In 2006 the then Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Peter Shergold, described the ‘Children Overboard’ affair and the mistreatment of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon as ‘failures of public administration’, unfortunate ‘mistakes’ that have nothing to tell us about public service culture or the relation between the public service and the Government:
I do not accept that the failures represent the collapse of the Westminster tradition or the diminution of public service values or a sad decline in ethical standards. More profoundly, the mistakes are failures of public administration not instances of government conspiracy. The government did not direct public servants to provide false information or fail to correct the record or act outside the law. Nor did it intimate that such behaviour was acceptable. Nor did Ministers put impenetrable barriers around themselves.[6]
This representation of the present state of the public service is significant for a number of reasons. The language suggests that, so long as the Government did not explicitly direct, or intimate, that public servants should act unethically or unlawfully, then there were no broader institutional issues and the problems were simply local. That is not, however, how the system works or is meant to work. Public servants are meant to serve ministers and act in their name. The Public Service Act calls for responsiveness to ministers (s.10(1)(f)), responsiveness that anticipates as well as implements their requirements. It calls for a performance culture with a focus on ‘achieving results’ sought by government (s. 10(1)(k)). Responsiveness is hardwired into service-wide legislation, service-wide policies, and agency arrangements to support them. Without an understanding of how this overarching framework positions individual public servants who are making (or failing to make) administrative decisions, there is always going to be an increased risk of ‘failures of public administration’:
We look to previous instances, such as the ‘certain maritime incident’ or children overboard affair; the illegal detention of Australian citizens by the Department of Immigration and Indigenous Affairs, the problems revealed by the so-called ‘travel rorts’ affair, and difficulties with trust fund monies in the land transport development fund. Any one of these in isolation would be a problem that could be attributed to one-off failings on the part of individuals. Taken together, they begin to amount to a pattern—a systematic lack of capacity to identify problems, keep accurate records, and draw these uncomfortable problems to the attention of ministers.[7]
The real questions to ask about these failures are:
can a system that privileges responsiveness be tipped into complicity?
what are the circumstances that turn individual lapses of judgement into systems failures?
can the cause of these failings properly be labelled as politicisation?
Critically, these questions are often about the changing meanings of the terms in which the questions themselves are posed. Over time and across contexts the meanings of even key words like ‘politicisation’ and ‘responsiveness’ alter, as do those of more obviously slippery terms like ‘performance culture’, ‘contestability’, ‘managing for results’, ‘organisational alignment’, ‘partnerships’—and even ‘New Public Management’ itself, which is subject to ongoing debate and redefinition.[8] All of these terms are embedded in and changed by the history of their use.
Take ‘responsiveness’, for example. The need for increased responsiveness was identified by the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (RCAGA) in 1976. As will be seen later in the chapter, RCAGA used the term to refer to a more adaptive approach to service delivery as well as a sensitivity to government objectives that included a more efficient approach to implementing them. Over time, the latter became the dominant meaning of ‘responsiveness’ for the APS. Looking back in 1993 on the broad pattern of the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s, Prime Minister Paul Keating reflected that:
Central to our reforms of the public service was the desire to ensure that the government of the country belonged to the elected politicians. We stated at the outset that a key objective was to make the Public Service more responsive to the government of the day, more responsive in the sense that it would be better able to recognise and achieve the Government’s overall policy objectives.[9]
In 1999 ‘responsiveness’ acquired a legal definition as one of the APS Values established in the Public Service Act to guide the conduct of public servants. The initial Public Service Bill 1997, presented by Peter Reith, included the bare clause (s.10(f)): ‘the APS is responsive to the Government in providing timely advice and implementing the Government’s policies and programs’. This emphasis on both advising and implementation was broadly consistent with the overall thrust of RCAGA, but the definition itself lacked a number of critical qualifiers that had been recommended to the Government. The Bill was referred to the Joint Committee on Public Accounts (JCPA), which urged a strengthening ‘in relation to the provision of frank and honest advice’.[10] Fearlessness, it appears, was not even on the agenda. Senate amendments unacceptable to the Government were made and the Bill was allowed by Minister Reith to lapse. The next Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service shepherded an amended version through Parliament which read: ‘the APS is responsive to the Government in providing frank, honest, comprehensive, accurate and timely advice and in implementing the Government’s policies and programs’ (s. 10(1)(f)).
