tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/terry-moran-3895/articlesTerry Moran – The Conversation2013-04-15T12:34:44Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/125502013-04-15T12:34:44Z2013-04-15T12:34:44ZLet’s hear it from the public service: Moran<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/22456/original/crn5vjv2-1366005068.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Terry Moran is urging public servants be allowed to use new technology to speak about their jobs more frankly.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Public servants should have greater scope to speak out publicly about long-term issues, the former head of the Prime Minister’s department <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8500.12005/abstract">Terry Moran has said</a>.</p>
<p>Moran also urges bureaucrats to make more use of what opportunity already exists for them to blog.</p>
<p>Writing in the Australian Journal of Public Administration, Moran said that public sector leaders should be “more prepared to talk sensibly about the long-term and self-evident truths about the work of their agency or department.”</p>
<p>This meant political leaders “recognising that this may, on some occasions often be a desirable outcome.” The public and media would also have to accept that such speaking out did not entail a breach of the Westminster system or a vote of no confidence in government policy.</p>
<p>There should “be a greater acceptance of the idea that public administrators can legitimately talk about long-term strategy in a similar manner to what is now broadly accepted for leaders of the Reserve Bank and Treasury.”</p>
<p>Elaborating on his article, which was based on a speech delivered to the IPAA Moran, who was secretary of the PM’s department 2008-11, told The Conversation that the decline of the traditional media and the rise of smaller specialised media outlets provided more scope and reason for senior public servants to be able to discuss their work.</p>
<p>It was not a matter of secretaries being on the front pages of newspapers everyday, but recognising the profound change in the media and starting to explain things through the available online publications.</p>
<p>He said that public service rules had been changed to allow senior brueaucrats to get involved in certain circumstances in blogs. But this hadn’t happened because everyone is “too cautious.”</p>
<p>Moran gave as an example of what could have been explained by those involved the success of arrangements for hospital service pricing under the federal-state health reforms.</p>
<p>This was not widely understood or appreciated, and it would have been more desirable for specialist information to have been canvassed by the public service.</p>
<p>In his article Moran, a one-time secretary of the Victorian Premier’s Department, also repeated his proposal that departmental boards, sitting alongside ministers and secretaries, should be created.</p>
<p>The boards would import members from outside the public service, who would bring particular skills and insight into the running of a department.</p>
<p>He also argued that ministerial staff should be made more answerable to parliamentary committees and other bodies, in the same way as public servants are.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/12550/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Public servants should have greater scope to speak out publicly about long-term issues, the former head of the Prime Minister’s department Terry Moran has said. Moran also urges bureaucrats to make more…Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/102772012-10-31T21:21:43Z2012-10-31T21:21:43ZTerry Moran: time for an inquiry into the public service<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/16777/original/hz95t658-1350885176.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Terry Moran has called for the strengthening of the Australian Public Service.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Porritt / AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Terry Moran was Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011. He is now President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and a governor of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.</em></p>
<p><em>He joined John Alford, Professor of Public Sector Management at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and at the Melbourne Business School, in conversation on the future of Australia’s public service.</em></p>
<p><em>They discussed how the public service has changed, how it should operate, and the vexed question of the role of ministerial advisers.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>John Alford</strong>: I invite you to think about when you first joined the public service. Do you think the public service will change as much in the future as it has since you joined it? Could you talk about a couple of the major changes?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran</strong>: I think that devolving more authority to deliver services to the lowest possible level is already underway. It’s gone furthest in Victoria but it has to go a long way in other states. Devolving responsibility into new governance structures is a critical change. That will in turn shake up what government departments think their business is, particularly in social policy, environmental policy and aspects of industry policy. </p>
<p>It will have a huge impact on how the commonwealth thinks its job should be described and how state governments think their jobs should be described. All of these things can be sorted out in a technical sense. The variable is the political impetus.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford</strong>: What is your prognosis as to the likelihood of some of those things coming to fruition?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran</strong>: I think we are facing years of fiscal constraint in Australia, not as significant as in Europe and the US, but nonetheless significant.</p>
