Public administration
Machiavelli and the Australian public service
Perhaps Machiavelli’s strongest advice for the prince was to beware of flatterers who would tell him only what he wanted to hear.
In the media there is a steady flow of horror stories from the Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. Stories of deliberate cruelty to the weakest in our community, stories of blatant disregard for the law, stories of former ministers hiding behind the “I do not recall” defence when confronted with the consequences of their decisions.
In last week’s Saturday Paper – FW: URGENT: Tudge leaked personal data to cow welfare critics – Rick Morton reported on accounts of the government’s “ugly” strategy of demonizing welfare recipients, of the efforts the government and senior public servants took to make the government look good, and of the way all actors worked hard to avoid asking if the program was illegal.
There is a risk that people’s Schadenfreude at seeing Morrison and former Coalition ministers squirm under tough questioning, and that lawyers’ concern for legal compliance, are overshadowing the cultural problems in the relationship between public servants and ministers.
Laura Tingle, in an article in which she singles out former Attorney-General Christian Porter as the only former minister to have behaved with dignity and credibility before the Commission, raises the question of culture: The Robodebt royal commission is hearing damning evidence of public sector dysfunction. Now it must probe the question of culture. Tingle describes a culture in which no one was game to give their boss, the head of the department, the bad news that Robodebt was illegal.
She describes a culture “where government departments run huge media divisions which work hand in glove with ministers’ offices to deliver false information and ‘counter narratives’ about government programs”. One of those “counter narratives” is feeding selected partisan media stories that will serve the government’s political ends – the Murdoch media in the case of the Coalition’s Robodebt.
Note that Tingle is referring to people we call public servants, whose salaries and resources to perform their jobs are appropriated by parliament, not by some decree of executive government, or by the political party in office.
The unfolding story from the Commission is one of politicization of senior public servants who go out of their way to ingratiate themselves to ministers, and of ministers who bask in the uncritical support and comfort of being surrounded by such flatterers.
It’s not a story only about the Department of Human Services, or about individual public servants. Rather it’s a story about the Canberra culture. Anyone who has worked in one of Canberra’s policy departments has experienced this politicization. Public servants, although funded by taxpayers, write speeches, press releases and correspondence for ministers with a political spin, using every tool of sophistry short of outright lying to cover the government’s corruption, incompetence or illegality when the spin doesn’t align with reality. The only way they can protect themselves from madness or the agony of an ongoing moral crisis is to start believing the bullshit they are writing, and to shove irritating subordinate naysayers aside.
In this relationship neither the flatterers nor the flattered benefit. With hindsight former Coalition ministers must surely regret that they weren’t given early advice of Robodebt’s problems, so that they could have modified it with a minimum of political embarrassment.
Katy G
Labor in government is making much of the need to de-politicize the public service. Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher has spoken of several initiatives with such intent – most recently in an address last Sunday to a gathering convened by the Chifley Research Centre announcing that future appointments to public service boards will be based on merit. In that address she promised to legislate to build “an APS that embodies integrity in everything it does”.
That will be a hard task, because Labor has inherited the legislation of the Howard government’s change to the Public Service Act, which directed the public service to be “responsive” to the wishes of government, rather than to provide “frank and fearless advice”. Labor will be tempted to forget its principles and enjoy the inheritance of a flexible, responsive, political secretariat.
They should re-read Machiavelli before they succumb to that temptation.