by Laura Tingle
Drop the term “public servant” into a political debate at the tabloid end of the discussion, though, and they become “fat cats” and purveyors of red tape. And in discussions about reforming the economy, the public sector is generally seen as a negative. The loss of public service jobs is viewed as a sign of government fiscal machismo, or just a necessary outcome of reducing the drag on the economy. If large companies go through a major restructure, they set aside significant resources to oversee the change and bed it down. Yet in the public service, large swathes of the bureaucracy can be moved from minister to minister, as portfolios are sliced up, then re-sliced to appease the ambitions, egos or whims of members of the government. Whole areas of administration and policy can be moved from department to department, sometimes twice in a year, with no allowance made for the disruption. Instead, there are jokes about having to change the letterhead again.
All things considered, we seem to have developed a very confused view of public servants, the public service and even the public sector. We laud our military and its actions. We approve of public servants like nurses and policemen. But we speak disparagingly of public servants who might advise governments, and we presume that the private sector always knows best.
Yet is the private sector really that different? Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2013, the business consultant Ron Ashkenas reflected on returning to a large corporation – where he had consulted on a specific issue years earlier – and finding to his astonishment that he was seen as one of the corporation’s “main repositories of institutional memory.” He added that, “Although this is an extreme example, it’s not unique.” His advice was to “build an explicit strategy for maintaining institutional memory, even in your own team”:
Don’t assume that it will happen by itself … [and] use technology to create a process by which your team continually captures and curates institutional knowledge – to make it a living and evolving body of useful information that is accessible to people as they come into the organization. In this day and age of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia, everyone knows that an individual’s memory is fragile. What we often don’t recognize is that organizational memory is much the same – and if we don’t actively preserve it, we put ourselves at risk.
If the government wants to take advice from the private sector – and particularly from consultants – then perhaps Ashkenas’s advice about maintaining institutional memory should be at the top of the list.
Executive government – that is, the ministry – and parliamentary parties need to put serious thought into how best to preserve their institutional memory as the cast of individual ministers and staff turns over at an accelerating pace. The best thing that they can do is to understand what has happened to the capabilities of the public service already, and consider not just how to rebuild it, but also that the way it has been used by politicians over the past few decades has led to decline.
It is in the inner sanctums of the political system that the public service seems to have lost most status in recent times. The disdain of the Abbott era effectively closed off, outside the areas of national security and foreign affairs, much of this important repository of policy advice and memory from the Coalition government. But it was a process that had been underway for some time.
Merely being nicer to the public service is clearly not enough to remedy several decades of decline. The complex reasons for this alienation of executive government from the public service – which, as we have seen, goes well beyond simple politicisation – make it a hard thing to unwind. It’s also not just about the public servants, of course. The broader question is what we expect the public sector to do for us these days: whether we are happy with the current mish-mash of public and private providers, with its implications for accountability and transparency; and whether we have to rethink the idea that, in all things, the private sector does a better job.
We have to consider what the core work of the public service is, or – alternatively – what should not go into the hands of the private sector. That covers everything from whether it is appropriate for people detained in the government’s name – and therefore in its care – to be policed by private contractors, to the question of ownership and protection of data gathered by the government. If government were a private company, the board would be likely to try to define what the core business of that company is; what its core assets are. In the modern world, where data is the most valuable commodity, a company’s database would be its core asset. It would also be the institutional memory tied up in its people.
As prime minister, Tony Abbott would say that governments should only do for citizens what they cannot do for themselves. He defined that very narrowly. Defence is the classic example. Yet most of us know very little about what has happened to our defence and national security institutions in the last twenty years. In a paper published in 2014, the former Labor senator and defence minister John Faulkner noted that in the period since 9/11, “the size of Australia’s intelligence organisations and their budgets have more than tripled.” For example, ASIO’s staff grew from 565 in 1999 to 1792 in 2013. Its budget expanded commensurately from $65.7 million in 1999–2000 to $443.8 million in 2013–14. Furthermore, Faulkner writes:
A significant volume of legislation passed through the Parliament has given the intelligence agencies and other security agencies including the AFP unprecedented powers. These new laws included: new terrorism offences with a broader definition of terrorism, terrorist acts and terrorist organisations; laws prohibiting the financing of terrorism or receiving funds from a terrorist organisation; laws against advocating or praising terrorism, associating with terrorist organisations or recruiting for terrorist organisations or giving support to a terrorist organisation.
While we are only vaguely aware of the growing power of one arm of government, we are kidding ourselves about our continuing commitment to provide services to many Australians who cannot provide for themselves. The delivery of these services has become “invisible” to us because it has been contracted out. We cannot properly assess whether the people who need these services are getting them, whether the services are of a sufficient quality, or whether they represent value for money.
