Oz Politics

Introduction

The business of administering and policing the laws made by parliament is far too big a job for ministers to do alone. Ministers are assisted in their executive role by the public service (called the civil service in Britain and the United States, and the state service in New Zealand), comprising the public servants employed in the government departments and associated agencies.

The Australian Public Service serves the Commonwealth Government. Each state and territory government is served by its own public service (called the state service in Tasmania). In Australia “the public service” only refers to those people employed under the Public Service and State Service Acts of the Commonwealth, state and territory governments. The broader government or public sector also includes politicians and their advisers, the judiciary, as well as the many people employed in statutory authorities and government business enterprises but not under the public service acts. While the media often focus on the Australian Public Service, the state and territory public services are much larger, accounting for almost 65 percent of those working in the public sector, compared with a 10 per contribution from the Australian Public Service. The largest employers in the public sector are schools and hospitals.

Two important forces have shaped today’s public service. The first is the Westminster ideal that emerged following the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1853 into the British civil service. At the centre of this ideal are the notions of a merit based, politically neutral, professional career service. The second is the almost relentless waves of public sector reform since the mid 1970s. These reforms can be grouped around four broad (and sometimes contradictory) objectives: efficiency and effectiveness; open and transparent government; internal equity and welfare; and responsiveness to government. However, before considering these two forces, we will focus on the role and duties of the public service.

The three duties of a public servant

According to Stanley (2000), there are three distinct duties of a public servant: providing frank and fearless advice to ministers; helping ministers to promote, explain and defend government policy; and implementing government policy.

The first duty of a public servant is to give frank and fearless advice before ministers make policy decisions. The advice should be honest, comprehensive, informed, accurate and timely, even if it is politically inconvenient. As far as is possible within time and resource constraints, advice should be based on a full understanding of all relevant issues and options, the government’s objectives and the environment in which it operates. Such advice may be ideas for new policies and programs, or a fair critique of the policy ideas of others, whether they are the government’s policy platform, suggestions from other political parties, or proposals from service providers, clients or the public.

The second duty of a public servant is to help ministers and the government promote, explain and defend their decisions, even if the public servant previously advised against the course of action decided upon. For a public servant this can range from preparing speeches for ministers, developing media campaigns and media lines for the minister, speaking at public events, preparing responses to correspondence to the minister, and explaining the detailed policy provisions to clients and customers wishing to receive a government service. In all of these tasks, it matters little whether a public servant thinks that the minister is right or wrong or that the policy is good or bad.

Senior public servants are often required to publicly explain government policy, for example at Senate Estimates hearings. This task often extends to explaining the government’s policy rationale. However, for the most part, a public servant would limit herself to outlining the relevant facts and background, and explaining departmental practice and procedure. While assisting ministers to defend government policy through private (in-confidence) advice is a routine part of the job for many public servants, a more difficult issue is publicly defending government policy on behalf of a minister. There are shades of grey between an appropriate explanation of the underlying government rationale for a policy and an inappropriate spirited public defence of that policy. One guidepost for navigating this territory is the scope for the wider public to perceive public comments in a way that would compromise the values of a professional, impartial and apolitical public service. Another guidepost is avoiding the perception of disagreement with government policy by damning that policy with faint praise.

The third duty of a public servant is implementation. Once a minister or the government makes a decision, public servants are called on to implement that decision on the ground, often beginning with the drafting of necessary legislation. Once a decision is made, the time for frank a fearless advice on the issue has passed. Stanley (2000) observed, “Nothing upsets Ministers more than civil servants who cannot recognise when Ministers have made their minds up, and so fail to provide the pro-active service to which Ministers are entitled.”

While the senior levels of the public service are often required to exercise all three duties, most public servants are primarily involved in the implementation of policy, usually the funding and delivery of services. Middle and lower ranking public servants are rarely (if ever) asked to provide policy advice to ministers. For many public servants, the only role they have in explaining government policy is limited to explaining the detailed and technical provisions of a program to the clients and potential clients of that program.

The different duties require different skills and behaviours and a clear awareness of the specific duty a public servant is carrying out at any one time. For example, when a public servant gives evidence to a Senate Estimates committee, she is explaining government policy; she is not there to provide the Senate with frank and fearless advice on the merits of government policy. The official Government Guidelines for Official Witnesses Before Parliamentary Committees and Related Matters make it clear that “the duty of the public servant is to assist ministers to fulfil their accountability obligations by providing full and accurate information to the Parliament about the factual and technical background to policies and their administration.”

