The public sector, holder and guardian of our common wealth
Contradictory attitudes to our common wealth
We like Medicare, aged care, public housing and our social security system so much that we think they should get much more public funding. But we don’t want to increase taxes – we think our taxes should stay around their present level. We’d like big corporations, very wealthy individuals, and high-income earners to pay more tax, however. Perhaps we can find a way to reconcile our desire for more spending on public services with our reluctance to pay more tax by rooting out waste in the public service, particularly by cutting staff.
That’s a short summary of our attitudes to taxes and public services revealed in six questions in the latest Essential Report. On most questions the partisan differences are predictable and strong, but it is hard to find any voting or demographic group keen to pay more tax. Coalition voters are particularly keen on cutting the number of public servants, and are strong in the belief that such cuts would be good for the economy. There are some significant age differences: older people want to see more spending on Medicare and aged care and they want the rich to pay more tax, but they also like the idea of public service job cuts. And women are generally more supportive of the public sector than men.
There are few surprises in these findings. We want more public goods, but we think the rich should pay for them. And we think the public service is overstaffed.
At first sight our belief that we think the rich should pay more suggests we support progressive taxes. The trouble is that we all believe our income is about the average: the rich are other people living in harbourside mansions and driving Ferraris. Most people in well-paid employment would be surprised to learn that only 15 percent of taxpayers have incomes above $100 000 and that only 4 percent have incomes above $150 000.[1] When they learn that they are the high-income earners their attitudes shift.
The idea that the public service is overstaffed goes back to jokes about road workers leaning on shovels, and images of rows of bureaucrats wearing coffee-stained grey cardigans passing memos to one another. Surveys consistently reveal that the public believe that the number of administrative staff in relation to program delivery staff is much greater than it actually is.
1. ATO Taxation statistics, individuals, Table 14. ↩
Dutton’s DOGE – it has nothing to do with efficiency; it’s about trashing our common wealth
It’s fortunate that we don’t have nuclear weapons in Australia, because Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has just sacked hundreds of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration – the people responsible for the stewardship of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
Writing in Michael West Media – Peter Dutton’s DOGE: draining the swamp or making the swamp great again?– Josh Barnett describes Dutton’s vision for an Australian DOGE, inspired by his friend Gina Rinehart and to be administered by a new minister for government efficiency.
The word “efficiency” appearing in America’s DOGE and in Dutton’s Australian DOGE is a cover for deep cuts to public services. There isn’t much efficiency to be wrung out of our public sector. Years of so-called “efficiency dividends” have generally been achieved by under-staffing, which means longer waiting times for passports, Centrelink services, pensions and so on. You can watch a very short clip by Andrew Leigh on the consequences of such deep cuts.
One of Dutton’s obsessions is with 36 000 public sector jobs: The public service has indeed grown, but some of that is simply in line with normal employment growth in the economy – as private sector service jobs grow, so too do public sector service jobs. Some is a result of filling staff positions to deal with backlogs in service delivery, and some is a result of bringing work back in house – work that had been contracted to consultants and labour-hire companies. Such contracting out brings down the reported staff numbers, but at much higher cost than keeping people on the payroll, and when policy work is contracted to consultants there is no guarantee that commercial interests won’t override the public interest.
Senior public servants’ pay
If there were more attention to the cost of providing public services, rather than a silly obsession with the number of people on the government payroll, the pay and conditions of senior public servants should be up for review. Senior public servants have always been well paid, but their pay of department and agency heads is now around $1 million, about twice the level of their ministerial bosses.
That rise in pay has come about since the Keating government in 1994 abolished tenure and introduced five-year contracts for senior public servants, explains Chris Wallace in her Conversation contribution: The prime minister earns $607,000 a year. Why does his top public servant earn more than $1 million?. The old contract was that modest pay was a recognition that the main reward for public servants was the opportunity to work for the public purpose. Tenure was part of the deal with benefits for public ministers and ministers, because it meant no public servant could be sacked for giving frank and fearless advice. That contract has changed: senior public servants are now in the same employment pool as highly-paid consultants. The issues isn’t the pay – little would be saved from the Commonwealth budget by paring back the pay for top public servants. Rather, it’s the about the culture and values in public service.
The ideology behind DOGE – contempt for the common wealth
DOGE, in both its US and Australian manifestations, is about far more than efficiency, and the effects of cuts in government services, as serious as they are. It’s about the way people in political power see government.
Glyn Davis, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in an address to the Institute of Public Administration, stated that:
… concerns about the scale of government are not driven principally by evidence. Rather, they reflect beliefs, genuine disagreements about what is the appropriate role of the state, what's legitimate, what sort of society are we looking for?
In spite of evidence that there is no correlation between the size of government and the performance of national economies – evidence that Davis acknowledges – some people believe that “small government” is a desirable end in its own right (an issue Miriam Lyons and I took up in our work Governomics: can we afford small government?).
As has often been pointed out in these roundups, the Liberal Party, in its statement of beliefs, presents government as something that is hostile to people’s interests, and states explicitly that “businesses and individuals – not government – are the true creators of wealth and employment”.
It therefore doesn’t matter whether government is efficient or not, because no value comes from the public sector. It’s all waste.