Section 10(1)(f) of the Public Service Act has since been elaborated by the Public Service Commissioner in APS Values and Code of Conduct in Practice: A Guide to Official Conduct for APS Employees and Agency Heads. The guidance still links operational efficiency with strategic attainment of government goals, and emphasises ‘a close and cooperative relationship with Ministers and their employees’:
Responsiveness to the Government demands a willingness and capacity to be effective and efficient. Responsive APS employees:
are knowledgeable about the Government's stated policies
are sensitive to the intent and direction of policy
take a whole-of-government view [and] are well informed about the issues involved
draw on professional knowledge and expertise and are alert to best practice
consult relevant stakeholders and understand their different perspectives
provide practical and realistic options and assess their costs, benefits and consequences
convey advice clearly and succinctly
carry out decisions and implement programs promptly, conscientiously, efficiently and effectively.
Responsive advice is frank, honest, comprehensive, accurate and timely (APS Value (f)). The advice should be well argued and creative, anticipate issues and appreciate the underlying intent of government policy. Responsive advice is also forthright and direct and does not withhold or gloss over important known facts or 'bad news'.
Responsiveness demands a close and cooperative relationship with Ministers and their employees. The policy advisory process is an iterative one, which may involve frequent feedback between the APS and the Minister and his or her office.
Responsive implementation of the Government's policies and programs (APS Value (f)) is achieved through a close and cooperative relationship with Ministers and their employees. Ministers may make decisions, and issue policy guidelines with which decisions made by APS employees must comply. Such Ministerial decisions and policy guidance must, of course, comply with the law and decisions by APS employees must meet their responsibilities for impartiality and efficient, effective and ethical use of resources.[11]
Adjusted or alternative definitions of what ‘responsiveness’ should mean have been posed by academics, media commentators, and members of the Opposition.[12] What it means in practice to working public servants, when disciplined by the contestability of policy advice (see Chapter 2), inserted in a performance management system (see Chapter 3), experienced through devolved relations with specific ministers’ offices (see Chapter 4), aligned with ministerial priorities through individual contracts (see Chapter 5) and re-expressed through a cooperative partnership (see Chapter 6), can shrink to ‘what have you done for the minister that’s special’?[13] This is not the normative meaning of ‘responsiveness’, but it can be the operational one.
Or take ‘politicisation’. A recent article by Richard Mulgan offers a useful and much-needed account of the concept as ‘understood within the context of the APS Values associated with a professional public service’:
In order to be able to offer the same degree of loyal service to governments of differing political persuasions, professional public servants are expected to maintain a certain distance from concerns of their political masters. ‘Politicisation’ is the term used to describe the erosion of such distance. It marks the crossing of a line between proper responsiveness to the elected government and undue involvement in the government’s electoral fortunes.[14]
For the public service, the legislated equivalent of this is the requirement under section 10 of the Public Service Act to be ‘apolitical, performing its functions in an impartial and professional manner’. As in the case of ‘responsiveness’, this definition has been elaborated by the Public Service Commissioner:
The role of the APS is to serve the Government of the day: to provide the same high standard of policy advice, implementation and professional support, irrespective of which political party is in power. This is at the core of the professionalism of the APS.
The APS works within, and to implement, the elected government’s policies and outcomes. While it is not independent, it is well placed to draw on a depth of knowledge and experience including longer-term perspectives.
Good advice from the APS is unbiased and objective. It is politically neutral but not naïve, and is developed and offered with an understanding of its implications and of the broader policy directions set by government.
APS employees have a role to assist Ministers with their parliamentary and public roles, such as drafting speeches.
In the course of their employment, however, APS employees should not engage in party political activities such as distributing political material, nor should they use office facilities or resources to provide support of a party political nature such as producing political publications or conducting market research unrelated to programme responsibilities.[15]
These definitions are altogether consistent with that proposed by Mulgan. Like his, however, they remain ‘slippery in meaning because the line [between proper responsiveness to the elected government and undue involvement] itself is often blurred and hard to draw and because charges of politicisation are often part of adversarial political rhetoric’.[16] One of the most common defences against a charge of politicisation, for example, is to treat the word as an indicator of the personal or party agenda of whoever used it.[17] Another means of neutering the concept—described by Mulgan as ‘singl[ing] out the more overt form of direct instruction’—is to reduce it to whether or not a government ‘issued … direct instructions to falsify the record’.[18] Consistent with this strategy, analysts who hypothesise the existence of less overt forms of politicisation lay themselves open to being criticised as conspiracy theorists. In any event, to confine an analysis of politicisation to ‘who said what to whom, when’ simply shifts attention away from institutions to individuals. While there is much to be said at this level, it is often associated with histories of specific events or interactions, generally between individual public servants and their ministers and ministerial advisers. These histories assume that, whether or not specific interactions were proper, there is a normative version of such relationships, one in which the proper line between responsiveness to the elected government and undue involvement is respected. Such an assumption incorporates a further assumption that both public servants and ministers and their advisers clearly understand their different roles. This has not always been the case.
