Our submissive public service
The Robdebt commission is not only about the scheme’s legality: it’s also about a politicized and enfeebled public service.
Robodebt – “a landmark failure of the Australian Public Service”
Rick Morton, writing in the Saturday Paper, ran a series of articles about the legal issues around Robodebt as the Commission tried to work out who knew the scheme was illegal, when they knew it, whether they tried to pass that knowledge up the line, and who engaged in wilful ignorance. They’re an excellent set of articles, but I haven’t hyperlinked them, because The Saturday Paper, quite reasonably, has a paywall, limiting free access. My advice to anyone interested in Morton’s work is to take out at least a digital subscription to the Saturday Paper: it’s a beacon of enlightenment in a commercial media landscape dominated by partisan and sensationalist journalism.
Nor have I tried to summarize Morton’s articles: the reader can draw his or her own conclusions on legal issues, and in any event that is the work of the commission, which is due to report on June 30.
Media emphasis on the scheme’s non-compliance with the Social Security Act has distracted us from considering the appropriateness of Robodebt, even if it had somehow been in line with the law. The idea that an income earned over a 2-week period is also earned in the other 50 weeks seems to be plain wrong. The idea that people should keep payslips going back many years, to defend possible accusations of fraud, does not align with our ideas of social justice. The lack of easy avenues for people to query accounts sent to them goes against the very idea of “public service”.
This perspective is emphasized in a ten-minute interview with Darren O’Donovan of La Trobe University on the ABC’s This Week. (Starts at 19:20.) He touches on the legal issues, but he is mainly talking about “a multi-level system failure” and “a failure of ethics, professional ethics, particularly in the Australian Public Service”. It has been “a landmark failure of the Australian Public Service”, involving professional misconduct.
O’Donovan also has a Conversation article – “Amateurish, rushed and disastrous”: royal commission exposes robodebt as ethically indefensible policy targeting vulnerable people – which he concludes with poignant observations on the testimony victims made to the commission.
Ethical principles are also the emphasis in Karen Middleton’s Saturday Paper contribution: What robo-debt reveals about the public service. The commission’s hearings exposed a public service so attuned to the political agenda of executive government that they completely forgot the people whom they are supposed to be serving and whose taxes pay their salaries. The overwhelming impression is that they were working without any framework of professional ethics. She goes on to describe 50 years of politicization of the public service, mainly by Coalition governments, concluding that “a culture of fear, intimidation and plausible deniability can’t produce good government”.
How we let consulting firms enfeeble our public service
The Pacific War was followed by a period of nation-building. Immigrants poured into our country, manufacturing industries expanded, roads, railroads, dams and power stations were constructed, and new universities were established.
One aspect of nation-building, well under way before the end of the war, was a strengthening of the Commonwealth public service. The Curtin government recruited a handful of people of outstanding ability – affectionately known as the “seven dwarfs” – to establish a professional public service that would help guide the government through the task of postwar reconstruction. This was more than a simple recruitment drive; it was a recognition that governments needed the advice and support of a professionalized public service with solid university qualifications, particularly in economics.
Although building a professional public service had been a Labor government initiative, the Menzies government pushed ahead with the project, moving government departments to Canberra and continuing the development of the Australian National University, which had been officially established in 1946.
By the mid-1980s, however, there was a change of mood among policymakers. The public service, and government in general, came to be regarded less as an important economic asset, and more as an unproductive and wasteful overhead. “Small government” came to be seen as an indisputable policy objective.
Initially there was the idea that government needed to be more efficient by taking on the management practices of the private sector. In a 1994 edition of the Harvard Business Review is an account of an interview with David Osborne, co-author of the best seller Reinventing government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector, which for a time was almost compulsory reading in schools of public administration.
As anyone who was familiar with the Commonwealth bureaucracy could testify, the public service of the time was overburdened with too many layers of management, extreme risk aversion, demarcation barriers, and penny-pinching regulations. (For a little amusement one can read Bruce Nicholls’ work A briefcase in transit, an account of his move from a large corporation to the public service, where he describes the bureaucratic process he had to navigate to get a writing pad from the stationery cupboard.)
Administrative reforms were overdue, but, as one can detect in the Osborne article, the difference between the functions of the public and private sectors tended to be forgotten. In a private company, for example, closing an unprofitable regional operation is clever management, but in the public service there are often mandates to serve all regions with a basic service.
Also there was a widespread belief that public sector reform was almost an oxymoron, because whatever the public service did could always be done better in the private sector. Public servants should not be involved in program delivery: rather they should contract all services to the private sector, and retain only a small core of people to manage such contracts. The slogan “steering not rowing”, a term coined by Osborne and his colleague Ted Gaebler, had sacred status among right-wing politicians.
The model of program design and supervision done by public servants in one box, and program delivery done in the private sector in another box, looked neat on a Powerpoint diagram, but it ignored transaction costs – the costs of tendering and supervising contracts. It ignored the need for a two-way process between administrators and those delivering programs. (The Robodebt commission has been exposing the consequences when the administrators and program deliverers aren’t in constant contact). And it ignored the hard-to-quantify but real value of corporate memory built up in public service departments.
In a recent interview on the ABC’s program The Money, Mariana Mazzucato described how even the “steering not rowing” model has given way to a model in which private sector consultants are now in the coxswain’s seat doing the steering. The examples she uses are mainly from the UK, but the problems are general. She describes conflicts of interest: how can the same firm be advising the government about reducing greenhouse gas emissions while it is also advising oil companies about their corporate strategy? And she recounts the wasteful way governments overlook the capacity governments have in their own agencies and departments. (First 16 minutes of the February 23 program.)
The Albanese government is well aware that too much work is being done by consultants that should be done in the public service. The Public Service Minister, Katy Gallagher, believes that there is a $3 billion annual saving to be found in bringing work back to the public service. That figure seems to be based only on comparisons of public servants’ salaries with the fees charged by consultants. It does not include the far greater benefit that can be gained from work being done by people who understand the role of government, who don’t have conflicted interests, and who are not driven by a short-term profit motive.