<p>I can’t see the long term average proportion of GDP devoted to government activities going up; it’s actually down below that long term average at the moment because of the contraction in revenue effecting the commonwealth and state governments. Of course, it will return eventually to the long term average.</p>
<p>The commonwealth and the states and territories are going to have to look harder at what their core business is. At the national level we are seeing an argument emerge on both sides of politics along the lines of, “we want more activities shipped out to the states”. The current federal government has done that in a number of ways. Take the 2011 reforms to public hospitals. These go past the state and territory governments to self-governing public hospitals, to which governments will pay fixed proportions of the efficient price for delivery of service. This can become a template for other areas of social policy in the future.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford</strong>: One thing that has come up recently is the role of ministerial advisers. Do you think they make it necessarily harder or easier for public servants to have a productive relationship with elected politicians?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran</strong>: I think there is a big problem. Ministerial advisers have become the black hole of accountability within our parliamentary democracy.</p>
<p>The reason for that is that the old conventions governing their roles no longer hold true. In the past, if a public servant told a ministerial adviser something it would be deemed that they had told the minister, and the adviser would make sure the minister knew. In turn an adviser would speak with authority if they actually knew the minister’s wishes or had good reason to know what they would be.</p>
<p>There is insufficient accountability because there are so many ministerial advisers now with few, in some jurisdictions, who actually possess a grasp of the business of government commensurate with their responsibilities. No one can suggest that they are an expression of the “persona” of the minister any more. Now the minister isn’t accountable for what they do, because now a minister can say, “Oh that was one of my advisers, I did not know about this”.</p>
<p>Well, if ministers are using that to escape accountability, they can’t escape the proposition that it’s time the advisers were made more accountable for defined roles, and became answerable in the same way as public servants to all the investigatory and accountability bodies, including parliamentary committees.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford</strong>: Do you think it would make a difference if there were to be a cap placed on the number of ministerial advisers?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran</strong>: It would help, because it would be another means of forcing a hard look at what jobs they do. So when the Coombs Royal Commission reported in 1976, there was a definition of the role of ministerial advisers that seemed reasonable to everybody at the time. That’s fallen away. Now, in some jurisdictions, you have tribes of younger, inexperienced people who crowd out mature policy debates while they pursue hyper active issues management. This is corrosive of good government.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> If you were king for a day, what changes would you make to the public service?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> Well first, I think accountability has to be improved. So I would make the heads of agencies and departmental heads more directly accountable in their own right to parliamentary committees for delivery, particularly through the examination of their annual reports. These reports should actually provide more useful information about departments and KPIs to use in assessing performance.</p>
<p>I’d move to better define the role of ministers for the purposes of ministerial responsibility. At the moment, the media is prepared to hold ministers in many portfolios responsible for anything that crops up. In practical terms this cannot work. It creates confusion, public dissatisfaction, the removal of any real sanctions for poor performance and exhaustion for ministers over time as they cope with immense and impossible pressures.</p>
<p>Finally, at the state level, service delivery has got to be well and truly devolved to new style governance arrangements of the sort you see in Victoria and elsewhere for hospitals, schools, vocational education and training under modern purchaser-provider arrangements. This supports more competition between providers where possible and thus more innovation. Competition between public sector providers and entities in the private sector can deliver good results for citizens and enables public sector people to demonstrate the quality and efficiency of which they are capable. But in order for that to happen, as we see with the <a href="http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/Documents/Review-of-Funding-for-Schooling-Final-Report-Dec-2011.pdf">Gonski recommendations for schools</a>, you have to actually put money into the system to enable public sector providers and others wishing it to address disadvantage effectively.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford</strong>: Of course we know the public sector is beset with a whole pile of investigative and indeed inquisitorial agencies that can be construed as making life difficult for public servants and their work. What can be done about this?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran</strong>: One of the consequences of what happens in nearly all jurisdictions is that the public comes to feel that public services are riven with inadequacy and incompetence. This is just not true.</p>
<p>If you look back over the past 40 years, the transformation of Australia in an economic and social sense would have been impossible without the drive and implementation capacity of the public services of Australia. That change has transformed Australia so that we are far more prosperous, and, in other respects have all done better than would have otherwise been the case.</p>