Clearly, there is a tension between the various duties of a public servant. For example, sometimes a public servant may find himself marshalling the arguments against a particular policy approach in a brief for the minister, and at the same time preparing a media statement for the minister, which extols the same approach. The confidentiality of advice to ministers is necessary to manage this tension. Without confidentiality, political opponents could use the frank and fearless advice that has not been heeded to embarrass the government. If all advice were publicly available, public servants would be more likely to say what they believe their political masters want to hear. Conversely, because they have a public duty to explain government policy, the public statements of public servants will not be particularly critical or analytical and they may not reflect the personal views of the public servant.

When an election is called, the duties of public servants are restricted under the caretaker conventions. During the caretaker period, advice and analysis on new or possible policy options is not provided to the government. Similarly, while the public service will continue to explain the existing policy, it does not seek to promote or assist ministers defend government policies. The implementation of existing government policy largely continues unaffected by the election and the caretaker conventions.

Having outlined the three broad functions of the public service, we will consider the Westminster ideal and the more recent waves of reform.

The Westminster ideal

Like many of Australia’s political institutions, the public service has its origins in British civil service of the mid to late nineteenth century. That service was shaped by the famous report on the reform of the British civil service by Stafford Northcote and by Charles Trevelyan, laid before the Westminster Parliament on 23 November 1853. (As an aside, the Melbourne suburb of Northcote was named after Stafford Northcote. Also, Northcote’s second son was Australia’s third Governor-General.)

The perceived problems the Northcote-Trevelyan report sought to address were a weak and ineffective civil service staffed by the “unambitious, and the indolent or incapable” on the basis of political patronage. According to Northcote and Trevelyan, the relatives of politicians “whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in the open professions Â… are placed in the civil service, where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with little labour and with no risk; where their success depends upon their simply avoiding any flagrant misconduct, and attending with moderate regularity to routine duties.” To rectify these problems, Northcote and Trevelyan proposed a public administrative system based on:

• “a proper system of examination before appointment”;
• “a central Board for conducting the examination Â… at its head a Privy Councillor”;
• “a proper system of transfers’ between departments”;
• a “proper distinction between intellectual and mechanical labour”;
• “promotion by merit” and not seniority; and
• annual increments of salary conditional upon satisfactory work.

While the Northcote-Trevelyan report generated enormous controversy at the time and was never fully implemented, it established the foundation for the Westminster ideal of a politically neutral public service with complete loyalty to the government of the day regardless of its political complexion. An expert, career service permanently staffed on the basis of merit rather than political patronage: a professional service, offering impartial and courageous advice, devoted to the public interest and obedient to the will of the Minister and Cabinet; a service that provides the nation with continuity when governments change.

Many of Northcote and Trevelyan’s recommendations were seminal in shaping Australian colonial and later state and Commonwealth bureaucracies during a period of modernisation between the 1880s and the early 1920s. While the period between the mid 1920s and the 1970s could be characterised as a period of incremental administrative improvements, the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, which reported in 1976, began a new era of modernisation.

Public sector reform

There have been many individual public sector reforms over the past 25 to 30 years across the Commonwealth, states and territories. Although the details of these reforms in respect of the Commonwealth have been documented in a number of places (for example, see Verspaandonk (2000)), they can be grouped under four broad (sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory) objectives:

• efficiency and effectiveness - including outcome/output budgeting, accrual budgeting, a simplified system of program and running costs, four-year forward estimates, devolution of financial and personnel responsibility to line agencies, commercialisation, contracting out, purchaser-provider arrangements, cost-recovery and ‘user pays’ principles;
• open and transparent government - including the introduction of Senate estimates hearings, freedom of information legislation, administrative appeals mechanisms, the Ombudsman, a greater focus on performance monitoring and program evaluation, and the use of service charters;
• internal equity and welfare - including equal employment opportunity, a focus on providing safe and healthy workplaces, support for workplace diversity, and family-friendly workplaces; and
• responsiveness to government - including portfolio rationalisations, reforms to the Cabinet processes, replacing permanent departmental heads with non-tenured secretaries, and increasing the number of ministerial staff working directly to the Minister.

It would appear that this reform process has some way to go. Even so, it is already challenging the Westminster ideal in a number of places. Two places where these tensions appear to be most acute are concerns about the politicisation of the public service and the relationship between the public service and the much-expanded corps of ministerial advisers on each minister’s personal staff.

Politicisation of the public service

The definition and identification of politicisation of the public service is a difficult task. As Weller (2001) notes, political neutrality does not mean serving the government and opposition equally or a commitment to an ideal policy position that is in the public interest. Between elections, the public service should be totally committed to serving the government of the day. Between elections, consideration of the political outlook of the government of the day is a vital ingredient in providing high quality policy advice. In terms of Australia’s Westminster heritage, politicisation usually refers to public service appointments and promotions based in party politics or the beneficiary’s identification with particular policy stances, rather than merit. According to Mulgan (1998), the United States is the best-known example of a politicised public service system, where around three thousand senior positions become vacant on a change of president and where there may be four or five echelons of political appointees between a career public servant and the cabinet secretary.

