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I am pleased to speak to you about the need to continue a passion for policy in the Australian Public Service. I assume that having made the time to be here today you share my concern for getting the best policy outcomes for Australia. I hope that at the conclusion of this lecture you will also share my enthusiasm for re-examining where the public service is positioned in the policy environment, and for working out where we need to be, and how to get there – and for re-igniting a passion that goes to the very heart of what we do.
What do I mean when I talk about a ‘passion for policy’? For some of you it may seem an unlikely combination of words. You’ll be surprised to know, then, that in 1887 Richard Bentley of London published Policy and Passion: a novel of Australian Life. Though dated, it comes close to describing the sense in which I use ‘passion’ today. ‘There is [the author says] a quasi-intellectual passion which in some natures is hardly less potent than that aroused by wine or women.’
On the eve of a combat mission during WWII a young Gough Whitlam demonstrated such a passion in a letter to his wife, thousands of miles away. It was an impassioned argument in support of Curtin’s post-war reconstruction and democratic rights referendum. The letter, Laurie Oakes, a parliamentary journalist, later observed, could easily have been addressed to ‘the men and women of Australia’. Gough concluded the letter ‘[y]ou can hardly fail to see that the Commonwealth is better fitted to deal with such nationwide problems. And so to bed. Love, G.’
It is this sort of ‘passion’ that forms the essence of this lecture. It is an intellectual passion for new thinking, for challenging the status quo – a passion for resolving national problems, problems that are said to be unsolvable. It is a passion for working together, and for working differently.
The areas I want to cover in this lecture that go to make up this passion for new thinking, for resolving problems and for working together, are:
making policy in a contestable public sector environment;
the nature of the passion for policy development itself;
growing the research and policy-making capability in the APS; and
building whole-of-government policy.
I start by tackling policy-making in a contestable public sector environment.
Once the source of almost all policy advice to the Commonwealth Government, the Australian Public Service now operates in a contestable environment. But I wonder whether most of us really understand the dynamics of that environment, and what its implications are for the Australian Public Service. The notion of a public service providing ‘frank and fearless advice’ is deeply embedded in our institutional psyche. Yet we stand alongside ministerial advisers, the media, lobbyists, think tanks and interest groups – who are neither supported nor constrained by our values; as providers of policy inputs to government, our virtual monopoly on policy is long gone.
The contestability of ‘policy’ is part of a more fundamental shift in the public sector environment, and I think it needs to be understood in this context.
As in the OECD, the public sector in Australia over the past 30 years has been continuously adjusting its ‘fit’ to a changing global society. To a society where economic, social and technological developments have given rise to new problems, new capacities and new relationships between citizens and governments – an environment in which an educated and empowered citizenry hold new and different views about what they expect from their social contract with government.
At the same time, governments have relinquished control of some of their key economic levers by, for example, floating their currencies, opening up their national economies and deregulating their financial systems. They now operate within the constraints of a global economy. Government policy is now delivered through a more devolved set of arrangements, including the privatisation of some areas of government business; a shift from direct service delivery to contracting out and regulation; and the creation of quasi-markets, where the government retains control of some aspects of the market including access, availability, quality, and sometimes even price. This is the policy delivery end of public policy.
At the other end, where policy advice is provided to government, there are at least an equally large number of players. Many are not contracted by or to government and offer their advice on behalf of non-government bodies. Nevertheless, according to author Celia Perkins, the large number of external sources of policy inputs available to government now points to an established market for policy advice. On this basis, she says, policy advice is naturally contestable.
For reasons I will elaborate on shortly, even if we in the bureaucracy could influence a move away from contestability (and I would argue we cannot), I do not believe there would be much reasoned support for it. We do, however, need to ask ourselves how we can make the most of our evolving circumstances – some are inclined to view contestability as a threat, or worry that the position of the public service is being eroded. I view the situation differently – there are undoubted opportunities here for the public service to capitalise on all of these policy inputs so as to get the best possible policy outcomes – but I do think we need to mobilise our passion for policy – a passion that has always been there – in new ways and in new directions.