that saw it pursue alleged information leaks with a remorselessness that bordered on the obsessive.

Smith and Hyndes are now back at work in DFAT, and they and the department appear anxious to put the episode behind them. Although the affair occurred while the Howard government was in office, the Rudd government has shown little public inclination to continue the pursuit of the issues that it raised in opposition. It is still unclear whether Labor will compensate Smith for the substantial legal costs of clearing his name and gaining reinstatement after being sacked by DFAT. A blanket of silence has come down over the affair.

Yet unease remains. Smith has been cleared of leaking sensitive information but is reportedly heavily in debt. Hyndes has been demoted and fined by DFAT. It has been confirmed he was involved in Thailand with a business partner now missing and presumed murdered. It has also been confirmed that $46 million passed through his bank accounts before he was declared bankrupt (the bankruptcy was annulled in 2001). And it has been confirmed that Hyndes’s DFAT security clearance, which was downgraded for five years, was restored after he sent an email to the head of DFAT’s security branch saying that he would leak information.

These lurid aspects of the affair made headlines. Yet the heart of the matter arguably is not what was and was not done by and to Smith and Hyndes. It is rather why the two officers were treated so differently by DFAT throughout the affair. Smith was referred to police and other external investigators and treated as a pariah who was to be investigated until some offence could be pinned on him. Hyndes was treated as a decent chap who had made mistakes, repented, and been forgiven and rewarded after being punished through internal DFAT processes.

It is these extraordinary differences that raise questions about the fairness, critical judgement and moral courage of DFAT’s senior officers. It might or might not be relevant that Smith was reported to have worked as a Labor Party staffer while Hyndes had links to the Liberal Party and had campaigned for the Nationals. Whether Smith was pursued as a result of Coalition government political pressure is a question that has not, and is unlikely to be, answered by DFAT.

TRENT SMITH’S ORDEAL started in February 2003 when he was suspended from work on full pay on suspicion of having leaked the minutes of a politically embarrassing conversation between the then foreign minister Alexander Downer and the New Zealand High Commissioner Kate Lackey. Downer had told Lackey that with or without United Nations approval Australian troops would participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq. At the time the public position of the government was that no decision had been made to commit Australian troops.

It subsequently emerged that Matthew Hyndes was the informant who told DFAT investigators that Smith had possibly leaked details of Downer’s conversation with Lackey. Hyndes also told investigators that he was “convinced on some level” that Smith had passed information to the Labor opposition and that he had helped the opposition to prepare questions for Senate estimates hearings. A subsequent inquiry by the Australian Federal Police cleared Smith of leaking Downer’s conversation.

Notwithstanding the AFP’s finding, DFAT continued to investigate Smith, hiring external consultants and eventually spending more than $1.3 million. Smith was eventually sacked in July 2006 after an investigation conducted by Peter Kennedy, a former public service commissioner and former staffer of retired Liberal minister Peter Reith, found that he had breached the apolitical requirements of the Australian Public Service code of conduct.

A search through more than 8000 of Smith’s emails had found that in September 2002 he replied to a message from Ashley Wells, a former DFAT colleague who was an adviser to Kevin Rudd, the opposition foreign affairs spokesman. Wells had asked Smith where he would find a list of people consulted in the preparation of a government white paper. Smith replied that the list of individuals consulted could form the basis of a question at Senate estimates hearings. In effect Smith referred Wells to information available on the public record. That appeared to be the alleged offence that led to his sacking.

In December 2006 Smith applied for reinstatement and, vigorously opposed by DFAT, mounted a case in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission before Commissioner Barbara Deegan. It was during the AIRC hearings and at Senate estimates hearings in 2006 and 2007 that lurid details of Hyndes’s professional and personal life, and the institutional attitudes of DFAT, emerged as factors in the ongoing saga.

In September 2007 Commissioner Deegan ordered Smith’s immediate reinstatement. In a major embarrassment for DFAT and the government she described his sacking as “harsh, unjust and unreasonable” and said there was a myriad of reasons why she could not accept that any evidence given by Hyndes, DFAT’s main witness, was credible. She found that Hyndes had a “lack of regard for the truth.” Hyndes, then deputy Australian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, was flown to Australia to give evidence at the AIRC hearing.

