Take the very simple case of gathering data, which is an everyday reality for public servants in both policy and program-delivery departments. Let me offer a scenario that is, I suggest, not entirely unrealistic. The government wants a survey done that will enable it to claim support for a particular policy decision that it has already agreed to implement in exchange for the support of a particular interest group. It wants to be able to say that the research is wholly independent, so it asks the public service to commission an outside organisation to do the research. Once it is clear that the government wants data gathered outside the public service, the default public service approach is to try to ensure that it receives good quality evidence, and an academic consultancy is considered. The public service knows that there are individual academics and particular institutions with views that have not been supportive of government policy in the past and is aware that the government (not unnaturally) does not wish to commission those groups. For this reason, the public service has established, in agreement with the minister, research panels that include academics who are supportive of the government’s policies, and it proposes to commission one of these without going through the rigors of a public tender process.

At the same time the government wants (also not unnaturally) to control the questions that will be used to gather the data, and it also wants to include among them some that are not consistent with the usual academic standards for setting survey questions, but are consistent with the government’s reasons for wanting the data collected (push-polling). The favoured academics decline to proceed with the questions concerned, and the government then decides to commission a private sector organisation that will conduct a survey that includes any question for which it is paid. In addition, the government wishes to support the interest group that supports the government’s policy (and indeed lobbied for it in the first place) to undertake its own independent research among its own membership that will subsequently reinforce the government’s position.

The government may also decide to engage an eminent person, who is supportive of a much more radical version of their policy, to undertake a study that advocates the more extreme view and, thereby, make the government’s position look moderate. In this case, it is not the policy usefulness of the consultancy but the known policy position of the eminent person that is important. In the end, the survey company and the eminent person are commissioned by the public service and the interest group receives a small grant to survey its constituency; the evidence is duly found and the arguments are duly made. The government points to the independence of its sources and the moderation of its policy. The policy becomes draft legislation; and the quality of the data underpinning the legislation becomes a matter for sporadic debate in the Parliament.

There is nothing about this scenario that is dependent upon applying the principles of NPM: public servants have never had exclusive access to a minister or a monopoly on advice. There have always been lobby groups and think tanks and academics that are sympathetic to the government of the day and those that are not, and governments have always used the former strategically and the latter sparingly, or preferably not at all. The difference following NPM is partly a matter of degree. It is also, I suggest, the unquestioning legitimation—even celebration—of the proposition that competition for the ministerial ear, of necessity, increases the range of what ministers hear and thereby improves the democratic foundation of their decision making. This is only likely to happen if ministers actually want it to. If they don’t want to hear from a range of competitors, they won’t; or they will send in a public servant to do the listening for them. If the implicit argument here is that increased contestability will broaden public debate even if it does not affect government’s policy predispositions, the jury is still out. But if the implicit argument is that government itself has become open to a wider range of opinion, then the evidence has not been forthcoming.

Take the case of the WorkChoices legislation. According to an insider—albeit one without sympathy for the legislation—‘the detail of policy guidelines and drafting instructions … was supplied in the main by drawing upon submissions from the Business Council of Australia, one mining industry peak council, and several other national employer bodies’.^[6] It is reasonable to assume that in this, as in other cases of significant Howard Government policy initiatives, any mooted ‘growth in … alternative sources of policy advice’^[7] did not occur independent of increased demand from Government. The interaction of supply and demand for non-APS organisations (considered below) has been evidently affected as much by the laws of politics as those of economics, strictly speaking. For the APS, any increased reliance by government on alternative sources of advice raises two questions: what is the role of an ‘impartial and professional’ APS in maintaining the uneven playing field for policy advice, and what is the impact of contestability on the apolitical or professional nature of the APS’s own role in advising on policy?

For a comprehensive view of how interest groups stage their interactions with government, it is worth considering the chronology of business, community and government commentary on legislative change to the Australian workplace relations system produced by the Parliamentary Library in 2007.^[8] The actions and interactions, pronouncements and campaigns of those involved suggest that there is considerable orchestration of the public release of contestable policy advice to government on these issues. It is not by any means clear, for example, what proportion of public lobbying of government is actually directed to government and what proportion is directed to building community support for (or opposition to) intended government policies, whether or not those policies have been publicly announced. Ambit claims are made of government in order to radicalise its position, and are cited by government in order to make its position appear moderate. There is no means of distinguishing between those who are vying for the ear of ministers and their political advisers and those who are being used, willingly or not, as stalking horses, unless they themselves are happy to say as much:

In this case the democratic contest of ideas is not between the APS and other sources of policy advice, or among those sources with the APS abstaining, but between public relations strategists for control of public opinion. The Institute of Public Affairs may be fully committed to a radical deregulation of the labour market, but both it and the then Government knew, at least in broad outcome, what the short-term policy outcome would be.

It is not clear, either, whether the ‘vastly increased alternative sources of policy advice’ to government are offering different views from each other, or only different views from those offered by the previous government. The hypothetical increase in alternative sources of policy advice would surprise many academic commentators, who have argued that neither the supply of nor the demand for scholarly policy input is flourishing. On the supply side, Edwards has identified problems associated with available funding, data access, comprehension of the policy process and government timelines amongst researchers, and effective communication of academic research findings. On the demand side, she has identified:

Those demand factors have also influenced changes to institutional arrangements intended to increase central control over what can be said—for example, the CSIRO’s instructions to its scientific experts not to comment on issues that have policy implications, and the replacement of the entire board of the Australian Research Council by an advisory committee with no decision-making power.

