When asked about their own understanding of their roles, departmental secretaries reported themselves to be mainly ‘relaxed and comfortable’ about their relations with ministers:

Just how much reliance can be placed on this kind of confidential research is open to question. As far as those further down the line are concerned, a survey conducted in the same year found that, of those public servants who had had contact with ministers and their advisers over the previous two years, 35 per cent had encountered a ‘challenge in balancing the need to be apolitical, impartial and professional, responsive to the Government and openly accountable (as per the APS Values) in dealing with ministers and/or ministers’ offices’, and a further five per cent were unsure.^[26] The findings of subsequent surveys have remained remarkably consistent with these perceptions.^[27] The questions put to secretaries and to public servants were differently worded: those put to secretaries concerned the behaviour of politicians generally, and those put to public servants were confined to their own ministers and their advisers. More importantly, the question of possible impropriety is differently put in each survey. The point is, however, that if you are interested in whether systems unduly restrain the provision of frank and fearless advice, you do not look only at those who are at the top of the system. Bureaucratic decision making occurs all the way up (and down) the line.

There are factors other than management systems that constrain decision making, and some of these have a disproportionate impact on lower-level staff. With respect to the challenges to public servants posed by ministers and their advisers, it is undoubtedly the case that the considerable growth in the number of ministerial advisers has increased the penetration of contact between ministers’ offices and agencies. According to the 2003–04 State of the Service Report, at 1 May 2004 the total number of ministerial personal staff was 392, an increase of 89 per cent from the 207 at April 1983,^[28] following the Hawke Government’s decision to appoint political advisers to ministers’ offices. There are some simple logistical reasons for this increase, including ministers’ needs for additional support following changes in information and communications technology used by media commentators, and the sheer physical size of the office space available following the move to the new Parliament House. The simple fact that numbers of ministerial staff have increased means, however, that there is more scope for interaction between this group and public servants. Technological change—email, mobile phones, SMS, etc.—means that there is increased scope for this contact to be direct, bypassing conventional channels of approach down through the hierarchy, and that the expectation is for short turn-around times.

While the increase in the numbers of ministerial advisers is known, there are no pre-2003 data available on the corresponding increase in the numbers of public servants who are responding to their requests. However, there are relevant data on the classification levels of those public servants being contacted by ministers and their advisers, and the extent to which public servants at different levels have ‘experience[d] a challenge’ during one or more of those interactions. In 2004–05, 73 per cent of Senior Executive Service employees surveyed reported having had direct contact^[29] with ministers and/or their advisers in the preceding year. 35 per cent of their immediate subordinates (executive level employees) and 15 per cent of the lower grades (APS 1–6) also reported having had direct contact with the minister’s office. Given the actual numbers of employees in each of these groups (the APS generally exhibits a pyramidal structure), it appears that individuals in the lower grades who experienced this direct contact outnumbered senior executive staff by a ratio of about 10:1.^[30] This is contrary to the conventional view of how the system works.

Not surprisingly, executive-level public servants were less likely than departmental secretaries to report being comfortable and confident during such interactions. In 2004–5 one-third of public servants who had been in direct contact with ministers or their advisers in the last 12 months reported that they had only moderate (22 per cent) or very low (10 per cent) levels of confidence that they could appropriately balance the legislated public service values of being apolitical, impartial and professional, responsive to government and openly accountable.^[31] This group is more likely to be on the receiving end of difficult questions than APS-level staff, and less likely to be familiar with the conventions for managing them than the senior executive staff. While confidence in balancing the APS Values was found not to be correlated with age, sex or size of agency, it was correlated with awareness of agreed written and unwritten processes in place in an agency for resolving staff concerns about the nature of requests from ministerial offices.^[32] This may go some way to further explaining why public servants as a group are less confident than their departmental secretaries in their interactions with ministers and their advisers: they are less likely to be familiar with any conventions or protocols that apply to such interactions—and have less power to assert any such knowledge.

There are some data on the availability of such protocols. For example, many agencies require the purport of oral briefings to ministers or ministerial staff on key issues to be confirmed in writing (including emails or follow-up minutes). Nine large agencies reported in the 2004–05 State of the Service agency survey that they had this protocol in place—a fact unlikely to have escaped their agency heads—and yet between 37 and 66 per cent of their relevant employees were not sure whether their agency had such a protocol in place.^[33] These people may not have known whether they should be keeping records of their oral advice any more than new or untrained ministerial advisers may have known whether they could ask that records not be kept. It is in situations like this that decisions can ‘make themselves’, and that the default response may become responsiveness, where responsiveness has lost touch with any countervailing requirement for apolitical professionalism. Advisers may ask that records not be kept and public servants may see it as their duty to acquiesce. Or, even if public servants are aware that they may be being asked to do something outside usual practice, they may find it more difficult to decline on the ground of a generalised public service ‘professionalism’ than on the ground of a formal protocol. In the absence of explicit guidance and responsible leadership, administrative failures may more readily occur, even when no direct pressure is being personally exerted on any individual public servant. However, there are indications that pressure has been exerted by some ministerial offices. Indeed, the 2004–05 State of the Service Report found that between 12 and 52 per cent of employees in large agencies reported having faced a challenge during interactions with their political masters.^[34]

Claims of ‘politicisation’ do not take us far into the nature of these interactions, and are counterproductive to the extent that they may be used to deflect or avoid analysis. Most public servants are ‘political’ to the extent that they understand and have conscious views on the political factors influencing government policies and their application. That may be why they joined the public service or it may be an effect of having joined it. Nearly all public servants are aware that they are bound by law to behave apolitically and accountably.^[35] Public servants at DIMIA appear to have been particularly well informed in this area. In 2002–03 staff at DIMIA reported the highest levels of participation in training that included an emphasis on the APS Values.^[36] Nevertheless, at DIMIA, as Palmer (2006) found, ‘a strong government policy’ flowed through ‘rigid attitudes and processes’ into poor individual decision making with the consequence that numbers of individuals suffered who should not have suffered.^[37] To understand failures of due process—in relation to information flow, record-keeping, regulatory decision making or disbursing grants—particularly when such failures occur in politically sensitive environments, it is important to understand the intersection, over time, of the legislated public service values and the actual management systems in which they are applied. The fact that such failures are still largely the exception suggests that individual public servants understand what can happen to principles when they get caught up in administrative machinery, and are prepared to act to sustain what is principled. How long that can continue is unclear.

The purpose of this study, then, is not to probe for conspiracies but to study the present system of public administration: how it positions public servants in relation to the governments they serve, and how ‘failures of public administration’ can be the outcome. The system itself is presented in the context of the changes that have been made since the introduction of ministerial advisers by the Whitlam Government in 1972 and the tabling of the RCAGA report in 1976. RCAGA is the point that has been identified by previous and current Public Service Commissioners, the former Auditor-General and the former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as a ‘watershed in administrative thinking and reforms’ whose ‘enduring themes have proved to influence greatly the reforms of the past 25 years’.^[38] In retrospect, at least, there is agreement on the powerful and lasting influence of the report’s three key themes:

Without assuming the existence of a previous golden age,^[40] the discussion is confined to those changes undertaken following RCAGA and consistent with NPM that were intended to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public servants and their responsiveness to government. A chronology of reforms between 1975 and 2003 prepared by the Parliamentary Library and included at the end of this volume as an appendix shows that both of the major parties have had a hand in driving these reforms, and that ‘successive governments have generally consolidated, or at least tolerated, the changes of previous governments.’^[41]