Politics and administration
Robodebt
The Report into the Robodebt Scheme has been a godsend for journalists and for those enjoying the Schadenfreude of seeing yet more confirmation that the Coalition government was incompetent, deceitful, and had little regard for the law or for evidence. It is worth reading at least Commissioner Holmes’ preface to see how extraordinarily bad the scheme was.
So strong are these findings of illegality and deceit that four other aspects of the report, which involve significant problems in Canberra’s political and administrative culture, could get ignored. One is the role of the public service (remember the word “public”), another is the attitude to those receiving social security transfers, the third is the suggestion (not a formal recommendation) that social security payments should be raised, and the fourth is about the government’s obsession with secrecy.
These are all important but difficult because they involve spending money and taking day-to-day power away from executive government.
The role of public servants
On Pages 633 to 646 are the Commission’s findings and recommendations relating to the public service. In part the Report is critical of the structure of the public service, a structure guided by an idea often found in administration textbooks, advocating that policy development and program implementation should be in separate agencies. In this regard there is a recommendation that:
SES staff at Services Australia should spend some time in a front-line service delivery role and with other community partnerships.
Similar recommendations were in the Coombs Report in 1976. Since then the Commonwealth public service has become even more separated from the public it serves.
Regarding the misbehaviour of public servants it’s not that there’s an absence of rules of behaviour. The Report lists three specific Acts and one code of conduct guiding their behaviour and it reminds the reader that public servants should have a basic understanding of “natural justice” and “administrative decision-making”. Rather, it’s that many public servants are conveniently unaware of these rules, or choose to ignore them.
That should be rectified through training of public servants and of those who sit on bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Much of the Commission’s Report about public service behaviour draws heavily on the work of Andrew Podger who was asked by the Commission to provide his expert and informed opinion of Robodebt.
To emphasize what should be obvious to senior public servants, the Report carefully explains what is meant by impartiality:
The APS Value of “Impartial” requires the public service to be apolitical, and provide the government with advice that is frank, honest, timely, and based on the best available evidence. The Commission heard evidence about APS leaders (both Secretaries and SES leaders) being excessively responsive to government, undermining concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice.
The Commission is particularly dismayed by the failure of senior public servants to give “frank and fearless” advice. In this regard the Commission takes up a recommendation of the Thodey review of the public service, which would result in more transparency and less politicization of the way in which APS department heads are appointed.
That’s a sensible recommendation, but it goes against politicians’ instincts. Even though it’s against their interest to appoint sycophantic “yes” men and women to their circle of advisers, as Machiavelli pointed out 500 years ago, prime ministers and ministers will always be inclined to appoint those who offer uncritical loyalty. That process of appointment has to be put at some distance from executive government.
The Commission seeks to see the “public” re-emphasized in the work of public servants. To summarize the Commission’s findings, it’s that the scheme’s administrators have generally been too focussed on their ministers rather than on the citizens they should be serving, and who, in democratic processes, are their bosses. The Commission recommends:
Services Australia and DSS should introduce mechanisms to ensure that all new programs and schemes are developed with a customer centric focus, and that specific testing is done to ensure that recipients are at the forefront of each new initiative.
The Commission’s work was specifically about the ministers and agencies involved with Robodebt, but the issues of public servants’ accountability and responsibilities are wider, concerning the politicization of the public service. Politicization has developed over many years, and was formally encouraged by Prime Minister Howard who emphasized the idea that public servants’ prime role was to be “responsive” to executive government. This process is described in a 2005 lecture by Paul Kelly: Re-thinking Australian governance – The Howard Legacy. The public service, particularly in the policy-related agencies, became a trophy for the winning party (usually the Coalition), who could use it as a taxpayer-funded political secretariat.
The taxpaying public would be horrified to see the extent to which public servants are drawn into political work – writing speeches for ministers that include the government’s partisan spin, preparing briefs and talking points for ministers to help them deal with embarrassing questions from journalists or opposition MPs in Question Time. This work involves every imaginable use of deceit – sophistry, casuistry, obfuscation, misrepresentation of data – but generally falls short of outright lying. Public servants, even though they may not like the role into which they are cast, become encultured into the governing party’s way of thinking.
Unless this political work is handed back to ministerial staffers and there is more distance established between public servants and executive government, it will be hard for the public service to be de-politicized and to be protected from repeating the transgressions identified by the Commission.