<p>If Australia is much better because of what has been done by governments and the public services over the past 40 years, we have to ask why it is that the public has now reached a point where it is almost conditioned to believe that poor performance is endemic.</p>
<p>I think it’s good that there are such investigative and inquisitorial bodies, which are there ultimately to lighten the load of parliament itself, but I think it’s probably time for a Commission of Inquiry to look into how these bodies could relate more effectively to the Australian Parliaments.</p>
<p><em>The full transcript of Terry and John’s conversation is available <a href="https://theconversation.com/terry-moran-in-conversation-full-transcript-10187">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/10277/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Alford was a member of the Ministry of Transport Project Team in Victoria, and a member of the panel appointed by the Victorian Premier to conduct the Review of Public Service Personnel Management in 1990.</span></em></p>Terry Moran was Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011. He is now President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and a governor of the Committee…John Alford, Professor of Public Sector Management, Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101872012-10-31T20:08:26Z2012-10-31T20:08:26ZTerry Moran in conversation: full transcript<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/16745/original/n4h6h4fv-1350862594.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran AC, has called for the strengthening of the Australian Public Service</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Porritt / AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Terry Moran was Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011. He is now President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and a governor of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.</em></p>
<p><em>He joined John Alford, Professor of Public Sector Management at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and at the Melbourne Business School, in conversation on the future of Australia’s public service.</em></p>
<p><em>They discussed how the public service has changed, how it should operate, and the vexed question of the role of ministerial advisers.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> I invite you to think about when you first joined the public service. Do you think the public service will change as much in the future as it has since you joined it?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> I think that devolving more authority to deliver services to the lowest possible level is already underway. It’s gone furthest in Victoria but it has to go a long way in other states. Devolving responsibility into new governance structures is a critical change. That will in turn shake up what government departments think their business is, particularly in social policy, environmental policy and aspects of industry policy. </p>
<p>It will have a huge impact on how the commonwealth thinks its job should be described and how state governments think their jobs should be described. All of these things can be sorted out in a technical sense. The variable is the political impetus.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> Could you talk about a couple of the major ones?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> I think that devolving more authority to deliver services to the lowest possible level is already underway. It’s gone furthest in Victoria but it has to go a long way in other states. Devolving responsibility into new governance structures is a critical change. That will in turn shake up what government departments think their business is, particularly in social policy, environmental policy and aspects of industry policy. It will have a major impact on how the commonwealth thinks its roles should be described and the same for state governments. All of these things can be sorted out in a technical sense. The variable is the political impetus.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> What is your prognosis as to the likelihood of some of those things coming to fruition?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> I think we are facing years of fiscal constraint in Australia, not as significant as in Europe and the US, but nonetheless significant.</p>
<p>I can’t see the long term average proportion of GDP devoted to government activities going up; it’s actually down below that long term average at the moment because of the contraction in revenue effecting the commonwealth and state governments. Of course, it will return eventually to the long term average.</p>
<p>The commonwealth and the states and territories are going to have to look harder at what their core business is. At the national level we are seeing an argument emerge on both sides of politics along the lines of, “we want more activities shipped out to the states”. The current federal government has done that in a number of ways. Take the 2011 reforms to public hospitals. These go past the state and territory governments to self-governing public hospitals, to which governments will pay fixed proportions of the efficient price for delivery of service. This can become a template for other areas of social policy in the future.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> What do you think public services will need to be good at to pursue these kinds of reforms?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> It depends. If you are working in a line department, most of the service delivery will have gone elsewhere, for example to local bodies. Innovation in service delivery will flourish at the local level. Efficiency will increase. Productivity will be up. At the head office of government departments, people will be focused on policy work, strategic interventions in service delivery systems, funding and budgeting, accountability, how to find good people for governance with less participation in actual service delivery at the centre.</p>
