Notwithstanding MAB’s expectations, experience has shown that the system is not seamless and its elements are not all internally consistent. In fact, while the traditional Westminster values do tend to reinforce each other, subsequent studies suggest that their intersection with NPM values is less than mutually reinforcing.^[55] According to The APS Values and Code of Conduct in Practice, public servants are likely to encounter, in addition to any complementarity between different values, a need to balance the distinct pulls of the old and the new. Under the heading ‘Balancing the APS Values’ it advises that:

In Australia as elsewhere,^[57] conflicts between market-oriented and more traditional public values appear at all operational levels.^[58] At a system-wide level, treating agencies as distinct businesses has the potential to constrain effective whole-of-government management. Agency-specific operating procedures and systems can undermine collaborative practices, just as agency-specific values can undermine the concept of a broader public service. At an agency level, the market model can increase exposure of public servants to values conflicts in areas such as recordkeeping, fraud prevention and outsourcing, as reported in the 2001–02 State of the Service Report. For example, efficiency agendas encouraging agencies to cut red tape or streamline processes may increase the scope for fraud or compromise probity checks. A focus on benchmarking and performance indicators may encourage practices that actually compromise aspects of service delivery. For individual public servants, common tensions that have been identified include:

While these kinds of conflicts are certainly not new, many of the old rule-bound procedures for managing them in practice are gone, leaving the new system dependent on a set of APS Values whose application is often subjective and can drive behaviour in conflicting directions—a good example of what Stewart calls hybridisation:

In a hybridised decision-making framework not all values are equal. Take the case of the APS Values. The Public Service Act was not designed to embed traditional Westminster values in public service behaviour; the old rule-based system did that just as well. It was designed to insert the Westminster values into a framework that was fundamentally focused on encouraging responsiveness to government priorities and managing for results.^[61] Responsiveness and managing for results are not just APS Values, they are also the rationale behind the decision-making framework itself. In practice this framework has been further reinforced by a number of systems changes characteristic of NPM—such as devolved management structures, contestable policy advice and service delivery, and program budgeting and performance management—that are also about being responsive and delivering results.

As a consequence, values-based decision making in the APS is not simply a matter of individual public servants balancing different APS Values; the supporting systems that are in place situate and orient both reflective and routine behaviours. The idea of striking a balance between different Values suggests that bad decision making occurs when individual public servants make individual mistakes in weighing up issues or fail to recognise that a decision point has been reached. The approach is silent about the institutional framework in which these decisions are made, and how it organises the relations between the administrative and political arms of government. That is why, when taken on their own, the APS Values do not take us far when looking for the causes of systems failures such as those associated with the Departments of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and DIMIA in the case of Children Overboard, or those found by the Palmer and Comrie reports, or the role of DFAT in relation to AWB when overpayments were being made to Iraq.

This focus on individual choice—rather than on the systems and culture within which decision making occurs—is characteristic of public service commentary. The public service tends to shy away from institutional self-analysis unless it is upbeat or can be articulated in such a way as to quarantine the government from criticism. Instead, it offers ‘do it yourself’ advice targeted to individuals or human-resource areas. In the case of the APS Values, public service commissioners have released Directions (1999), Guidelines on Conduct (2003), Embedding the APS Values (2003), Being Professional in the APS—Values Resources for Facilitators (2005), and, with particular reference to interactions between public servants and ministers and their advisers, Supporting Ministers, Upholding the Values.^[62] These aids operate at the level of principle and convention and advise on how to apply both to situations considered in the abstract. For example, Supporting Ministers talks of how to handle requests from ministerial advisers to amend ministerial briefs before those briefs are formally presented as departmental advice. Undoubtedly such situations arise and need to be addressed. And guidance is useful in making it clear that these things happen and that particular responses are appropriate when they do. But, generally speaking, the guidance is silent about how situations such as this are embedded in the institutional context: how do performance assessment and pay, contestability and outsourcing, devolution and technological change, and the new workplace relations arrangements construct the environment in which such situations arise and are understood, and in which decisions are defined and taken?

