To the extent that it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: the once-respected public service has a major problem around competence.
We’ve been tracking the growing problem of public service bungling for a couple of years now, and the evidence is that things are getting worse, not better. The highest profile public service casualty of recent times has been Border Force’s Roman Quaedvlieg, but his dismissal wasn’t the result of underperformance. The comprehensive failure of the agriculture department to effectively regulate live export companies for animal welfare, revealed by the decade-long non-compliance of sheep exporter Emanuel Exports, led to the relevant minister publicly savaging his own bureaucrats for their failure to do their jobs properly. No one at agriculture will, as far as we know, be held to account for the failure, though. Bureaucrats there will just endure the humiliation of having Attorney-General’s staff come in and give them lessons on how to regulate properly.
Nor will anyone at Prime Minister and Cabinet will face legal action in relation to the trove of sensitive material that found its way to the ABC before being handed back by a cowed national broadcaster. Given the Abbott and Turnbull governments have dramatically extended their own powers to combat what they describe as “insider threats to national security” but which the rest of us call whistleblowers, it’s a strange outcome. Having postured about the need for draconian powers to ensure national security information isn’t revealed, having sought to criminalise basic forms of journalism such as receiving information that is in the public interest, the loss of thousands of pages of sensitive and in some cases cabinet documents seems to have yielded surprisingly little in terms of consequences for the bureaucrats involved.
Perhaps they’ve moved on to other jobs or retired. That’s one of the great mechanisms for avoiding accountability in the public service, one that’s regularly on show at every estimates hearings and at senate inquiries involving the public service — bureaucrats nodding understandingly and declaring how much they wished they could help the senator with her question, but sadly the officer involved is no longer with the department and they themselves have only recently commenced in the position.
But even for public servants that remain in position, there’s little to fear as a result of demonstrated incompetence. Last year, the Australian National Audit Office, after examining the handling of underperformance in eight public service agencies, concluded “there is significant room for improvement in the management of underperformance”. According to the ANAO, “underperformance is not being accurately identified and the proportion of employees undergoing structured underperformance processes is very low in all agencies.”
While you’d hope that a low number of employees would have been identified as underperforming, the plethora of problems found in the public service in recent years — Immigration bungling billion-dollar contracts and locking up Australian citizens again, the census debacle, the robodebt scandal, the repeated loss of personal information, and many others — suggests that the low level doesn’t reflect a dearth of candidates. Instead, there are internal barriers to managing underperformance — it’s time-consuming for managers, the procedures required are often repetitive and unnecessary and underperforming public servants can use sick leave to evade the process or allege bullying or harassment — which in turn deters managers from trying to deal with underperformers.
Sometimes, from the point of view of agencies, there’s been no underperformance. Immigration refused to accept the ANAO’s criticisms of its quite spectacular bungling of offshore processing contracts. Agriculture’s refusal to properly regulate live sheep exports perfectly fitted the view of former minister Barnaby Joyce, who boasted of restoring the trade. If there’s no disincentive for underperformance, then underperformance becomes inevitable — and all the more so if the underperformance is actually endorsed from the Secretary or Minister downward.
43 thoughts on “Does anyone in the Australian public service get held to account?”
Penny Lewisohn
April 17, 2018 at 8:38 pmVis a vis Public Service bungling…..what about the Murray Darling Basin…..that’s an absolute shocker!!! In fact possibly not ‘bungling’ as allowing powerful forces to exercise their muscle to overturn what were carefully negotiated agreements. Barnaby Joyce again the Minister?
Helena Ravenclaw
April 17, 2018 at 9:05 pmBernard, surely you know that the debacles you mentioned would have been the result of the unfortunate interplay of the Senior Executive Service and the Minister? Criticising operational Executive Level or APS level staff for supposed underperformance or incompetence completely misses the point, and the problem.
Ruv Draba
April 18, 2018 at 10:33 amHelena, I’ve spent the last 20+ years working with the federal government designing implementation of, providing assurance for and (not infrequently) rescuing risky and difficult programs of work (mostly informatics-related, but an awful lot of new policy requires informatics changes, so you see where the pressure-points live in the operations too.)
In my view, there are issues at more than one level, and problems don’t all trickle down — they also float up. It’s complex enough that targeting one level won’t fix it, while vague platitudes like ‘change the culture’ (not your suggestion, but one I often hear) are too fuzzy to be actionable, and too superficial to be effective.
As a single example, a common issue lies in the fascia between executive and operational management.
The lowest layer of executive management is politically exposed. Usually called Branch Managers or National Managers, they are personally responsible for specific programs of work attached to key policies, and typically support three layers of ambitious executive careers above them, as well as one or two political careers of whatever ministers are involved. Any can be called into Senate Estimates, and have to sit on-call in waiting rooms to see if they will be; no few take beta-blockers to deal with the intense, periodic stress of what in any other environment could be called workplace bullying.
