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.

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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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. •

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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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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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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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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. •

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