Will public servants become agents of the party rather than the state?

Jan 28, 2025
Parliament House - Australia

One of the strong points Anthony Albanese made before the last election was that Scott Morrison had virtually abandoned honest government, good government, accountable government and transparent government.

He had installed government by cronies and was bypassing long established systems and processes designed to ensure that government was getting best value for money. His government was handing over billions to private sector interests without tenders and without satisfactory systems either for securing the public interest or for being able to retrieve money not used for the purposes for which it had been given.

Responsibility for the moral, ethical and illegal shortcuts taken by that government lies with Morrison and his ministers, and those central departments such as Finance and Treasury charged with safeguarding the public purse. But a good deal of the waste, or failure to follow the long-established standards of stewardship was the fault of senior public servants. Some of the very ones responsible for losses going into the billions were among a committee of the most senior current officials who recently expressed their satisfaction that reforms the Albanese government had caused meant the poor management could not happen again.

It could. It could do so at the hands of many of the public servants who, as senior public servants under Morrison, were responsible for many of its administrative failings. A few public servants – ones whose identity the public service commissioner is determined to protect from public disclosure – were subject to excessively mild penalties, although we are not to be told who got what, and why. Others escaped penalties altogether because they had resigned or retired. The very light spankings administered to a small number of public servants, whose names and bad behaviour were covered up were in respect of failures over Robodebt – the only piece of maladministration to be considered by gun-shy government and their personally chosen APS leaders. There was no inquest into how senior officers of the Department of Finance neglected to ensure that taxpayers could retrieve an unspent $30 billion of money handed out virtually on demand to any private company claiming that Covid would see them shedding jobs. There were umpteen narrowly focused reviews at Infrastructure to work out how the department, then under Treasury secretary Stephen Kennedy, paid 10 times what private property was worth, but that no-one in the department could, or should be called to account. Two years have passed since the AFP was asked to consider charges against Price Waterhouse Cooper when it used confidential knowledge obtained about tax plans to sell to transnational companies on how to avoid paying the tax in question. PWC is a partnership, and every PWC partner about the world is liable for the sins of other partners, and in other countries such as the USA, they would be paying over $1 billion in civil penalties, with actual lawbreakers most likely going to jail. PWC has been excluded from some commissions. But if there were any justice, they would not be off the hook for decades. They were taking Australian taxpayers for a ride.

Cops bamboozled. Government irresolute

But no one has been charged. No penalties have been exacted, and the AFP appears bamboozled, conflicted and keen to make the horrible case disappear. Or perhaps hopeful about the return of Peter Dutton, so that it can be filed under forget.

The public service commissioner, Gordon de Brouwer, and the secretary of prime minister’s Glynn Davis, are given to proclaiming that their reforms to public service systems have transformed it, and re-established integrity in administration. They are kidding themselves. Nothing of any substance has changed. All that has happened has been fresh slogans devoid of actual meaning, new long sequences of meaningless management-speak, and trivial changes to the Public Service Act which would not have prevented the maladministration – even the Robodebt disaster – of the Morrison era. Everything done could be undone by the stroke of a pen. Managed by much the same group of secretaries whose prioritisation of pleasing the minister caused the problems under Morrison, who failed to deliver under Albanese, and who will loyally serve a Dutton government, if there is to be one. This will not be because they are hopelessly politically loyal to those who appointed them in the first place. It will be because their personalities, approach to leadership issues and economic predispositions have not changed, and won’t.

One of the signs that the Albanese government was going to change governance for the better was through the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. But the government seriously limited its powers. Those put in charge propped at the first hurdle, deciding that the Robodebt scandal did not warrant its attention. The chairman of the commission, Paul Brereton, who declared a conflict of interest in the matter, nonetheless tried to involve himself behind the scenes, earning a serious reprimand from the body supervising the NACC for its own integrity. The fairly minor transgressions which have actually been investigated have hardly been chosen to enhance confidence in its investigations. None of the limited details given have persuaded the audience about the competence, reasoning processes or priorities of the commission. The chairman’s efforts to avoid the sack have involved particularly poor judgment, quite capable of sinking the whole ship.

The NACC’s mishaps reflect on its naivete and incompetent management. But Albanese and his Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, must share the blame for umpteen political misjudgements along the way, including Albanese’s apparent belief that he owed major concessions to Peter Dutton as part of his duty to the two-party system. One of the big political problems for a “disappointing” Albanese is the perception among swing voters that he did not deliver on his NACC promises.