<p>Public sector employees working in the more devolved areas where service delivery happens will need higher level skills in public sector management to handle the challenges of service delivery, the capacity to innovate continuously, plus a sufficient understanding of policy to enable effective interaction with the smaller, more strategic head office.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> Right. And of course one of the factors that bears on this is the relationship between the bureaucracy and the political sphere. One thing that has come up is the role of ministerial advisers. Do you think they make it necessarily harder or easier, for public servants to have a productive relationship with elected politicians?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> I think there is a big problem. Ministerial advisers have become the black hole of accountability within our parliamentary democracy.</p>
<p>The reason for that is that the old conventions governing their roles no longer hold true. In the past, if a public servant told a ministerial adviser something it would be deemed that they had told the minister, and the adviser would make sure the minister knew. In turn an adviser would speak with authority if they actually knew the minister’s wishes or had good reason to know what they would be.</p>
<p>There is insufficient accountability because there are so many ministerial advisers now with few, in some jurisdictions, who actually possess a grasp of the business of government commensurate with their responsibilities. No one can suggest that they are an expression of the “persona” of the minister any more. Now the minister isn’t accountable for what they do, because now a minister can say, “Oh that was one of my advisers, I did not know about this”.</p>
<p>Well, if ministers are using that to escape accountability, they can’t escape the proposition that it’s time the advisers were made more accountable for defined roles, and became answerable in the same way as public servants to all the investigatory and accountability bodies, including parliamentary committees.</p>
<p>If prescribed roles and a code of conduct were legislated, it would force ministers to engage people in ministerial office roles who were actually experienced in the business of government. Most advisers in some jurisdictions now operate tactically in pursuit of short term partisan interest and gain while on the public payroll. This can be at a cost to the long term, enduring national interest.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> Do you think it would make a difference if there were to be a cap placed on the number of ministerial advisers?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> It would help, because it would be another means of forcing a hard look at what jobs they do. So when the Coombs Royal Commission reported in 1976, there was a definition of the role of ministerial advisers that seemed reasonable to everybody at the time. That’s fallen away. Now, in some jurisdictions, you have tribes of younger, inexperienced people who crowd out mature policy debates while they pursue hyper active issues management. This is corrosive of good government.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> This of course raises a broader question. Traditional public policy thinking tends to posit a clear dichotomy between the realm of politics and the realm of administration. Do you think there is actually a clear line, and how is it discerned?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> There is in some respects, but not in others. Clearly there is a line around party political issues, which public servants should not cross. It gets fuzzier when you talk about what support public servants should provide to ministers in respect to dealing with media queries and it’s well accepted that is OK too. It has been accepted at times that, with the agreement of ministers, senior public servants may brief journalists on background so that they understand the context of a policy initiative. This is not partisan activity.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> I hear from some public servants that while it’s understood they shouldn’t be involved in politics, particularly in party politics, sometimes it’s actually difficult to do their job unless they stray across that line. Do you agree with that?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> I think that danger is present but partisan activity is the province of politicians, not public servants. An obligation rests on public servants to ensure programs are administered without partisan favour.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> If you were king for a day, what changes would you make to the public service?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> Well first, I think accountability has to be improved. So I would make the heads of agencies and departmental heads more directly accountable in their own right to parliamentary committees for delivery, particularly through the examination of their annual reports. These reports should actually provide more useful information about departments and KPIs to use in assessing performance.</p>
<p>I’d have more involvement for parliamentary committees in considering proposed appointments of departmental and agency heads before the appointments were submitted through the head of government to the Governor-General, a State Governor or Territory Administrator. This would have the effect of establishing an individual’s professional credentials for a job and relative security for the duration of the appointment.</p>
<p>I’d move to better define the role of ministers for the purposes of ministerial responsibility. At the moment, the media is prepared to hold ministers in many portfolios responsible for anything that crops up. In practical terms this cannot work. It creates confusion, public dissatisfaction, the removal of any real sanctions for poor performance and exhaustion for ministers over time as they cope with immense and impossible pressures.</p>
