What is the role of the APS in a contestable environment? Setting aside for the moment its own role in policy advising, the public service is not an impartial third party refereeing a contest for the ear of the minister and ministerial advisers. Fairness would involve the re-engineering of the entire playing field. And although the resulting ‘competition in ideas’ might be of academic interest to public servants, experience suggests it is not likely to interest government. The APS may be required to be impartial, but governments are not; naturally they have favoured friends, policy interests and stalking horses. And just as the public service knows the government’s policy interests, it also quickly learns to know those who share them.

The APS is often more useful to government in managing those who do not have its ear than in facilitating the access of those who do. It has relatively little to do with ensuring ministers get access to informal advice—the sort that arrives from spouses, cronies, party think tanks, those who donate to political campaigns, favoured lobby groups, and people seated next to the minister at dinner or on a plane. For these informal advisers, the APS is at best a secondhand gatekeeper, providing detailed briefing and commentary on what is sought by those who are favoured, and talking points in rebuttal on the commentary of government critics.

Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that the APS has a broader consultation brief with respect to policy development than most if not all corporate research, advocacy organisations, consultancy firms, public policy think-tanks and academic departments. Agencies responding to the 2005–06 State of the Service agency survey were offered a list of groups that could have been consulted, namely: the public, local government agencies, state/territory government agencies, tertiary education and research groups, unions, industry and NGOs. 62 per cent of all agencies reported that they usually or sometimes consulted one or more of these groups about the development of government policy, and 45 per cent reported consulting five or more.^[19] However, it is not clear—cannot be clear—what contribution the ‘formal’ consultation recorded in the State of the Service data makes to contestable policy development or program design. Formal consultation, particularly when conducted by the administrative rather than the political arm of government, may be of the variety that takes place after a decision, whatever it is, has been taken. It may legitimately influence the fine-tuning of a policy, or its implementation arrangements, but ‘consult is also a code word … for having in mind a particular outcome that you want rather than just asking people what they think—sometimes yes and sometimes no—but in the end, you want to have a document that says, ‘we spoke to 10,000 people about this’.^[20]

What we know from public servants themselves about the nature of their public involvement is that they tend to see themselves as bearers of messages from the public to government or bearers of administrative directives from government to the public:

Indeed, of the 76 per cent of employees who had dealt directly with interest groups or with people from other levels of government over the preceding 12 months, 25 per cent reported simply attending meetings with stakeholders to hear their views, and half as many (12 per cent) reported actually negotiating with stakeholders to develop mutually agreed policy positions.^[22] At least some of those who may have attended meetings but did not actually negotiate then or at any other stage, may have fallen into that subgroup for whom ‘consult’ is a code word. This may include, for example, some of the 32 per cent of NGOs that report finding the federal government sometimes uninterested in what they have to say, the 50 per cent that find them often uninterested, and the 11 per cent that find them always uninterested—just as state public servants may find themselves closeted with the 52 per cent of NGOs that report finding the state government sometimes uninterested, the 28 per cent that find them often uninterested, and the 6 per cent that find them always uninterested.^[23]

It cannot be assumed, then, that the consultations conducted by public servants and referred to in the State of the Service data are genuinely indicative of who is or is not making an effective contribution to the contest of ideas in the minds of ministers. According to one public servant, ‘people from within government understand each other, but it’s so hard to deal with people externally (e.g. NGOs), who don’t understand why/that you can’t be more helpful when faced with a perfectly reasonable position’.^[24] This observation may offer some insight into the finding that 35 per cent of employees who had dealt directly with stakeholders or with people from other levels of government over the preceding 12 months had faced a challenge in balancing the need to be fair and effective, impartial and courteous in delivering services to the Australian public, and responsive to the government (as per the APS Values).^[25]

In addition to managing consultations, the APS, as the administrative arm of government, also manages the funding, by means of grants or consultancies, for those ‘think-tanks, research institutes, consultancy companies, private sector lobbyists and community advocates’ mentioned by Dr Shergold from whom the government wishes to hear or wishes the public to hear. Once it has learned who these people are, the APS can anticipate the government’s wishes. There is little point in not doing so: in the first place it would represent a breach of responsiveness; in the second place, it would bring down the wrath—or at least the outspoken dissatisfaction—of ministers and their advisers; and in the third place, putting up briefs that do not favour the government’s preferred contestants would have no effect on the outcome of a given selection process. The selection process itself is often hedged in with guidelines that incorporate ‘impartial and professional’ features of public administration, including due process, transparency and accountability. But as the Public Service Commission’s good practice guide on Supporting Ministers makes clear, ‘guidelines are simply that—guidelines for APS employees’^[26] and not for ministers. As long as the law is not broken, and regardless of any baggage of short lists and credentials, ‘decisions about spending Government money are made by portfolio ministers’.^[27] The worst of it is that the uneven playing field is also a training ground for public servants: after years of watching how the game is played, it is remarkable that so many public servants continue to see themselves as operating outside it.

With respect to the contestable advice that has been received, public servants label, digest, zip, unzip, order, categorise, integrate, compare and contrast it and turn some of it into options and speaking points for ministers. They know whose contestable advice triggers the big brief on implementation feasibility and whose triggers the short brief on fundamental flaws. And if they do not, the process of seeking performance ratings from ministers and their offices on ministerial briefs, considered in the next chapter, will provide an opportunity to be ‘informed and improved by ongoing discussions with political advisers: [who] on occasions … will have a keener sense of the range of issues that need to be addressed’.^[28]