That’s why Angus Taylor doesn’t have to explain why a Coalition government would cut public spending (if we ignore their nuclear promise), and why Dutton doesn’t have to explain where those cuts will be made.
This dogma is taken to an extreme in America’s DOGE, described by Tom Nichols in his Atlantic article The death of government enterprise. As he writes about DOGE:
… it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.
DOGE has been shaped around a premise that people like Trump and Musk know better than the experts who have administered government agencies. They must surely be cleverer, because they have made so much money, and because they are able to come to quick decisions without having to go through slow and deliberative processes.
Nichols’ final word on DOGE:
It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.
The NACC reluctantly turns the spotlight on public servants involved in Robodebt
On Tuesday the National Anti Corruption Commission quietly issued a press release, stating that:
As a result of the decision made by its independent reconsideration delegate, Mr Geoffrey Nettle AC KC, on 10 February 2025, the Commission will investigate the 6 referrals it received from the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether or not any of the 6 referred persons engaged in corrupt conduct.
We actually asked for a German Shepherd
The NACC’s initial decision not to proceed with investigations into public servants involved in Robodebt was covered in roundups last year. The story of how it has been forced into action is covered by Olivia Ireland of the Sydney Morning Herald: Robo-debt officials to be investigated, in anti-corruption commission backflip, and by The Guardian’s Sarah Basford Canales: NACC to investigate six referrals made by robodebt royal commission.
The Commission into Robodebt made damning findings against the Morrison government – findings that were welcomed by the Albanese government. But the NACC provided weak excuses for its decision not to proceed with investigating the behaviour of public servants involved with Robodebt.
The NACC is a weak body, reluctant to act and secretive in its operations. That’s a deliberate design feature, resulting from Albanese’s “bipartisan” deal in establishing the NACC, in a process that ignored the independents’ demand for a strong anti-corruption body.
The ABC’s Olivia Caisley reports that the NACC’s reluctant backdown has prompted independent members of Parliament and the Greens to state that they will use the balance of power to require NACC to hold more open processes if, after the election, it is necessary for parties to go into negotiations to form a government.[2]
The lawyers will go into specific aspects of individuals’ behaviour, and some public servants who tried to stand up against their bosses who knowingly failed to tell the government it was breaking the law will feel vindicated. The general issue is much wider, however: it’s about the independence of the public service, and the steady politicization of the public service, initiated by Coalition governments and accepted by Labor governments. If the heat continues to be a applied to NACC, the outcome of its proceedings could be quite consequential.
2. To Olivia and other ABC journalists, can you please stop using that term “hung parliament” with its connotations of something unusual. Minority government is a common feature of most decent democracies. ↩
Schoolkids and civics – they’re interested in politics but they feel ignored
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has recently produced a report on civics and citizenship knowledge among Year 6 and Year 10 schoolchildren. The document is tediously long, but it is summarized in ACARA’s press release, which finds:
The 2024 report reveals that Year 6 and 10 students have a high degree of trust in civic institutions, but considerably less trust in the media or social media. In addition, students have also expressed concerns about a range of issues affecting Australia, including pollution, climate change, crime, and racism.
The 2024 report also shows that, at the national level, results have fallen since the last assessment undertaken in 2019 and to the lowest levels since the assessment began in 2004:
43 per cent of Year 6 students attained the proficient standard in 2024 compared to 53 per cent in 2019.
28 per cent of Australian Year 10 students met the proficient standard in 2024 compared to 38 per cent in 2019.
Philippa Collin, of Western Sydney University, has a Conversation article on the report. The title Australian students just recorded the lowest civics scores since testing began. But young people do care about politicssummarizes her interpretation of the report. Young people have a practical, grass-roots understanding of politics, but they feel that governments and other authorities are poor at engaging with them, and that they don’t have a genuine voice in the community.
Dan Holmes, writing in the Mandarin – Civics and citizenship literacy plummets – has a less optimistic interpretation. He draws attention to a finding in the report that “only 6 percent of year 10 students said they were ‘very’ or ‘quite’ interested in Australian politics compared with 20 percent reporting interest in what is happening in other countries”, and that only 3 percent of students said they would join a political party in the future. (That seems to be surprisingly high, in view of the way adults are known to regard political parties.)
True to form, speaking for the opposition Senator Sarah Henderson issued a press statement blaming the government: Albanese government fails students on civics and citizenship education.
The ABC’s Conor Duffy covers the report, with an eye-catching headline: Australian students record worst ever civics result with 72 per cent not understanding the basics of democracy. He points out that students in disadvantaged communities have poorer scores on civics and citizenship than others. He also reports that education experts generally agree that the curriculum on civics and citizenship needs re-writing. He reports on Education Minister Jason Clare’s deflection of Henderson’s criticism, pointing out that the present curriculum was developed and signed off by the Coalition.
The Coalition’s criticism reeks of hypocrisy. In his deceitful campaign in opposition to the Voice, Dutton’s consistent message was “if you don’t know, vote no”. He was exploiting people’s poor understanding of the Constitution, and was adding to their misunderstanding by suggesting that a constitutional clause should specify administrative details.