That would involve a cultural change in the public service, including an awareness among public servants that appropriation of their pay and program expenses, and authority to administer programs, is made by parliament, who in turn are responsible to the public. That’s simply Politics 1. But as Andrew Podger is quoted in a 2019 Conversation article, the relationship between ministers and the Commonwealth public service became transformed from a partnership to one more like “master-servant”. This problem is probably more manifest in the Commonwealth than in state and local bureaucracies, where public servants are much more directly in contact with the people they’re dealing with.
An outline of what necessary reform would entail is in a speech in Parliament by MP Kate Chaney, in which she calls for more courageous reform of the public service than the government is considering.
Attitude to welfare recipients
Notable in the report are Commissioner Holmes’ references to people receiving social security payments as “citizens”. That could be seen as a statement of the obvious, but it was far from obvious to ministers and senior public servants involved in Robodebt. As she writes in the Report’s introduction:
Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes. It is not recent, nor is it confined to one side of politics.
She is particularly critical of the impression conveyed by Scott Morrison that there is substantial welfare fraud. The idea that many people were ripping off the system resulted in the government vastly over-estimating the amount that could be recovered by Robodebt acting as “the welfare cop on the beat”. As it turned out, however, there was very little fraud – something people down the line could have told their bosses if they had condescended to consult those they considered to be their underlings.
This perception of social security recipients as “welfare bludgers” or “leaners not lifters”, to use some of the Coalition’s phraseology, is particularly hypocritical. As everyone from Karl Marx through to the Reserve Bank Governor asserts, in a capitalist economy wage pressures are kept in check by the presence of unemployment. Marx referred to capitalism’s reliance on a “reserve army of the unemployed”, while the RBA, in less colourful language, simply asserts that it would like to see the unemployment rate rise to 4.5 percent by the end of the year.
On the one hand, for the sake of the economy, people are asked to bear the misery and humiliation of unemployment, but instead of being appreciated for this service, they are subject to “anti-welfare” brutality, with programs such as Robodebt. The ABC’s Garth Hutchens puts it neatly in his post Robodebt was a scandal. Should economists bear some responsibility for it too? He is highly critical of the way we have treated the unemployed, and asks “Could the Robodebt scandal have happened if our modern economic policies didn't already treat unemployed people in such a cavalier way?”.
The latest Essential Report shows how the Coalition’s “dole bludger” talk is so out of touch with the Australian community. Essential puts to respondents the statement “Most Australians who are struggling are in that situation because of their own poor choices”. Only 20 percent of respondents agree, while 52 percent disagree. Younger people (who haven’t been exposed to life’s misfortunes) are more inclined to agree than older people, but there is no difference between Labor and Coalition voters.
The need to spend more on welfare
On Page 659 is the Commission’s suggestion that the rate of social security payments should be lifted. To quote:
The administration costs of a scheme which addressed all the different ways in which people were harmed by the Scheme and examined their circumstances to establish what compensation was appropriate in each case would be astronomic, given the numbers involved. A better use of the money would be to lift the rate at which social security benefits are paid, to help recipients achieve some semblance of the “security” element of that term; because with financial security comes the dignity to which social security recipients are entitled and to which the Scheme was so damaging.
Treasury officials have probably already written speaking notes for ministers, giving seven reasons to reject the idea.
Secrecy
The Report notes that “large parts of the relevant ministerial briefs, materials put before Cabinet and Cabinet minutes themselves have not been able to be revealed”. Commissioner Holmes goes on to state:
It is time to ask whether the rationale of public interest immunity – the maintenance of Cabinet solidarity and collective responsibility – really justifies the withholding of information that routinely occurs under that mantle. Nothing I have seen in ministerial briefs or material put to Cabinet suggests any tendency to give full and frank advice that might be impaired by the possibility of disclosure, and the Cabinet minutes which are in evidence are sparing in detail, with a careful mode of expression revealing nothing of individual views.
She puts the case for making cabinet documents publicly assessible, except “where it [confidentiality] is reasonably justified for an identifiable public interest reason”.
It is hard to find any justification for the “cabinet-in-confidence” classification. The vast majority of cabinet submissions are mundane documents. But secrecy has become the default for government. It helps preserve the mystique of Canberra.
Politicians may fear that when their decisions are at variance with explicit or implicit advice in cabinet submissions they will suffer political embarrassment. Against that consideration, however, is the way governments can protect themselves by using the advice of detached and professional public servants as justification for making politically difficult decisions.
Labor’s honeymoon is over, but support isn’t flowing to the Coalition
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – Albanese is starting to be blamed for things, and that’s normal – by Anthony Galloway, is about the apparent decline in support for the Albanese government. That is evident from William Bowe’s Bludger Track and from Essential’s Political insights. They show Labor’s support falling from around 39 percent just after last year’s election to around 35 percent now. Those figures are rough because there’s a fair bit of noise in the polls.