Ministerial advisers were added to the machinery of government by Labor following the 1972 election. RCAGA itself ’did not generally favour policy advisers in ministers offices’.[19] It recommended instead that where a minister felt the need for additional policy advice, ’it will frequently be more helpful to him if the resources of the department are more effectively mobilised or stimulated to be responsive to his needs‘.[20] Nevertheless, the Fraser Government did not abolish the institution, although it did cut back on its numbers. The Hawke Government in its turn decided to greatly increase the number of ministerial advisers, which it presented as a trade-off for not proceeding with an election commitment to politicise 10 per cent of the senior executive service.[21] This trade-off effectively clarified a difference in role between public servants and ministerial advisers. Ministerial advisers would protect public servants from pressure to become politicised by providing those services themselves, from within the minister’s own private office. Thus, ‘the partisan policy role that had been so controversial and fiercely resisted in the Whitlam period was asserted and legitimised from the outset of the Hawke Labor period’.[22] Over time, the policy capacity of the ministerial office was strengthened[23] and the work of the senior public servant became more managerial.[24] These changes have continued to test the roles proper to public servants and ministerial advisers, secretaries and ministers, and with them the definitions proper to ‘responsiveness’ and ‘politicisation’.
[6] Peter Shergold, ‘Pride in Public Service’, speech to National Press Club, Canberra, 15 Feb. 2006, at http://www.pmc.gov.au/speeches/index.cfm, viewed 15 Mar. 2006.
[7] Stephen Bartos, ‘The AWB Affair—Matters of Governance’, National Institute for Governance, 1 May 2006, p. 19.
[8] See, for example, Glyn Davis and R. A. W. Rhodes, ‘From Hierarchy to Contracts and Back Again: Reforming the Australian Public Service’, in M. Keating, J. Wanna and P. Weller (eds), Institutions on the Edge? Capacity for Governance (Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 2000), 74–98.
[9] Paul Keating, ‘Performance and Accountability in the Public Service: A Statement by the Prime Minister’, Parliament House, 1 July 1993.
[10] For a more substantial discussion, see John Wanna, ‘Public Service, Public Values: The Implementation of a Charter of Values in the Australian Public Service’, Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, Dunedin, 2005; John Nethercote, ‘New Public Service Legislation: The Public Service Bill 1997’, Parliamentary Library Background Paper 2 1997–8, 22 Sept. 1997, at http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/pubs/bp/1997-98/98bp02.htm, viewed 8 Jan. 2008.
[11] Australian Public Service Commission, APS Values and Code of Conduct in Practice: Guide to Official Conduct for APS Employees and Agency Heads (revised) (Canberra, 2005), Ch. 2. http://www.apsc.gov.au/values/conductguidelines4.htm, viewed 22 June 2007.
[12] See, for example, Peter Shergold, ‘Goodbye to All that Power’, Public Sector Informant, Apr. 2005, p. 2; and Patrick Weller, Australia's Mandarins: The Frank and the Fearless? (Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 2001). A number of political, public service and academic commentators addressed the issue for the ABC production Corridors of Power: From Mandarins to Managers, 26 July–30 Aug. 2002, at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/learning/lifelong/features/corridors/, viewed 15 Feb. 2008.
[13] As asked of me in a performance assessment session.
[14] Richard Mulgan, ‘Truth in Government and the Politicisation of Public Service Advice’, Public Administration 85(3) (2007), 570.
[15] Australian Public Service Commission, APS Values and Code of Conduct in Practice, Ch. 2.
[16] Mulgan, ‘Truth in Government’, 571.
[17] See, for example, Peter Shergold, ‘”The Need to Wield a Crowbar”: Political Will and Public Service: A Short Historical Discourse on Attempts to Overcome the Perceived Ossification and Inertia of Buttoned-up Public Servants (and Why They're Now the Better for It)’, Dunstan Oration, Adelaide, 7 Apr. 2005 http://www.dpmc.gov.au/speeches/shergold/political_will_2005-04-07.cfm, viewed 23 Nov. 2005.
[18] Mulgan, ‘Truth in Government’, 578.
[19] Maria Maley, ‘Australian Ministerial Advisers and the Royal Commission on Government Administration’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 61(1) (Mar. 2002), 104.
[20] Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, Report (AGPS: Canberra, 1976), 105.
[21] See Weller, Australia’s Mandarins, 103.
[22] Maley, ‘Australian Ministerial Advisers’, 105.
[23] See Weller, Australia’s Mandarins, 103.
[24] See Maley, ‘Australian Ministerial Advisers’, 106.