Dutton has Morrison’s style of abusing power and denying fault. He won’t change

If Albanese can’t get credit for any improvements in public administration, it will not be for popular belief that Peter Dutton would do a better job. Dutton’s style and theory of political control and management – remarkably similar though if anything less consultative than Morrison’s — is firmly embedded in the public service. He has defended arbitrary grants to party cronies, and the favouring of government electorates in doling it out. He has set out to create an image of “toughness” and suspicion of public servants, and of governing by ideological conviction rather than by evidence. The public service has increased in size by 30000 in three years of Albanese government – largely because the Morrison government used the private sector instead of the public service. But he is reflexively talking of dismissals, perhaps buoyed by Donald Trump to do the same.

Much more likely to happen is that the issue – good government, and good governance – will simply fade away as an issue motivating voters. If neither side seems to care much, why should voters be asked to judge which is better on this issue?

If Albanese has done nothing to boast about, and Dutton is only a man whose style deserves to be dreaded, does the cause of better government really matter? It should, and not only because the service has never been in as parlous a state. Citizens suffer from poor administration, bad decisions, bad management and conscious disregard of the public interest.

And the problem is infectious. It leads to wider ones such as the politicisation of judicial and quasi-judicial appointments. It leads to moral cowardice, cover-up and lying. It leads to the sort of organised bastardry and cruelty shown by Morrison and Dutton to people on welfare, people in our overseas concentration camps and the treatment of people such as the Biloela family. It leads to the abuse of national security powers for domestic political purposes.

It creates a system unable to inspire and attract the best and brightest Australians. That is a quality that can be secured only when entrants see good leadership from the top, examples of ethical behaviour and evidence that words have meanings. Likewise when the system is geared towards stimulating work, rewards for effective, efficient and accountable management, rather than routine cover-up and compulsive secrecy.

Poor leadership and failure to talk (and act) the talk can also lead to the abandonment of noble hopes and policy aspirations. The failure of the Voice campaign has seen a massive de-emphasis –- by Labor as much as the coalition of the priority of Indigenous affairs. Conscious mining of popular resentment of existing policy and cultivation of the idea that the Voice proposal would make Indigenous Australians “more equal” than others, with rights others did not have caused Labor to lose confidence in its old policies, and the coalition feeling itself permissioned to disown the once-bipartisan aspiration. Donald Trump has ordered that his government sack those in equal opportunity programs. Dutton, when previously defence minister, ordered the services to drop “woke” policies on gender and discrimination.

Are we heading towards a more politicised service?

The modern public service style has the capacity to politicise public servants, and to make them agents of the party rather than the state. We are seeing in Trump’s US that the president wants civil servants – even mailmen, teachers, nurses, policemen and regulators — to be loyal to him rather than to the American system of law. We have seen him talk of his government using its powers to punish people who gave him a hard time. When America changes presidents, he is able to appoint not only his own ministers, responsible for departments, but, in effect, his own senior executive service to direct policies of administration. But the new style suggests that the US will revert to the virtual abolition of a career public service, independent advice and the experience of years of service. This is not an administration chosen by merit or able to give frank and fearless advice. In centuries past, such systems have been responsible for significant political corruption, and trafficking in appointments. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was able to “buy” the votes of senators for the abolition of slavery by allowing them to appoint the postmasters in their states.

Albanese and his ministers have been running and rewarding their administration more for avoiding scandal and signs of abuse than for imaginative adaption to systemic problems, a ruthless approach to investigation of poor practice, and a determination to do more, better, and more effectively and efficiently. Instead of using the past to inform and guide the future, public service administrators have done the very opposite. The service has become more secretive, and FOI is actively resisted by departments, minders and ministers. Specious claims for exemption pass largely unpunished because the appeal system is so short of resources. The system has also developed a judgment writing style that only rarely reflects on systemic refusals. Self-serving privacy doctrines invented from no-where, and a trend of reading legislation for the most restrictive application – rather than leaning towards open government helps cover up bad performance, bad leadership and bad publicity.

A task of improvement that never ends

At least better management and better accountability is a permanent project, one that can never be completely achieved. One can certainly say that the pace and commitment to real reform has slowed, as a conscious act of policy on the part of ministers, those put in charge of the project and by public servants who were never enthused about open government, accountability or transparency. One could use the very words of undelivered Albanese promises to get a more ambitious project started again, necessarily under some new and committed management. The public service as much as Australians generally needs a rededication to the problem. The importance of such a project is greater because of the half-hearted performance to date. Albanese cannot benefit from downplaying its urgency. If polling about what voters say they want are any guide, the more Albanese commits himself anew to the task, the more ground he can retrieve.

Share and Enjoy !