<p>I’d try and sort out better demarcation in some areas between the commonwealth and states in our federation. I’d decide whether we want the best arrangement for delivering services, or the best arrangement for delivering power to one group or another. To start with the best way to manage service delivery provides the easiest way into a fresh approach to cooperative federalism. The hospital reforms championed by the Commonwealth through COAG are an example of how to approach the problem.</p>
<p>The capability in the public sector has to move with the times, both on the policy front and in terms of the public sector management skills required to get the best bang for our buck in delivering services to citizens.</p>
<p>A lot of functions are best decanted out of cumbersome departments into agencies which have credible, professional governance structures. I’d bring people with expertise from outside government into these structures, men and women who can take more responsibility for effective and innovative service delivery, specialised policy advice or necessary regulation. At the commonwealth level, we have reached the unfortunate position where some departments are vast, complex public sector conglomerates. They have lost strategic focus and the innovative edge of which they are capable. Often these particular departments are less efficient than their leaders would wish them to be. The solution lies in sorting out which functions should be kept at the commonwealth level but done through new style agencies; or which functions could be devolved to the states.</p>
<p>Finally, at the state level, service delivery has got to be well and truly devolved to new style governance arrangements of the sort you see in Victoria and elsewhere for hospitals, schools, vocational education and training under modern purchaser-provider arrangements. This supports more competition between providers where possible and thus more innovation. Competition between public sector providers and entities in the private sector can deliver good results for citizens and enables public sector people to demonstrate the quality and efficiency of which they are capable. But in order for that to happen, as we see with the <a href="http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/Documents/Review-of-Funding-for-Schooling-Final-Report-Dec-2011.pdf">Gonski recommendations for schools</a>, you have to actually put money into the system to enable public sector providers and others wishing it to address disadvantage effectively. The design of funding systems for both the public sector agencies and private delivery bodies is critical.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> It’s sometimes said that commonwealth public servants are very good at policy, but there is an issue with service delivery.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> At the commonwealth level, some of the service delivery standards are exceptionally good by world standards. The tax office, customs and border protection, what has been Centrelink and Medicare and others. They have been so successful and are so well regarded overseas, largely because their job is clear, although it can be complex, and they have experienced strong, capable and committed leadership. Agencies such as the ATO are extremely well regarded internationally and have had a succession of remarkable leaders to this day. These leaders don’t get the recognition they deserve. </p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> Is that because their job involved mobilising the people within their organisation to do particular things and they have some control over them?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> It does. It also means there is a measure of co-production. As you would know with the tax office, these agencies are increasingly shifting to online processes where people do the data entry themselves. If you go back to the decades long debate about mixing or separating policy and service delivery, both are now so complex and require such sophisticated skills and knowledge that cohabitation of specialists in both streams seems not to deliver the best results in either. </p>
<p>So I am actually in favour of handling discreet, specific and measurable tasks in agencies with new style governance and accountability arrangements. Modern IT systems enable policy departments to be far better informed than ever before if sophisticated information and performance management systems are used. You can then have more of an emphasis on policy groups and departments that are largely about policy, budgets and funding, accountability, legislation and support to ministers, more than anything else.</p>
<p>Even in these cases I would favour the UK initiative, which sets up a departmental board in policy departments where you’ve got non-executive directors who come in from outside of government to supervise management performance in departments.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> In terms of developing the capacity of public servants, there is a distinction sometimes drawn between the learning that occurs in formal academic programs and the learning that occurs in training in executive programs and learning on the job. Usually it’s 70%, 20%, 10%. Do you see there is a need to emphasis one rather than another?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> Hopefully through an undergraduate education young students acquire the foundations of thought and expression to serve them in any career. But then what has been neglected is contemporary professional development for public servants. We are seriously under investing in this at the moment, even when compared with what was accepted in the sixties and seventies.</p>
