The living and the dead: government’s arteries and capillaries have lost symbiosis

The arteries are willing (at least to put on a show), the capillaries are weak.

The micro-detail as a thicket

Thus too often the top and the bottom of these systems - or the centre and the edge - are ships passing in the night. Directing, coordinating, encouraging those in the field might be the job of those in head office but that doesn't mean they can do it. Thus for instance every few years for the last twenty, governments have adopted policies to the effect that the research they fund must be open access rather than locked up behind the paywalls of learned journals. They occasionally announce that data from such research must be published. But there are any number of 'i's to be dotted and 't's to be crossed. Similarly, in open data and in IT - grand statements are issued while the little things remain incorrigible - a largely impenetrable thicket.

It's been highlighted in government reports for a decade or more that there are numerous roadblocks to allowing wider data sharing - including in legislation. Has there been a coherent, comprehensive and concerted effort following the announcement of open data policies to do this work and clean up the undergrowth? Not that I'm aware. If there was it didn't get far. And so progress limps along - until the same recommendations are made anew from the top.

As PC chair Peter Harris recently highlighted:

"In our report, you can read how hospitals are required to sign up to intellectual property restrictions that prevent data transfer between wards. Or how cancer researchers use foreign data sets because our local ones are more restricted. Or how a nationally-funded research project into vaccination is nearly 7 years into a saga to be allowed access to Commonwealth and States' data sets. It expects to be finally allowed full access in another year or so. These are pretty disgraceful events. They are the tip of the iceberg."

This is eight years on from the government's accepting recommendations from reports such as the Cutler Review (2008) and the Government 2.0 Taskforce (2009) and then endless subsequent internal and public reports recommending that governments free up their own data for use.

Announceables, unnanouncibles and the hand to mouth state

What we see here can be likened to a well known syndrome in low income countries. Aid donors - not to mention host governments - like announceables and cutting ribbons. If you want an announceable and a ribbon to cut, fund a locomotive, or the railcars. Or even the track. But standard maintenance doesn't an announcement make. And so the developing world is littered with formerly shiny assets that barely work for lack of proper upkeep.

Modern governmental institutions like the auditor-general protect against such maladies. But the rising appetite for announceables should surely be a matter of increasing concern. I can even suggest a date of birth for the new sensibility. The Keating government released the first major government economic statement I'm aware of with a propaganda name "One Nation" rather than a descriptive, bureaucratic title - as had been done just months previously in the Hawke government's "Prime Minister's Economic Statement" of 18th October 1990″. Since then, as I've documented several times, the compulsion to theme things - platforms, policy statements, elections, conferences - have continually grown in significance. Here, the themes are the arteries - the slogans and keywords by which the whole is marketed - with the detail being subordinate to the theme in just the way one would choose a theme for a ball.

I documented the brain eating qualities of this here where the OECD released an extraordinary report on 'fragmentation' - including reciting concerns about "different legal regimes across countries" all because fragmentation was "the theme of this year's Business and Finance Outlook". And it's deranging entire systems of public good delivery. I recall, on Anna Bligh's accession to power, being told that she wasn't prosecuting the 'Smart State' slogan any more because that was Peter Beattie's 'brand'. It wasn't just a rebranding either - but came with some serious changes (who knows, perhaps this was to respond to the potential charge that it was 'just rebranding'!) In any event, this strikes me as basically disastrous at least in its implications. Something like a 'Smart State' strategy takes a long time to build. This was what governments used to do - in most areas - as one government would build on the legacies of its predecessor including governments of different political persuasions. Yet in the case of Anna Bligh, this was a peaceful handover of power within the same party and still it involved the 'brand' of the leader reaching down and discombobulating work on the ground.

These examples may well be the tip of the iceberg. The British Institute for Government recently documented three areas of policy where the phenomenon of edicts from on high was especially accute:

In the [further education] sector, since the 1980s there have been 28 major pieces of legislation, 48 secretaries of state with relevant responsibilities, and no organisation has survived longer than a decade. In the industrial strategy space, ¹¹ there have been at least two industrial strategies in the last decade alone - and we are now moving onto a third.

Here the bad news is illustrated … well, graphically!