During the AIRC and Senate estimates hearings it emerged that Hyndes was found to have breached the public service code of conduct while on leave without pay in Thailand working for a private firm, Asset Risk Management, during 1996. When he returned to DFAT in Canberra in 1997 his security clearance was downgraded. In 1999 he was demoted, had two “three-figure” internal fines imposed on him, and was required to undergo counselling.

Hyndes’s top-secret security clearance was restored in August 2002 only days after he sent an email to the head of the DFAT security branch saying that he would go to the media with allegations damaging to Australia–Thailand relations unless his clearance was immediately restored. Hyndes also said he would reveal information about the death of Merv Jenkins, the Defence Intelligence Organisation officer who had committed suicide in Washington in 1999 after being interviewed as part of a DFAT/Defence investigation into document handling. It also emerged that in September 1997, heavily disguised, Hyndes appeared without departmental authorisation on Four Corners.

There were also disclosures about Hyndes’s work with Asset Risk Management in Thailand. The company principal, Tim Gatland, Hyndes’s business partner, has been missing in Thailand since 1996 and is presumed murdered. Australia’s National Personal Insolvency Index showed Hyndes was declared bankrupt in 1999; the bankruptcy was annulled in 2001.

Perhaps understandably, newspapers at the time devoted significant space to these issues, to reports of $46 million passing through Hyndes’s bank accounts and to suggestions that Asset Risk Management had sought to bribe Thai politicians and that Hyndes was “a person of interest” to the Thai police.

During the AIRC hearings several expert witnesses said Smith had not breached the Public Service code of conduct by directing Ashley Wells to information that was on the public record. Commissioner Deegan criticised Kennedy’s investigation of Smith, saying she was unable to accept his reasoning or many of his conclusions or findings as to alleged breaches by Smith. “Mr Kennedy reached his conclusion… on the basis of evidence that was unsafe, untested and unsustainable on the facts,” she said.

While press reporting repeatedly stressed that Smith had been subjected to a long and financially damaging witch-hunt by DFAT it paid little attention to the difference in the department’s treatment of Smith and Hyndes. Yet this is arguably the most intriguing and disturbing aspect of the matter.

Smith, a trade economist and DFAT officer of good standing since 1991, had received two departmental citations for his work. He had worked as an adviser to the Labor opposition between 1997 and 1999. The career and professional behaviour of Hyndes, who was reported to have had Liberal Party ties and to have campaigned for the National Party, had been far more troubled.

Yet on information supplied by Hyndes, Smith was stood down, sacked and subjected to three years of searching investigation by the department, police and other consultants including Peter Kennedy. Hyndes, by contrast, was taken back into the department after his troubled interlude with Asset Risk Management and was subsequently posted to Sri Lanka as deputy high commissioner. Departmental penalties imposed on him seem insignificant compared with Smith’s protracted ordeal. Commissioner Deegan’s findings were doubtless embarrassing to him, but Hyndes is still with the department and is currently understood to be working on the plum United States desk at DFAT’s Canberra headquarters.

It certainly appeared that Hyndes was treated with kid gloves compared with Smith. In Senate estimates hearings on 27 May 2007 Labor Senator John Faulkner sought to pursue the issue as he questioned DFAT deputy secretary Doug Chester. Faulkner’s examination of Chester, which received little media coverage, proved a rare and troubling insight into DFAT processes and the department’s mindset.

Throughout, Chester repeatedly sought to avoid answering questions which he said were matters being contested at Commissioner Deegan’s AIRC hearing, which was running at the same time. He refused, for example, to comment when Faulkner asked him whether Hyndes’s email to the head of the DFAT security branch was “just a blatant threat.” “I think we are again straying into areas that are before the commission… and I would prefer not to go down that path,” he said.

Chester also refused to say whether, as reported, he had told Hyndes, in relation to his intention to destroy certain documents, that he could “do what he liked” with them. “Again I would like to answer,” Chester said, “but it goes to the issue of credibility of witnesses before the commission.”

