Politics
Robodebt and its mild consequences
It is surprising that the Robodebt scheme has had so few consequences for those who ran it. It probably played a part in seeing the Morrison government turfed out of office, but it would be rash to attribute any one of that government’s many policy failures to its downfall.
The Report of the Commission into the Robodebt Scheme made it quite clear that ministers didn’t screw it up on their own: public servants were all too ready to go along with the government’s maladministration.
Last Friday the Public Service Commission presented the Final Report of the Centralized Code of Conduct Inquiry Taskforce on Robodebt. It is written with the personal authorship of Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer, who states:
I apologise as Public Service Commissioner to those affected by the Scheme and to the Australian public for the part played by public servants in this failure.
He finds that “12 people have been found to have breached the [Public Service] Code of Conduct on 97 occasions”, and specifically that “two former Secretaries, Ms Kathryn Campbell and Ms Renée Leon, have been found to have breached the Code of Conduct during their tenure at the Department of Human Services”. He goes on to specify those breaches. Neither of those former secretaries is still in the public service.
Although 10 others have breached the code, sanctions are recommended against only 4 of them, the others having left the public service. None of these 10 individuals are named.
The ABC’s Jake Evans provides a summary of the Commissioner’s findings.
On the ABC’s PM Samantha Donovan interviews Andrew Podger, former Public Service Commissioner, now Professor at ANU, about the Commissioner’s findings.
Podger describes the different responsibilities of Campbell and Leon and their different experiences. While Campbell was able to stay in her role for some time, Leon was dismissed, apparently for being too frank with the minister. He notes:
It’s very clear that pleasing ministers brings about rewards without penalties but telling ministers what they don’t want to hear brings about enormous penalties.
He is disappointed that the report is so restrained in its findings, and that it fails to name people other than the two departmental heads: it misses an opportunity to send a strong message about integrity to the rest of the public service. In a post on Pearls and Irritations – The APSC’s Robodebt code of conduct inquiry: too little, too late and not convincing – he argues that the Commission should have gone much further in exposing who was involved, and he asks why it names just two department heads when there seems to be strong evidence that at least one other department head may have been heavily involved.
Podger is particularly critical of the culture in which there is no penalty for not telling ministers what they should be told. It is inevitable, perhaps, that department heads do not want to upset their ministers. That has always been the case. But over the years there has been more pressure on public servants to prioritize their responsiveness to their ministers, he points out.
One explicit source of pressure on public servants was the Keating government’s decision to abolish the Westminster tradition of assured ongoing employment for departmental heads. Podger writes at length on the need for security of tenure, and a better-defined role for department heads, in a Pearls and Irritations post Restoring integrity to the Australian Public Service. Another explicit source of pressure was the Howard government’s 1999 set of amendments to the Public Service Act, which required public servants to be “responsive” to the government, and downplayed public servants’ responsibility to the community and to the law.
It is understandable that ministers feel comfortable when senior public servants understand the government’s ideology and can be trusted to implement it. But there is a fine line between loyalty and sycophancy. Five hundred years ago Machiavelli warned that the prince is not served well by the flatterer and the sycophant, who fail to warn him when his administration is failing. Machiavelli understood the function of “frank and fearless advice” in a way that many of today’s politicians don’t.
Podger has been concerned with issues of public service integrity for some time. In July this year he authored a discussion paper Further reform of the Australian Public Service “to help promote discussion about the ways in which the efficiency, effectiveness and capability of the Australian Public Service (APS) and its integrity can be improved, and the standing of the APS as a key institution in Australia’s democratic system can be restored”.
The project has the support of 28 former public servants who similarly consider that robodebt and other recent cases of maladministration demonstrate the urgent need for reform.
The paper develops 13 proposals for reform, the essence of which is captured in the first one:
Consideration be given to a more substantial revision of the APS Values in the Public Service Act to better reflect Westminster principles of being professional and apolitical, serving the elected government and administering its policies and programs, being accountable to the Parliament and the public through the system of ministerial responsibility, being impartial in its exercise of authority, being committed to serving the Australian public, adhering to the merit principle and having the highest ethical standards.
Writing in The Saturday Paper – Rot in the Public Service – Chris Wallace of the University of Canberra echoes Podger’s disappointment at the outcome of the Public Service Commission’s inquiry, and its lack of any recommendation for systemic reform. She notes that robodebt and the behaviour of its key actors arose out of so-called “reforms” of the public service:
The context of the report is the hollowing out of the traditional Westminster system by a neoliberal “new public management” approach that emerged under the Thatcher government in Britain and spread to Australia and beyond during the 1980s.
She goes on to write:
Robodebt is the bitter fruit of the contract system and the “responsiveness” of Kathryn Campbell to Scott Morrison, the minister she was so eager to please with it, and is its ultimate expression.
Like Podger she notes that it is unfortunate that much the same judgement has been passed on Campbell and Leon, although their behaviours and the consequences they experienced were very different. Regarding Leon’s treatment she writes:
It tarred the widely admired former secretary of the Department of Human Services, Renée Leon, who shut down robodebt when the Morrison government minister, Stuart Robert, would not. She was fired a fortnight later.