The programs they plan and resource are often new, unprecedented and untested; they frequently depend on procurements that haven’t been conducted before and industry capabilities that may not yet exist, or haven’t been fully tested. Such procurements can take two or three goes to get right; yet responsibilities can be changed annually or even faster through internal restructures and Machinery of Government changes, and they can be exiled from a high-profile project into some operational backwater just for offending, embarrassing or disagreeing with the wrong master. So at executive levels, churning is often faster than learning.
But meanwhile, directly beneath them are career middle managers, most of whom will never be promoted simply because the pyramidal strata between operational and executive management narrow drastically at that level. They can sit in the same roles for a decade or longer, responsible for executing the same programs of work. They form strong, career-long peer networks, and it’s not impossible for a clique of middle managers to veto an incumbent executive manager to a standstill with pocket-change procedures. I once saw a network of such people destroy an ambitious agency-wide change strategy by simply outwaiting the three-year contract of the senior executive brought in to oversee it. I don’t believe that’s the first time it has occurred. Although paid to implement change, many risk-shift, focusing only on procedure, forcing their managers to micromanage the planning and oversight, and thus bear any responsibility for subsequent errors.
In the private sector, a typical response would simply be to replace recalcitrant middle managers, but in the APS this is hard. The prospects for middle management promotion are limited, yet the operational context is complicated. You want managers happy to stay in place, so the number you can move is always a balancing-act of how much new blood you want vs. how much critical operational context you need to retain. The uniqueness of the legislative and policy context works against rapid replacement, yet at the operational level, the only reward for success is that you stay in the same job doing it again next year with fewer resources, under greater stress, and at rock-bottom enterprise bargaining rates that in many cases don’t even track CPI. So it’s a great recipe for disgruntlement and cynicism.
Over two decades working with dozens of agencies, I’ve seen numerous attempt to ‘replace bad apples’ fail, and am now convinced that the issue isn’t the apples so much as the barrel itself. Perhaps it wasn’t a terrible barrel when the scope and pace of change were slow, but the world has sped up since the 1980s. The APS increasingly demands agile knowledge workers, yet the APS is still recruiting, developing, evaluating, rewarding and retaining risk-averse process-workers.
And innovation needs the opportunity to fail small, fail early and fail cheap, yet the APS policy environment seldom allows that. A lot of the big program failures occurred simply because the skills weren’t there in the first place, yet there was no way to bring in a critical mass and no time to develop them. Yet it’s politically imprudent to halt failures-in-progress and restart — it’s safer to watch it fail and find away to avoid the blame.
So as I said: it’s not particular apples, or even a layer of them. I believe the barrel itself needs an overhaul, starting with parliamentary engagement, but running right through recruitment, development, retention, performance, accountability and reward structures.
DF
April 17, 2018 at 9:22 pmAt what level do Public Servants become accountable? I worked in one of the key departments preparing ministers for Question Time. We were instructed that if the Minister made an incorrect statement when answering a question during QT, we were to notify his office with the correct information. Waste of time. We bothered with it for two weeks and then stopped. He never corrected the record so what was the point? Until the power balance between departments and ministerial staffers is corrected, why would any public servant bother with facts and honesty on the record? A complete waste of time.
DF
April 17, 2018 at 9:25 pmI should add that the Minister regularly made stuff up re statistics – he just plucked them out of the air, with no reference to his briefing papers. I contacted the relevant area of the dept, which provided the correction, which I sent to his office and then – nothing. No acknowledgement and certainly no correction on the floor of the House or in Hansard.
Tom Jones
April 18, 2018 at 1:06 amWhat you call incompetence is actually a systemic approach so that no one is accountable as the churn is always so great that a public servant is given a job to do but mainatains it long enough to get a better paying job and then the next person comes in, changes things and then moves on. Meantime Ministers and their staff are told what they want to hear.
[email protected]
April 18, 2018 at 6:20 amArticles like this depress me.
The belief that somewhere somebody who is competent AND gives a shit is taking care of government business with at least a degree of common sense is shattered.
Sad.
CG
April 18, 2018 at 9:51 amI have no doubt there are genuine problems. But how many of them are more properly seen as politically driven rather than something wrong with the APS?
How much latitude would public servants have had to genuinely enforce change in the live export trade. You might want to speak to the ministers involved before dumping on the public servants below them.
CG
April 18, 2018 at 9:58 amSo do you really worry that accountability is a big issue in the APS particularly after watching the Banking Royal Commission?