In the narrower but crucial world of policy advice, there has never been a greater need for intellectual firepower, and for a deep memory. In their time, the Seven Dwarfs were able to mobilise the forces of government and facilitate a massive expansion of Australia’s population and industrial base. No one is suggesting that is the right response now, but a capacity to respond to the circumstances of the day is always necessary. In the history wars between the Coalition and Labor over which had the biggest impact in the 1980s and 1990s, both sides seem to have forgotten that the best periods of reform were collaborative creations: there was real but productive tension between politicians and policymakers, with each bringing the memory and experience of their respective realms to the discussion.
Now we have a public sector from which much expertise has been lost. Change has left the public service as both piggy in the middle and a rabbit in the headlights (to mix my metaphors). Public servants find themselves shoved into the public arena to defend decisions that their political masters have made, although they often had little input in the original decision, nor do they have any direct way of controlling its implementation by contracted parties. It is not just Senate committee hearings that leave public servants feeling vulnerable.
The one thing the public service could offer in this dangerous world where it has neither responsibility for final decisions nor the direct capacity to carry them out is the memory of how government dealt with problems in the past, and how and why it took the decisions it did. But advice usually means a paper trail. A senior public servant says that an unintended consequence of freedom-of-information laws has been to create a culture in which public servants “don’t want to write advice down.” “You can’t have private conversations anymore,” one says, lest the advice turn u
p in an FOI request which leaves public servants, rather than their political masters, accountable for decisions that they have not taken.
Rebuilding policy capability requires lowering the risk public servants face in giving advice. It may also involve changing recruitment and promotion so that those who build up long-term memory in a particular area are not effectively penalised for it. And it may mean rebuilding the wider culture. “What can be done to ensure good people enter public service?” a senior public servant says. “One word: respect. If you disparage an institution over a long enough period, you will slowly but surely undercut the quality of people who want to go there. And respect is different from being free from criticism.”
It should be noted that many of our most senior bureaucrats also think that the public sector has to toughen up and stop being quite so cowed by the rise of executive government. Michael Thawley, as the secretary of PM&C, is the titular head of the public service. He told a conference in Canberra in September:
We’re not just here to write papers, elegant or otherwise … We’re actually here to ensure that things change. It’s no use us shrugging our shoulders if the government doesn’t accept our very wise suggestions about how to reform this or the other thing. Why did we fail to convince the government to do what we suggested? … Did we fail to provide adequate evidence? Were we unpersuasive? Did we not talk to the various stakeholders? … Did we talk enough to people outside the system generally?
Don Russell says much the same thing:
The wise [departmental] Secretary realises early on that advice to Ministers is contestable. If departmental advice is to have influence, it has to be useful. It is a mistake to think that the department’s main influence comes from creating the piece of paper that cannot be ignored. It is true that you should never underestimate the power of the written word, but if the department is only viewed as having a capacity to hem in a minister, then over time the department will find itself frozen out and more and more decisions will be taken late at night in ministers’ offices.
The missing ingredient that holds back departmental advice is imagination. We have to create an APS where departments become ideas factories; ideas that have been properly researched and tested and that are only looking for objectives and values to be harnessed by the minister or government of the day.
Ministers should take advice from their departments not because they have to but because they want to.
Still another says:
Sure, there is the capacity for advisers to be bastards. But the onus is on the public service to stand up to that. The public service has become very weak.
It’s not that the public service and politicians aren’t aware of these problems. It’s rather that until things came to a head under Tony Abbott, they didn’t receive concerted attention. They were just part of an ongoing downward spiral. There are signs here and there that the public service is trying to rebuild its memory banks. One example is the decision to have the head of PM&C, and the head of the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, review what happened in dealings with the Lindt Café killer, Man Haron Monis. If officials were to learn something from this tragedy, the thinking went, they needed to be exposed directly to what had happened and consider where they had gone wrong.
In some cases, politicians and public servants are also thinking twice before automatically contracting out policy or review work to consultants. It is revealing when one public servant observes that contracting out “is the easy path when you don’t have any ideas and are looking for new ones.” “Besides,” he says, “the outside consultant’s report tends to be seen as having more credibility.”
These are very small steps. Not everyone in the public service or politics is exercised by the need for change, nor do they see it as a priority when they are caught up dealing with the crisis of the day. And politicians still pander to an insatiable media by seeking to have something “new” or “announceable” to offer every day.
Rapidly evolving media technology is not just changing the way we do things, it is changing the way we think about them. We have access to an unprecedented amount of material, yet the sheer volume militates against the capacity to absorb and synthesise it. Developing a “narrative” that can be maintained over months which is about ideas rather than new verbs is difficult.