Notable in this whole process has been the focus on the two department heads. Olivia Ireland of the Sydney Morning Herald describes how Cambpell claims she has been made a scapegoat for the robodebt crisis. She quotes Shorten’s public response:
Ms Campbell, you are not a scapegoat; you were involved in robo-debt. There were 430,000 scapegoats; they are our fellow Australian citizens who had unlawful debt notices raised against them by the most powerful institution in Australia,” he said.
Ms Campbell says that the attacks on her have been political. The reality is the attacks on 430,000 people using welfare were political. The politics wasn’t against the Coalition government; it was by the Coalition government.
Shorten and de Brouwer are right: final responsibility lies with agency heads. But that shouldn’t mean that other public servants aren’t also responsible for their actions. The public service has a code of conduct, but it is extraordinary that one can hold a quite senior position in the Commonwealth public service without really being aware of the code’s provisions. By contrast if you work as an academic, a lawyer, an engineer, a medical practitioner, or in virtually any other profession, a professional code guiding your behaviour in every task is almost hard-wired into your brain, and you know you have to take personal responsibility for your advice and your decisions. But not in the public service, where there is a culture of pushing responsibility up the line. Chris Wallace’s account of what happened to Leon suggests that she was a victim of that practice.
The government probably feels it has wrung enough political dividends out of robodebt, and it believes it is doing enough to re-build the public service. There may be more to come, however. Writing in the Saturday Paper – Inside the fight to open the robodebt sealed section – Rick Morton reminds us that there is a still-confidential chapter of the robodebt commission’s report recommending referrals for civil and criminal prosecutions. That probably relates to behaviour by former ministers: it would be politically dangerous for the government to go down that road in a pre-election period.
Polling – are independents displacing the old parties?
The latest Essential poll has three blocks that may be of interest to readers – a time series on voting intentions, attitudes on housing bills blocked in the Senate, and attitudes on social media.
Voting intention
If you go to the regular “Latest political insights” page, and click on “View all political insights”, you can choose a time series of respondents’ primary voting intention, going back to December 2022.
The gain in the Coalition vote at the expense of Labor is evident. (Labor started from a high post-election base). Notably Labor seems to have lost its lead among female voters. Labor still has a lead among younger voters but that lead is closing.
Also evident is the steady erosion of the Green vote. Their support rose to 15 percent after the election, but is now back to around 13 percent – the same as at the 2022 election.
Essential, unlike other polling companies, separately polls for One Nation, UAP, and “Independent or other party”. Polling accuracy gets to be a little rough when trying to measure support for small parties (it’s a mathematical problem), but the time series has enough data points for some trends to be evident. Support for One Nation is fairly steady at about 8 percent, and support for the UAP is down to about 2 percent.
Noticeable is a rise in support for “Independent or other party” from about 8 percent to 10 percent, and the rise is stronger among women and younger people.
Now a 10 percent vote may not come across as impressive, but national polls tend to understate support for independents. There is no support in these polls for the Liberal Party assertion that the Teal members have had their day. And the rise, although small, is significant. That 10 percent is probably concentrated in a comparatively small number of electorates, and it could indicate that some new candidates may be reaching the 30 or 40 percent threshold to displace major party candidates, confirming Kos Samaras’ view that voters, having turned away from the Coalition in 2022, are now turning away from Labor but aren’t coming back to the Coalition.
The government’s housing bills
The Greens are blocking two significant housing bills in the Senate – the “help to buy” shared equity scheme, and the “build to rent” scheme.
On “help to buy” there is net support of 31 percent (49 percent support, 18 percent oppose). On “build to rent” there is even stronger support at 44 percent (57 percent support, 13 percent oppose). We like both schemes, and are more in favour of the supply-side scheme (build to rent) than the demand side scheme (help to buy).
Partisan predictions are depressingly predictable: Coalition voters are less supportive of these bills than other voters.
Respondents are asked whether Green and Coalition Senators should pass these bills and argue for their own policies at the next election, or should they go on blocking them.
People would like to see the Greens or the Liberal Party unblock these bills (48 percent support, 22 percent oppose). Again Coalition voters stand out for their negativity, but surprisingly Greens voters are almost as supportive of their passage as Labor voters.
There is a strong message here for the Greens in particular.
Social media
The poll has 13 blocks of questions on our attitudes to social media and related issues.
The results are hardly surprising. We are in favour of government policies that protect children from the worst aspects of social media, but we think it will be hard to implement effective measures. We believe it’s primarily parents’ responsibility to keep children safe online.
There are a few notable findings in these questions. Young people and women are more likely than older people and men to admit that they use social media more than they would like to. When asked at what age we believe children should be allowed to vote, buy and consume alcohol, and access pornography, we tend to settle on 17 years, and there isn’t much difference relating to respondents’ age, gender or voting intention.
Now it’s confidential
When respondents are also asked what should be the age of criminal responsibility, people settle on an age around 14, with very little variation on voting intention, age or gender. At the same time the law’n’order lobby, including the newly-elected Northern Territory government, is pushing to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 10 and the Victorian government is struggling to lift the age to 12.
One finding worth a mention is that 71 percent of us believe that “doxing” – the public release of personally identifiable data (e.g. phone numbers, addresses, social media details) with malicious intent – should be made a criminal offence. Older people are particularly strong in their belief that doxing should be a criminal offence. Yet it’s not long ago that inclusion of our names and addresses in the Telstra White Pages was almost considered to be a social obligation.