Galloway’s article includes an observation from Resolve Director Jim Reed, who notes the decline in Labor’s support, and who says that support is now flowing back to the opposition. “A portion of the electorate are now dissatisfied enough to jump ship.”
That transfer to the Coalition is not evident from either source. The Coalition primary vote is doggedly sitting at around 32 percent, well short of the 36 percent at the election. In fact if one applies a little statistical analysis to the Poll Bludger’s series, it may even be slipping a little. By some two-party preferred estimates the Coalition’s support is improving, but making inferences about how preferences will be allocated is subject to too many assumptions to have much value.
Journalists and pollsters still seem to be bound by the two-party model. Perhaps their metaphor should be less about jumping from one ship onto another, but rather jumping into the ocean and hoping someone will rescue them.
Why are the French revolting?
Quiet before the storm
First it was outrage over raising the pension age from 62 to 64 (ours is moving to 67) , and then it was reaction to a young man being shot dead at a traffic stop, the 17 th such incident in the last 18 months, mostly involving people of African or North African origin.
Why is this happening in one of the world’s more prosperous democracies, with the highest social welfare expenditure in the “developed” world? Could it happen in other democracies?
Writing in the European Conservative Hélène de Lauzun unconvincingly sheets much of the blame on to the “left” and a judiciary that’s been soft on crime, but she does concede that there is a problem with French police: French riots: ignoring the rotten root of the problem. The root of the problem, according to de Lauzun, is a general reaction against authority, worsened by lax immigration and education policies. “France has welcomed millions of people to its shores but has been careful not to teach them to love their country.”
Journalist John Lichfield, in a Politico article – The politics of the French riots – brushes aside simple explanations such as “race” and “religion”. He describes the rioting as “insurrection without aims: a scream of fury, an anarchic rejection of government; an act of gang-warfare writ large; a competition in performative destruction”. Many who have had their cars torched and their business shopfronts smashed are from the immigrant communities themselves. Similarly Chris Bertram, writing in Cooked Timber – Sincerely inauthentic: zombie republicanism and violence in France – is cautious about general explanations, but he does see the police culture as one of the problems.
Joseph Downing, writing in Social Europe – Nanterre and the suburbs: the lid comes off – puts the problem down to what he calls “hypermarginalisation”: “Poor-quality housing and schooling combine with geographical isolation and racism to make it virtually impossible for people to stand a chance at improving their circumstances.” A similar explanation is in Ben Hall’s Financial Times article – Riots underscore depth of France’s social tensions – where he writes:
The latest protests demonstrate that France’s impoverished, ethnically-mixed neighbourhoods, remain a powder keg, riven with a feeling of injustice, racial discrimination and abandonment by the state.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writing in The Atlantic – Dystopian fiction becomes reality in France – sees the riots as a manifestation of nihilism. He quotes Albert Camus’ statement that “the spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities”. Hardly anywhere else in the world is there such a gap between the oft-pronounced rhetoric – “liberté, égalité, fraternité” – and many people’s actual conditions.
Nihilism is a common theme in these explanations. There is no Vladimir Lenin, Martin Luther King, or Lech Wałęsa haranguing the crowds. In fact there is no coherent political movement, even though there are those who blame “the left” whenever they see unruly behaviour.
A common theme in these comments, from across the political spectrum, is that there has been a political failure in France. People no longer look to political parties for solutions based on public policy. Political polarization, driven mainly by the far right, has contributed to this situation.
Other Europeans, including the British and Germans, may ascribe the problem to something uniquely French, but Chris Bertram reminds readers of similar unrest in Britain in recent times, and in Germany the far right Alternativ für Deutschland has been surging in opinion polls, at the expense of traditional parties. In Spain where there is an election on Sunday July 23, polls are suggesting the far-right Vox movement, that wishes to roll back gender- equality legislation and other reforms that have distanced Spain from its fascist past, may have a decisive place in a coalition government.
Political polarization may not be the only factor driving political unrest, but it contributes to people’s feeling that they have no one to turn to. That’s what commentators mean when they refer to a “failure of politics”.
Here in Australia the coming referendum on the Voice has given the hard right an opportunity to polarize the Australian political landscape: The Guardian’s Josh Butler points out that the “No” campaign has employed US firms to spread fear and division among Australian voters. The “No” campaign has no consistent message. In fact its statements contradict one another, but that doesn’t matter. Its aim is to use the referendum as a means to de-legitimize the government and democratic processes such as elections and referendums.