1984AUS
April 18, 2018 at 10:33 amExcellent article Mr Keane. I believe Australia has reached a low never before witnessed in this nation and the recent crop of human rights/civil rights abusing legislation being passed enables this to continue without any accountability or scrutiny.
Paul Munro
April 18, 2018 at 11:48 amIt is a relief to see the quality and balance of the comments on Keane’s article. There are many reasons for suboptimal performance and perceptions of the APS. No one should ignore the degree to which the standing body of the service has been eroded by progressive waves of outsourcing, consultancy recruit, emts, value for money contracting out and the like. I often wonder why there are still so many competent and dedicated people left. Take a close look at the guy who heads the APS and is responsible for developing its a professional force; he must be seen as more at home facilitating outsourcing and cost cutting than developing an esprit de corps and ethos that fosters high achievement. Look at the evidence put together by the ANAO about the degree of funding going to consultancies , labour hire and value for money short cuts; look at how little public attention is given to it. then perhaps read Owen Jones ” The Establishment. And how they get away with it”, an account of the operation of neoliberal policy settings across the UK from Thatcher through Blair to Cameron. One can quickly pick up the degree to which Australian governments have adopted similar small government policies hostile to maintaining quality public service activity. Most telling to me is the chapter in which Jones details what he describes as the corporate sector neoliberal forces “scrounging off the taxpayer”. That is precisely what has been happening in Australia for decades; do not blame the remaining public servants for what happens; blame the political masters, the media who fall into line with conventional mantras about small government and public service inefficiency, and finally blame an electorate too besotted with economic growth slogans to notice how deeply corrosive the related policies have been for institutions that are integral to the quality of our democracy and standard of public goods .
Ruv Draba
April 18, 2018 at 12:50 pmI broadly agree, Paul. Working as I do in the informatics sector, I see some of the worst problems of Federal outsourcing, contracting and consulting. The original idea might well have been valid: improve technical resource agility by tapping into a broader market; encourage permanent staff to move into a more competitive environment and thus constantly sharpen and develop their skills in ways that as permanent employers, the APS could neither easily anticipate nor resource.
But that isn’t what has happened. Lacking a concerned employer’s strategic vision, contractors have virtually no career development, become locked into ageing expertise and fail to broaden with generalist skills. Just as with gig-economy exploitation, operational costs that were typically managed corporately — including OH&S, insurance, professional development and work conditions — are pushed into hidden costs on the labour side, then price-managed until they’re eaten. In a world where we differentiate heart-surgeons on reputation, we differentiate IT professionals the way we do pork-bellies: as commoditised price.
Meanwhile, for simplicity’s sake, recruitment has been channeled into a small number of national and transnational labour-hire firms who have adopted rent-seeking behaviours, adding next to no value operationally, but spending their business development funds on building and maintaining bigger barriers to entry.
The consultancy side is no better, trading on organisational fear and ignorance, using ‘grey gifts’ to hire superannuated executives and sell them back in to build more business, luring key decision-makers with the prospect of future sinecures, while retaining a platoon of lawyers to pro-actively manage the expected failures of delivery.
I don’t think these problems are a root cause, but one of several malodorous effects of abdicating an admittedly vexing set of HR challenges. You could call it neoliberalism if you wish, but I view it as magical thinking: the market provides only what capacity has been built to provide. Destroy strategic HR-developing capacity and the market simply supplies less of that, and bluntly teaches you to lower your expectations.
Tom
April 18, 2018 at 2:25 pmGlad to see this issue raised. I’ve been trying to have the ABC held accountable for a substandard tv story it broadcast about me on 7.30. Thought I was okay when the Australian Communications and Media Authority investigated my complaint and subsequently made a formal determination that the ABC had breached my privacy and critically, that of my pre-school children. But, to my amazement and disgust, the ABC snubbed the breach and has continued to publish online its full privacy-breaching story for nearly 3 years. (The ABC is exempt from the Privacy Act too.) A token part of the material has just been removed (last week!) after the Commonwealth Ombudsman queried their actions but alas the most sensitive personal information about my children remains published contrary to the privacy breach finding. My mistake was thinking the ABC could and would be held accountable to its self-written Code of Practice in the absence of any other mechanism but the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office dispelled that illusion. They said the ABC Code’s core principles and standards, despite being described in the Code as ‘requirements’, only provide broad guidance and are vulnerable to multiple interpretations, specifically:
‘The Principles and Standards contained in Part IV provide broad guidance as to how the Code should be interpreted and may lead to different interpretations depending on the circumstances and, as noted above, may not always lead to a single supportable interpretation or conclusion.’ Hardly useful for accountability. Lucky ABC. But is it really good enough for a national broadcaster or us in 2018?