<p>Not all agree, but I would say that in terms of professional preparation, public servants need to cover policy and public sector management. After that, there are parts of the public sectors which provide for the ongoing professional development of their employees extremely well; in particular the defence force, police and emergency services. The underinvestment elsewhere is not a trivial matter. Where underinvestment occurs public sector organisations are not as efficient, effective and innovative as they could be. Organisations, which actually cultivate improvement in the skills and knowledge of their employees, are more productive and innovative.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> And this of course is a difficult argument in times of austerity, because some say we would rather spend the time on frontline services than on training, for example.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> That’s perhaps true in some cases, but not in others. It comes down to what decisions are taken by the people leading those organisations. In the review of the APS which I headed (the <a href="http://www.dpmc.gov.au/publications/aga_reform/aga_reform_blueprint/index.cfm">Ahead of the Game Review</a>), a key point made is that for departments in the APS, secretaries are stewards of their departments as institutions, and have a responsibility to get them in as good shape as possible so that when they go and the next secretary comes along there is a passing on of a worthwhile organisation. Collectively, secretaries are stewards of the professionalism and capability of the entire public service. I think that secretaries in the APS take those responsibilities very seriously. The culture of the APS remains very strong. Its independence and integrity remains very strong and is more evident than in most other jurisdictions.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> Of course we know the public sector is beset with a whole pile of investigative and indeed inquisitorial agencies that can be construed as making life difficult for public servants and their work. What can be done about this?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> One of the consequences of what happens in nearly all jurisdictions is that the public comes to feel that public services are riven with inadequacy and incompetence. This is just not true.</p>
<p>If you look back over the past 40 years, the transformation of Australia in an economic and social sense would have been impossible without the drive and implementation capacity of the public services of Australia. That change has transformed Australia so that we are far more prosperous, and, in other respects have all done better than would have otherwise been the case.</p>
<p>If Australia is much better because of what has been done by governments and the public services over the past 40 years, we have to ask why it is that the public has now reached a point where it is almost conditioned to believe that poor performance is endemic.</p>
<p>I think it’s good that there are such investigative and inquisitorial bodies, which are there ultimately to lighten the load of parliament itself, but I think it’s probably time for a Commission of Inquiry to look into how these bodies could relate more effectively to the Australian Parliaments.</p>
<p>It may mean that we have more or fewer of them or a clearer definition of what they do and how they may do it. As an example, for all the performance reviews done by Auditors-General since the late 70s, reviews written at times to feed headlines to the media, we still don’t have a consistent and persuasive pressure through these reviews to achieve the one thing that they should teach us to adopt – reliable, sensible performance measurement for the programs and operations of departments and agencies. We aren’t getting the full story the system actually needs.</p>
<p>Basically public servants are not in a position to answer back with a clear voice. Therefore, if there were more emphasis on parliamentary committees playing a stronger role in the consideration of these review reports, and if these reports paid more attention to sensible performance measurement, and if public servants themselves were able to challenge methods and conclusions before parliamentary committees, I think we would achieve even better public services more speedily.</p>
<p><strong>John Alford:</strong> If you were approached by a young graduate who was trying to work out where they were going to go career-wise, would you advise them to join the public service?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Moran:</strong> Yes I would, as I did my son and daughter. But I would not encourage a cradle-to-grave career for such young people. Increasingly the most successful public servants are those who have experienced diverse employment, in the public, private, not for profit and academic spheres. And it’s also been the case that since the late 70s and early 80s public services have been recruiting a lot of people from outside at all levels. They are still supposed to do it according to the principle that those who are appointed are qualified for jobs and selected on relative merit.</p>
<p>So we have to recruit lots of capable young people and we still do. We have to try to keep them and we do in large numbers. We’ve got to recognise that we have a very diverse labour market now and many will go off and do other things. Therefore we’ve got to be able to attract back people with 10-20 years experience and see how we best use them. We do this as well</p>
<p>And in the midst of all of that, the traditional culture of public service appropriate to our Westminster style of government continues, and as I have said the public services have been responsible for a huge range of reforms to themselves and to our economy and to society. I have said before and repeat: Australia has amongst the very best public services in the world. It didn’t happen by accident.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/10187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Alford was a member of the Ministry of Transport Project Team in Victoria, and a member of the panel appointed by the Victorian Premier to conduct the Review of Public Service Personnel Management in 1990.</span></em></p>Terry Moran was Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011. He is now President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and a governor of the Committee…John Alford, Professor of Public Sector Management, Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100312012-10-14T19:20:19Z2012-10-14T19:20:19ZDealing with ministerial advisers: a practical guide for public servants<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/16381/original/h2fwbzj3-1349910079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It takes more than a code of conduct to foster good departmental relationships.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The role of ministerial advisers and their relationship to public servants has been the subject of aserious public debate in recent weeks.</p>
