The art of Public Service Review

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.