Chapter 1. A failure of public administration?

Debate in the press about the politicisation of the APS has intensified in recent years. Undoubtedly these debates are not new. As will be seen, debate about the ‘proper’ role of the public service has continued virtually unabated since the Whitlam Government introduced ministerial advisers following its election in 1972. Nevertheless, commentators on both sides of politics have reflected on both the number and profile of recent controversies involving perceptions of public service politicisation.^[1] These include the ‘Children Overboard’ affair (known to the Senate as ‘A Certain Maritime Incident’) involving the Departments of Defence, Immigration and the Prime Minister and Cabinet; the cases of the detention of Cornelia Rau and the deportation of Vivian Solon, involving the then Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA);^[2] the payments made by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) to the regime of Saddam Hussein in order to obtain contracts for the sale of Australian wheat to Iraq, involving the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT); the detention of Dr Mohamed Haneef, involving the Australian Federal Police; and the role of a senior public servant in the Employment and Workplace Relations portfolio as the face of the Howard Government’s WorkChoices media campaign.

Debate around most of these cases has tended, particularly in media analysis, to focus on issues of ‘who knew what and when’. All except the last have resulted in some form of formal inquiry.^[3] Each involves allegations or suppositions about the degree of direct or indirect complicity between public servants and politicians concerning the communication or management of politically sensitive information. It is not the intent of this monograph to pursue what is known or can be inferred about the involvement of individual public servants in these cases. Rather, it explores how changes made to the administration of the public service over the past 30 years have had the effect of progressively blurring the differences between what professional public servants do and what politicians might want them to do.

The chapters that follow argue that a number of the core ‘traditional’ principles of public administration that have applied in Australian, as in other Westminster systems of government,^[4] have been compromised following New Public Management reforms. Australian NPM, it will be argued, brought about a number of distinct and mutually reinforcing institutional reforms embedded in a number of distinct and mutually reinforcing systems. Like all system changes, they were introduced gradually, applied unevenly, and have been the work of many hands. The formal intention was to introduce new disciplines to the public service, making it more efficient, effective and responsive to government. Over time, however, some of those disciplines have been ratcheted up to the point where responsiveness tips into complicity.

The following description and analysis of how this happened, and is continuing to happen, is intended to inform broader debates about the role and function of the public service in the early twenty-first century. The examples cited are recent and in the public domain, but it should be understood, as a former Public Service Commissioner has observed, that ‘insiders know better than anyone … that the concerns have been mounting in the Commonwealth since before 1996, and have been evident equally if not more so at state level under both Labor and conservative governments’.^[5]