But Faulkner did extract an answer from Chester when he asked why Smith’s case had been passed to external investigators while Hyndes had been dealt with internally. Here is the crucial part of Chester’s reply: “[I]t was clear that the issues surrounding Mr Smith were going to be politicised and the best way for the department to protect itself from dangers of politicisation was to have an independent umpire look at it.” In Hyndes’s case, Chester said, “there is no element of politicisation. The allegations in relation to Hyndes were things like misleading the department as to when he was going to take leave without pay; the allegations against Smith were ones of providing assistance to the opposition in the preparation of Senate estimates questions.”

Under Faulkner’s questioning Chester said: “I do not think there is any doubt that Mr Hyndes will forever be dogged by those six months leave he took from the department when he worked in Thailand. I think it is quite clear that it has had a significant impact on him, his family, his health and his career in the department. He has been subject to a code of conduct investigation. He has been demoted. He has been subject to a number of security clearance reviews… He has made a decision that he wants to get on with his career in the department. At least for the last three years or so his work in the department has been very good. It is on that basis that he was posted to Sri Lanka. As I said earlier he is doing a very good job in Sri Lanka.” Mr Chester was clearly not reluctant during the contested AIRC hearings to provide Hyndes with this character reference.

Towards the end of the questioning Faulkner asked Chester whether it was the department’s intention to have “the appropriate authority” examine Hyndes’s remarks about the Merv Jenkins case. While again saying “it would be best for us to allow the commission to reach a conclusion,” Chester finally conceded: “I can assure you that if at the conclusion of these proceedings there is any information that is relevant to that case, then the department obviously will be forthcoming with it.”

But since Smith’s reinstatement DFAT has not been forthcoming about any aspect of the case. It refuses to answer questions about Smith and Hyndes and it does not yet appear to have offered to reimburse legal costs incurred by Smith in clearing his name and getting back his job. Labor, now in government, seems reluctant to act. One possible reason is that Labor does not want to put DFAT offside by further pursuing the differences in its handling of Smith and Hyndes.

YET THE IMPLICATIONS of Doug Chester’s evidence are deeply disturbing. The evidence betrays an institutional mindset of ducking for cover when under pressure. Chester sought refuge behind the AIRC hearing to avoid answering questions about contested issues, although he was clearly well placed to offer credible judgements and he did not shrink from giving Hyndes a character reference.

The evidence also suggested DFAT was more concerned to protect itself from “politicisation” (a notion not defined by Chester) than it was to protect the employment and legal rights of Trent Smith. It was disingenuous of Chester to suggest that the allegations relating to Hyndes were merely “things like misleading the department as to when he was going to take take leave without pay.” The evidence showed contentious behaviour by Hyndes went far beyond that essentially administrative infraction.

DFAT’s willingness to rely on an officer with damaged credibility suggests that its desire to pursue Smith overcame its judgement and sense of justice. It is not clear why this was so. There were even suggestions that the department might have been complicit in moves to destroy documents relating to the death of Merv Jenkins.

Chester’s warm endorsement of Hyndes as a man who had repented his past behaviour and was now doing a good job contrasted dramatically with his silence on Smith. One conclusion might be that the department prefers to encourage flawed and repentant sinners rather than to support virtuous officers who have managed to clear themselves of groundless allegations. Indeed in Smith’s case the department acted with great energy to find a new if equally dubious reason to sack him after the police cleared him of leaking the Downer–Lackey conversation.

Perhaps the last word should go to the Labor lion Senator Robert Ray. In Senate estimates he noted the difference between the government’s performance in the AWB Iraqi wheat sales scandal and its pursuit of Mr Smith. Ray contrasted DFAT’s failure to note and investigate correspondence in the AWB affair with its obsessive hunt for anything that might nail Smith. He also noted what he called Hyndes’s “pretty bad track record.”

It is unlikely that DFAT will ever come completely clean about its pursuit of Smith. It appears to be hoping now that Smith and Hyndes have been sufficiently intimidated to simply want to get on with their lives and careers. It remains to be seen whether Smith will be compensated in any way and how far Hyndes will progress in the department. At least the affair should alert those considering a diplomatic career to what they might face if they fall foul of the DFAT hierarchy’s instinct for self-preservation. •

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