More broadly, academics are now required to make their contribution to the competition of ideas within a financial environment characterised by increasing reliance on industry research funding, fee-based courses and consulting services. These trends, in turn, involve closer attention to the needs of ‘consumers’ and ‘markets’. While there is a case to be made for some industry funding to act as a lever to prioritise and increase relevance of research, 41 per cent of Australian social scientists responding to a 2001 survey of social scientists from 13 universities, ‘reported that they had experienced discomfort with publishing contentious research results (13 per cent to a major extent) and almost half (49 per cent) reported they had experienced a reluctance to criticise institutions that provide large research grants or other forms of support (16 per cent to a major extent).’^[11] The consequence of these developments is that some academics, at least, are finding it challenging to establish a direct line of sight from increased competition for the attention of ministers to increased democracy in the making of public policy.

The hypothetical ‘vastly increased alternative sources of policy advice’ might also come as a surprise to some community advocates, who have argued, conversely, that governments at both state and federal levels have deliberately reduced the size of the nonprofit sector by ‘nationalising groups of nonprofit organisations, by ending their funding arrangements or by changing the rules by which nonprofits receive government funding to provide services; or by using their power as the main source of funds to force amalgamations of several nonprofits’.^[12] Federal governments have generally been selective at best about involving the community sector in the democratisation of policy making. Shortly before the 1996 election, for example, the leader of the Opposition made a virtue of proposing to exclude ‘interest groups’ outside ‘the one mainstream’ from ‘the ear of the government’ if elected, on the ground that they had had too firm a hold on the ear of the previous government:

The reported experience of community advocates following the 1996 election—particularly those singled out in the new Prime Minister’s pre-election lecture—supports the view that, with honourable exceptions, their contribution to the contest of ideas was not encouraged by the Government either as part of policy input or as part of the consultations that occur following decision making:

The capacity to award government grants enables governments to shape, in a broader way, the democratic competition for ideas by ceasing to provide funding for those non-government organisations that are dependent on support made available under previous governments, as happened following the 1996 election in the case of selected groups representing women and youth.^[15] Conversely, governments can fund those organisations whose views they believe should be aired. This process is not unique to any specific government; many demonstrate their democratic credentials by funding those voices they want to hear, and ceasing to fund those whose views are likely to be less compatible with their own. NPM has, however, added contracting and competitive tendering to the resources available to government for these purposes. This new discipline is considered at greater length in Chapter 6. In the present context, it is enough to note that, in 2004, ‘among those [NGOs] fully or partially funded by government, around 70% reported that, at times, their government funding restricted their ability to comment on government’.^[16] A subset of this group was not explicitly constrained by funding agreements, but nevertheless saw a need for self-censorship, referring to the inadvisability of ‘biting the hand that feeds them’. Even in the case of very high profile community organisations and those not contractually prohibited from speaking, government funding through grants or contracts can still have the effect of encouraging them to ‘choose their battles’.

When individuals rather than organisations are considered, it is still not clear whether increased contestability of policy advice means more actors vying with public servants for the ear of ministers and their political advisers or fewer actors doing it more frequently and possibly in different hats. Take Peter Hendy, until recently the Chief Executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI). He was an adviser to Peter Reith, the Minister for Industrial Relations during the waterfront dispute and later, during the initial work on what became the WorkChoices legislation.^[17] Subsequently he became ACCI’s spokesperson on the same legislation; undertook a benchmarking study for the Treasurer that covered, inter alia, business tax; and then, following the 2007 election, left ACCI to become Chief of Staff to the new Leader of the Opposition. He is like many other people who meet themselves coming and going in ministers’ offices, shuffling the hats of ministerial adviser, interest group representative and consultant.

This recycling of ministerial advisers is far from a recent development. From 1972 to 1974 Dr Peter Wilenski was principal private secretary to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and in later years he revolved through a number of positions inside and outside the public service that enabled him to both advise on and shape public administration, including the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984, which provided authority for Ministers to employ their own staff and to engage consultants. Of course it is not to be expected that ministerial advisers will cease to seek and to find employment once they have left the minister’s office. It would be hard to argue that people with an understanding of particular issues should not be able to take that understanding across sectors, or even that such movement might not broaden their policy perspective. Broadening your perspective is one thing, being able to respect the distinctive roles of a lobbyist and a public servant is another (which is considered below). A third issue is whether the recycling of lobbyists and advisers can properly be said to contribute to the increasing contestability of policy, or the process of ‘making of public policy … increasingly democratic’:

The kind of access to ministers being described here is qualitatively different from simply taking a role in the public debate. Certainly journalists, academics and policy advocates of all persuasions can go to the media and through the media can get a hearing from government. Nevertheless, particular benefits flow from more direct access to ministers and, therefore, it is worth asking whether increased contestability means that government is listening to more people or just more often to the same or even fewer people? Is the contest for the ear of ministers and their political advisers a continuing one, or is government listening more often to those people who already are, or are prepared to become, willing to say what it wants to hear?