Individual agency heads and their senior executive can undoubtedly make a great difference in reducing the negative impact of any agency systems on employee decision making, but the State of the Service data cited throughout the discussion suggest that their doing so cannot be assumed. How, then, do the arrangements that have been used to embed these NPM systems in agencies intersect with the APS Values that are intended to characterise the public service? How does this intersection position the people ‘down the line’ including those at a remove from the offices of their ministers? How does it influence the thousands of decisions that they make, either actively or passively, on a day-to-day basis? More broadly, how do we distinguish a politically aware APS from a politically exposed APS?

The chapters that follow address these questions. They focus on separate NPM reforms but in so doing try to evince the way in which particular systems relate to and reinforce one another. Chapter 2 considers the impact of contestable policy advising and service delivery on public servants’ understanding of what it means to be apolitical. How do agencies set about making themselves competitive with ministers’ favoured lobby groups in the delivery of policy advice and how are individual public servants expected to add value to this process?

Chapter 3 sets out the role of performance management and assessment systems in further focusing public servants on the implicit and explicit expectations of their ministers, ministerial advisers and senior managers, and how due process can be affected when the implicit and explicit messages they receive are not the same. It raises the scope for a performance focus to cause public servants to be ‘looking the wrong way’ in cases of systems failure. It also raises the matter of how individual performance agreements can structure information sharing between individual public servants, depending on their position in the food chain and the agencies in which they work. Many public servants are sceptical of the contribution of performance assessment and pay to an agency culture in which the APS Values are upheld and in which individuals work together effectively.

Individual agency systems and cultures have grown in influence as centralised, service-wide controls and protocols have been replaced by agency-specific arrangements. This issue is addressed in Chapter 4. When the process of devolution was first being contemplated it was realised that ‘to achieve greater flexibility it was probably going to be necessary to sacrifice many of the aspects of the public service which had provided the ‘connective tissue’,^[63] and this is what happened. As ‘connective tissue’ has weakened, public servants have been increasingly exposed to the disciplines of results-oriented systems. Guidance on appropriate and inappropriate behaviour is the responsibility of agency heads and their senior managers, as are processes for raising concerns about breaches of public service values. Surveys suggest that in some agencies public servants are in some doubt as to whether agency heads and senior managers (themselves under the discipline of performance contracts) behave in accordance with the APS Values. In the event, both policy advising and due process have been put at risk, and in some cases, compromised.

Chapter 5 examines in particular the workplace relations systems at work in departments and agencies, including individual employment contracts (AWAs) intended to align employee values to those of the agency and its ‘ultimate employer’, the minister. It also examines other changes to the ‘psychological contract’ between employees and their agency heads following in the introduction of ‘hard’ HRM practices. As in the cases of contestability, performance management and devolution when considered separately, these industrial arrangements have the effect of reinforcing responsiveness to short-term demands and drivers, and reducing second thoughts.

Chapter 6 raises more broadly the question of what it is that distinguishes a public servant from other providers of services to government. Since the mid-1990s, NPM has taken contracting organisations into areas of government activity characterised by increasing risk, sensitivity and complexity. In the process it has turned a significant number of public servants—already on performance contracts themselves and increasingly being moved on to individual employment contracts—into contract managers. While public sector providers have been exhorted to behave more like those in the private and community sectors, the latter have been drawn into alignment with government through contracting arrangements emphasising partnership and a community of values. In a devolved environment with tasks specified in contracts, what, if anything, continues to distinguish the work and ethos of public servants from those of the community and private sectors?

These questions are of concern because, although NPM has undoubtedly increased the capacity of public servants to achieve results, it has exposed decision making to new drivers and disciplines that interact in ways that increase their exposure to political direction. This was, after all, the purpose of the exercise. Nevertheless, ‘the shift in the last 25 years has been substantial, … steadily increasing political oversight and expectations of responsiveness by the bureaucracy to the elected government’.^[64] Survey material cited in the course of the discussion that follows suggests that many public servants are disturbed by the extent of this exposure. Some have made bad decisions, either actively or passively, and as a result people outside the public service have been damaged. There is also an impact on Australians more generally. Public accountability goes missing where there is what Bartos (2006) calls ‘a systematic lack of capacity to identify problems, keep accurate records, and draw these uncomfortable problems to the attention of Ministers’.