The American educationalist Mark Prensky set off a hot debate fifteen years ago when he coined the term “digital native” to talk about the problems educators had engaging students when the young were more at home with new technology than their teachers. While the debate about digital natives has many aspects, its implication for how young people think about things is something that exercises some of our younger MPs, like Labor’s Ed Husic: the idea that young people process information very differently; and that they may have too few opportunities to absorb and analyse – let alone remember – what they see and hear. For politicians, part of the difficulty of “feeding the beast,” and getting your message out, is that readers and viewers can now be highly selective about what they consume.
If the force for change thirty years ago was the need to make the economy internationally competitive, whether we liked it or not, the force today is technology, whether we are ready for it or not. The central dilemma is that technology, if anything, is acting against institutional memory. Yet the sheer bombardment of information technology only increases the need to think about how best to safeguard it.
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My AFR colleague Phil Coorey sometimes yells out across the office to me: “Oi! Yesteryear correspondent, when did [such and such event] happen?” At some point in the past ten years, I became the veteran staffer who is consulted on “ancient” history. We are products of our time, and our views of the world are formed accordingly. My professional career began with the 1980s and coincided with a dramatic new era in politics and policy debate. All that has happened in the following thirty-five years has shaped the way I see politics. Sometimes you realise with a rude shock that all the stuff you carry around every day in your head isn’t in everyone else’s head.
This came home to me most powerfully in 2012, when I was doing interviews to discuss my first Quarterly Essay. Before we started the formal interview, a radio journalist warned: “Oh, by the way, don’t presume too much political memory in the audience.” “Sure,” I said, “what shouldn’t I presume they know?” “Well, don’t presume they will know who Paul Keating is, or what he did.” I concede this caused a sharp intake of breath on my part. Yes, it was a youngish audience, but a politically articulate one. How could they not know who Paul Keating was? He had been one of our prime ministers, for goodness sake. Then I thought again. There had been three prime ministers since Keating left office in 1996. Anyone aged under thirty would have no adult memory of government before John Howard. The views of these people are just as relevant as mine. But they will be shaped by a very different set of memories.
How many of us actually remember some of the changes in politics, public policy and the public service that I’ve discussed in this essay? How many are aware, for example, of the changes in indigenous affairs of the past twenty years?
While we may refer knowingly to the first budget of the Howard government as a vehicle which set up spectacular political success for the Coalition, how many of us remember the decisions taken in that budget? How many people recall that the budget’s political success was partly built on the spectacular misjudgments of its opponents: the trade unions who violently stormed Parliament House and caused a public backlash, which helped quell immediate political opposition to the budget? How many people remember that the day the budget was brought down was the day the deal was announced to give a Labor “rat,” Mal Colston, the Senate deputy presidency and thus make the Senate a much more compliant upper house?
Even though ministers in Tony Abbott’s government believed that in the 2014 budget they were replicating Howard’s modus operandi, it turned out that their memories were faulty. The structures they put in pl
ace, the lack of experience of the staff they had in their offices and their failure to remember the other factors that ultimately allowed the 1996 budget to be a political success made that replication impossible.
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During the 1990s, then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin became notorious for his malapropisms and endearing turns of phrase. There was something wonderfully and absurdly bureaucratic about many of these expressions, such as “We have completed all the items: from A to B,” “The principles that were principled were non-principled,” and “There is still time to save the face. Later we will be forced to save some other parts of a body.” Perhaps most famously, he declared that “Whatever organisation we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist Party.”
My favourite among his declarations, though, is: “It has never been like this and now it is exactly the same again.” In the process of remaking our economy, and in the wake of a technological revolution, we have sometimes unwittingly remade our political institutions. They are not serving us well because they don’t remember how things were done in the past. The risk isn’t that we will end up in exactly the same place again, but that we will end up somewhere else quite unintended.
It is time to start learning to remember.
ON EXPECTATIONS AND AMNESIA IN THE ERA OF MALCOLM
He has aged ten years in less than two. As prime ministers tend to do. He looks like he wears the job heavily, though he insists that he loves it. Those close to him observe that he feels the weight of the entire government’s fortunes upon him. He doesn’t get enough sleep.
Here is the first remarkable, yet almost completely unremarked upon, thing about our prime minister: despite these pressures, you never hear about “bad” Malcolm anymore.
The Malcolm Turnbull who exploded at people and brought to bear his sharp intellect, sharp tongue and limited store of patience on someone felt to be of inferior intellect or capacity – and there were lots of them – is a figure of the past.