<p>Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/business-declares-war-over-ministerial-staffers-costing-us-billions/story-fn59niix-1226478444994">caused a stir</a> when she advocated that the number of ministerial advisers in the public service be halved. Less controversial was former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Terry Moran’s suggestion that the <a href="http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications-and-media/current-circulars-and-advices/2008/circular-20087">code of conduct</a> introduced by the Rudd government in 2008 be formally legislated, an initiative Westacott also supports.</p>
<p>Political advisers in ministers’ offices are here to stay, so the proposal for a legislated code of conduct is both a sound one and long overdue at both state and commonwealth levels.</p>
<p>But important as such codes are, they will not of themselves be sufficient to regulate the behaviour of ministerial advisers or their relationship to the public servants who they need to deal with on a day-to-day basis.</p>
<p>Equally important is the behaviour of public servants themselves – particularly heads of government departments.</p>
<h2>Yes, minister</h2>
<p>At the outset it should be said that advisers have an important role to play in supporting their ministers and acting as a bridge between the minister and his or her department. It also needs to be acknowledged that ministerial offices often work under extreme pressure. This stems from the challenges of parliamentary politics and the difficulties of developing policy and implementing change under blinding glare of the 24-hour news cycle.</p>
<p>Much of course depends on the skills and capabilities of the advisers themselves. In my experience, the quality of political advisers tends to be highest when governments are newly elected and there is a relatively deep pool of political advisers, often with previous experience working in similar roles, eager to take on these roles.</p>
<p>As governments get older, it is often the case that the best advisers go on to do other things and the talent pool gets thinner and less experienced; sometimes with a poor understanding of the boundaries of their roles vis-a-vis both their ministers and the public service.</p>
<p>New governments often make a virtue of having fewer ministerial staff than their immediate predecessors. However, as governments age, the number of ministerial staff tends to grow. This increase in staff – sometimes very young and always enthusiastic – can create demands on departments without commensurate benefits for the minister.</p>
<p>While departmental secretaries cannot direct ministerial advisers, there is much that they can do in establishing a framework for appropriate working relationships with ministers and their offices.</p>
<h2>Four steps to departmental harmony</h2>
<p>At a minimum the framework should cover the following elements.</p>
<p>First, secretaries need to make it clear that advisers cannot give directions to departmental staff. The best way to do this is to identify a specific number of key senior officers to whom advisers can make requests on behalf of the minister. As an adjunct to this arrangement ministers should be told that the department will not stand behind any advice he or she receives that doesn’t come through the normal paper-flow channel.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/16455/original/45zzkwmj-1350008252.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The terrifying Malcolm Tucker from TV series The Thick Of It is the ultimate example of an unelected adviser wielding enormous political influence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/The Thick Of It</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Secondly, it is essential for secretaries to insist that their advice is to the minister only. While political advisers are at liberty to make comments to the minister about departmental advice, they should not to act as gate-keepers in determining what and when briefings go to the minister. </p>
<p>The best way to prevent this gate-keeping role is for the secretary to be aware of when key briefings leave the department and after a reasonable period for ministerial office scrutiny seek to have the briefing discussed with the minister.</p>
<p>Finally, under no circumstances should a secretary allow a ministerial adviser to request the department to re-write a recommendation from the department on a particular matter.</p>
<p>Of course there should be opportunities for discussion between the department and the minister’s office about the substance of advice. However, at the end of the day the minister is entitled to receive the department’s best advice and the department is obliged to provide it. If someone in the minister’s office disagrees with that advice, they are always able to write a covering note or say so directly to the minister.</p>
<p>It is also vital that departmental staff have an appreciation of the pressures of working in a ministerial office. Advice needs to be provided within time-lines that take into account the need for ministers to consult with their colleagues and reflect on media implications of the matter under consideration. Ministerial advisers also need receive early advice about issues which could be problematic to their minister.</p>
<p>The role of the secretary is pivotal. Departmental staff take their lead from the top. If the secretary establishes a clear modus operandi with a minister’s staff (and the minister when necessary), political advisers and public servants are much less likely to engage in the sorts of behaviours that cause difficulties for themselves, their department and the minister.</p>
<h2>Give and take</h2>