Today’s claims of a more politicised Australian Public Service have their foundation in some of the public sector reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments. More recently they have focused on the immediate replacement of six department secretaries after the change of government in 1996, the appointment of Mr Max Moore-Wilton to head the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the 1999 dismissal of Mr Paul Barratt (Secretary of Defence), and the subsequent court finding that the government was not required to establish that the reasons for the Defence Minister’s “loss of trust and confidence” in Mr Barratt were well-founded.

There is little disagreement that the public service is marginally more politicised than it was 30 years ago, but only in the sense of some departmental secretary appointments to suit the preferences of the government of the day and that security of tenure has reduced. Despite that, the questions that must be answered are whether this subtle change has had benefits, and whether it has caused problems. A long-standing concern of ministers from both political parties has been the loyalty and responsiveness of the public service to government policy. This concern achieved iconic status in the TV series, Yes Minister, in which the wily bureaucrat was able to bend the minister to his desires. From a minister’s perspective, there can be little doubt that most ministers would consider today’s public service more responsive to the government of the day than that of 25 to 30 years ago.

On the downside, public commentators are concerned about the quality of policy advice the government receives. Some argue that filing the senior echelons of the public service with yes-people and partisan toadies will reduce the necessary but politically inconvenient advice given to governments, and would result ultimately in poorer decisions. However, it is presumptuous to think that only an impartial public service can provide frank and fearless advice. This argument is also dangerous as it implies a role for an unelected bureaucracy against an elected government in deciding the national interest. Another argument against politicisation (especially the extent to which it occurs in the United States) is the loss of expertise and experience that occurs with each change of government. However, there is no suggestion that the Australian Public Service is anywhere near as politicised as the system in the United States.

While politicisation would undoubtedly produce a different type of public service, in all of these arguments it has not been demonstrated that greater levels of politicisation would be necessarily bad. For example, Canada is a Westminster-like system that has a substantially more politicised public sector. Unlike their Australia counterparts, Canadian public servants can represent their minister in Cabinet meetings, and quite a number have made the transition from senior public servant to politician. According to Weller (2001), in 1953 the clerk of the Privy Council Office began one Cabinet meeting as an official and ended the meeting as a newly sworn-in minister.

In Australia, the great majority of public servants, including secretaries, see themselves as politically neutral professionals, capable of serving alternative governments with equal competence and loyalty. By way of example, Senator Vanstone (2001) noted that when she became a Cabinet minister in 1996 the Secretary of her Department was a former chief of staff of a former Labor Prime Minister and another member of the Senior Executive Service had just come out of the Prime Minister Keating’s office just a few weeks before the 1996 election loss.

Furthermore, the intention to retain an apolitical public service is reflected in a number of the values in the section 10(1) of the Commonwealth’s new Public Service Act 1999 for the Australian Public Service (APS):

• The APS is apolitical, performing its functions in an impartial and professional manner.
• The APS is a public service in which employment decisions are based on merit.
• The APS is responsive to the Government in providing frank, honest, comprehensive, accurate and timely advice and in implementing the Government’s policies and programs.
• The APS is a career-based service to enhance the effectiveness and cohesion of Australia’s democratic system of government.

Relationship with ministerial advisers

The role of ministerial staff is a second point of tension. Ministerial staff first started to appear in larger numbers during the Whitlam years of 1972-1975. The Whitlam government was deeply suspicious of a public service that had supported conservative governments for the previous 23 years. Since then, the role of ministerial staff has been institutionalised through their continued use and the Members Of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984.

Want to find out more?

• Legislation from www.austlii.edu.au and scaleplus.law.gov.au:
  • Public Service Act 1999
  • Members Of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984
• The Australian Public Service Commission has a wide range of material on the Australian Public Service
• Richard Mulgan’s paper, Politicising the Australian Public Service?, and Rose Verspaandonk’s, Changes in the Australian Public Service 1975-2000, are available from the Parliamentary Library
• Richard Mulgan’s public lecture, “Public Servants and the Public Interest”, is available from the Senate
• The Government Guidelines for Official Witnesses Before Parliamentary Committees and Related Matters are available from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
• Martin Stanley’s website: How to be a Civil Servant. Although the website and associated book are about the Civil Service in the United Kingdom, significant portions are relevant to the Australian Public Service.