The art of Public Service Review

With the release of the Henry report on tax the advisory group’s blueprint for Australian government, administration will slip well and truly into the background.

Providing this does not mean neglect, indifference and inactivity, this will be no bad thing.

Public services rarely benefit when they are the stuff of front-page news. It is in the nature of good public service development that it usually happens gradually, out of the limelight.

The most reassuring feature of the advisory group’s labours is its recommendations to enlarge and enhance the responsibilities and role of the Public Service Commissioner.

It will be a vital test of the Government’s integrity in this exercise that these proposals are implemented promptly and accompanied by augmented resources to allow, indeed require, the Commissioner to proceed on several fronts identified by the advisory group during the next two to three years. The blueprint itself observes: “Upfront investment will be required to enable the [Public Service Commission] to meet its extra responsibilities.”

Not to proceed immediately with strengthening the Commissioner will leave a de facto vacuum at the top of the public service which certainly needs to be filled if the reform agenda is to proceed with dispatch. Present part-time arrangements will not be adequate for the task.

The Commissioner has a busy time ahead. The twin tasks of reining in the over-sized senior executive service and restoring a unified pay and grading structure, with scope for some flexibility, will be demanding of time as well as staff, and not least in departments and agencies.

Such chores are at the heart of routine public service management. Historically this will be the fifth occasion that the APS has been the subject of such overhaul, though the last occasion was nearly half a century ago.

The modern reformers will need to revive some lost arts in the business of classification review and streamlining but they will have available to them many facilities which their predecessors could not even dream of.

Another big task will be establishing an integrated framework for professional development and training, commencing with induction programs for newly recruited staff.

This has been a neglected field in Australian government administration, and something of a self-inflicted wound. Back in the mid-1990s, when staff development should have been a central feature of the reform endeavour of that era, the public service leadership of the time was explicitly dismissive of the need for any concerted action on this front.

Now there is an opportunity to address this deficiency systematically and comprehensively. Fresh thinking will be needed and success is unlikely if the task is off-loaded to consultants and academics (quasi-consultants).

Revitalisation can only really come from the public service doing its own thinking (though testing it periodically against that of others).

The idea that the public service needs a blueprint is itself misconceived; the public service is not a bit of machinery. And the advisory group’s effort is not itself a blueprint but an agenda which will serve for 3-5 years.

This is essentially as it should be. Public services are large organizations and there are always matters in need of review, renovation, maintenance and, sometimes, elimination. There is not much wisdom in trying to do them all at once. There must be judgment about priority and about expected benefit.

The blueprint has not so far had a good press, partly because it reads like a series of overheads for a power point presentation. The public relations nature of its release a month ago betrayed a lack of confidence in its substance.

What will be interesting is how well it stands up to professional evaluation and appraisal. Academic gradings will likewise be of special interest, bearing in mind that so many academics nowadays are within the pale of government.

The blueprint’s problems partly arise from its ambiguous character. It seeks to place itself in the lineage of major public service inquiries – in nominal terms, casting itself as a derivative of the (Coombs) Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration.

But it otherwise brings with it none of the qualities of the traditional public service inquiry, nor their major defect – long drawn-out proceedings of two or more years.

The traditional inquiry, in recent times extant mainly in Canada, had several qualities which gave it durability quite apart from whatever recommendations were advanced. It became a great source of information about the public service and its practices; it gave an airing to matters which otherwise existed largely in the oral wisdom of a public service.

It was an instrument for investigation and research; as the Coombs commission wrote, the products of its “research program constitute a formidable body of work on public administration in Australia and will no doubt be a resource for study for many years.” And so it proved.

Many inquiries become forums for discussion and debate. The Coombs commission observed of its own procedure: “The Commission thought it desirable that its inquiries should take place at the centre of widespread public debate and discussion of the issues involved and that its work should be informed by that debate.”

There was quite a bit of discussion in the course of the advisory group’s work but it was not public or, in the jargon, transparent. It had all the privacy, confidentiality and intimacy of the focus group.

A traditional inquiry was also a forum for accountability in the sense that key officials explained publicly what they did, and why. In the case of the advisory group exercise, it would have been valuable to learn the views of departmental secretaries on, say, the size and structure of the senior executive service, or whether they thought redesign and enhancement of the Public Service Commissioner’s role would be desirable. As matters stand, the public record remains unenlightened on these points.

Where the advisory group especially failed policy-making about the public service was the absence of discussion papers about contentious matters. A leading instance is the question of mobility in the service.

Mobility is the fall-back position for lazy thinking about personnel management. It is the throwaway line for many matters, from stale performance to limited horizons in policy-formulation. It is perceived as a solution to all manner of defects including inadequacies in program implementation.

It has had a prominent place in APS talk for four decades or more. But the debate is stuck, and has been stuck for a generation. No-one has bothered to identify the variety of forms that mobility can take, how much mobility there actually is, whether there should be more, and what are the benefits sought and obtained. There is a formidable hypothesis that, on mobility, the APS is an over-achiever.

It could be done in the context of a searching study of promotion and staff selection practices of the public service. These are expensive, time-consuming and seemingly frozen in the 1960s. Some departments and agencies have made substantial changes; others should be thinking about doing likewise.

Some similar active thinking might have been brought to bear on the policy capacities of departments and agencies. Because of modern technologies this should be the strong suit of a modern public service (as of any large modern organization).

The advisory group passed up the opportunity to draw out the public service on these subjects. There is no reason why the Public Service Commissioner should not take them up.

Nearly every body that reaches out for the mantle of reform aspires to have its thinking enshrined in legislation. In some cases they labour under the false idea that this will entrench their insights.

The advisory group particularly seeks this outcome for its views on the Values which it believes should be “revised, tightened and made more memorable.” The Government should ignore this vanity. The existing statement is excessively long but to alter the Values along lines proposed will simply add confusion.

One of the attractive aspects of the blueprint is proposed amplification of the role of department secretary with the Biblical concept of stewardship. It is again proposed that this should be embodied in the legislation.

Again, the case for statutory action is non-existent. The secretary’s role is a matter for doctrine, not legislation. It would certainly be timely to have another considered exposition of the role of the departmental head, and one based on the present public service legislation. But tinkering with the legislation would be superfluous, a substitute for rather than an embodiment of thought.

Many commentators have drawn attention to the failure of the blueprint to address the question of consultants; like ministerial staff, they are a no-go area.

But, given the ambition to transform the APS into a body with “an intrinsic culture of evaluation and innovation,” use of consultants should have been prominently on the agenda.  A central strength of a public service is capacity to think for itself.

Australia is not alone in needing to address this issue. A recent Canadian report tackled what it described as “the explosion of the consultant culture in Ottawa.”

“A generation ago, departments had expertise in-house, and if consultants were employed, it would be to test out ideas already generated by the bureaucracy or to fix a short-term problem.”

“Today, there is an underground policy triangle of regular officials, consultants (often long-term and retired public servants) and lobbyists.”

The report simply proposed, as the blueprint should have done, “Discourage the use of consultants in line positions in favour of building up the capacity of the regular public service.”