<p>This framework is standard fare for the way most secretaries relate to their ministers and their staff. But like all human relationships it’s one which needs to be worked on continually. </p>
<p>At its core is a simple point; both advisers and public servants need to understand that each have different but complementary roles to play. In framing their advice public servants should have the ability and confidence to use advisers to gain a broader understanding of the issues concerning the minister; and do so without compromising the integrity of that advice.</p>
<p>Advisers need to appreciate that ministerial decision-making can only benefit by being exposed to the different perspectives that public servants can bring to an issue. They should value the understanding public servants can bring to the subject matter at hand. </p>
<p>In the end, whatever is specified in codes of conduct, legislated or otherwise, the relationships between ministerial offices and departments will only work if secretaries and ministers make clear the behaviour they expect from their staff. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/10031/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yehudi Blacher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The role of ministerial advisers and their relationship to public servants has been the subject of aserious public debate in recent weeks. Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott caused…Yehudi Blacher, Professorial Fellow, Centre for Public Policy, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97292012-09-21T05:54:22Z2012-09-21T05:54:22ZImproving public policy advice is a debate we have to have<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/15742/original/z85h9bcg-1348204543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Business Council of Australia's Jennifer Westacott has called for a debate over the role of Australia's public service.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The provocative <a href="http://www.bca.com.au/Content/102030.aspx">address</a> by Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott to the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) International Congress in Melbourne yesterday achieved something almost unprecedented in contemporary Australian politics. </p>
<p>It focused debate squarely on the quality of debate, analysis and advice that informs decision-making about public policy issues that are of vital importance to Australia’s prosperity, competitiveness and the living standards of its citizens.</p>
<p>Westacott’s was a serious and important critique by an individual who has significant experience of policy processes both within and outside of government, at state and federal levels. </p>
<p>She has held a variety of senior roles in the NSW and Victorian governments, as a lead partner with consulting firm KPMG and now as head of the BCA. Reaction has been mostly supportive, including from the retired former Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Terry Moran, and Roger Beale, a respected PWC consultant and former Secretary of the Department of the Environment and Heritage.</p>
<p>Her comments have clearly resonated with people concerned that populism and adversarial politics is undermining Australia’s ability to address the problems identified in her first major address in the BCA Chief Executive role. </p>
<p>These include: the high costs of doing business in Australia; poor productivity; and the need to embrace reforms the BCA believes will enable Australia to weather continuing global economic weakness and position itself for future opportunities.</p>
<p>It is not the first time Australian business leaders have drawn attention to the need to strengthen the public service; to streamline regulation, overhaul the tax system; and to fix a federation that many believe is “broken”. </p>
<p>These issues were key recommendations from Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit in April 2008, which reminds us such criticisms precede the Rudd and Gillard governments, although some commentators have been all too quick to interpret Westacott’s remarks (and Terry Moran’s endorsement of them) as a comment on the quality and performance of Julia Gillard’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).</p>
<p>Most analysts cite 2001 as the end of the reform era which began with Hawke and Keating. Since then governments have been increasingly criticised for seeking to “buy” political support with electoral bribes and seemingly feeling obliged to compensate any individual or group that stands to lose or be affected by policy change (see Quarterly Essay contributions from <a href="http://ebooks.readings.com.au/product/9781921866531">George Megalogenis</a> in 2010 and <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781863955645/quarterly-essay-46-great-expectations-government-entitlement">Laura Tingle</a> in 2012). </p>
<p>Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry has lamented with increasing intensity on the quality of policy debate and the ability of our political system to deal with long-term challenges. He <a href="http://afr.com/p/national/henry_slams_quality_of_public_policy_mCvbwRGFiU5kr4fxFCRv5O">told a forum</a> at the Australian National University recently that he could not recall a time in the past 25 years when the quality of public policy debate had been so poor.</p>
<p>Analysts and commentators including former prime ministerial adviser Ross Garnaut and journalist Paul Kelly in his 2009 book, March of the Patriots, have questioned whether Australia any longer is capable of designing and implementing the kinds of reforms that underpinned sustained economic growth over the past two decades, including during the global financial crisis, or whether a “great complacency” has become the dominant posture.</p>
<p>It is interesting then that Westacott cites the loss of public service authority and legitimacy as a key driver of the malaise afflicting contemporary policy-making, rather than attributing it to, for example, the nature of democratic politics, greater complexity, voter disenchantment, electoral volatility, a hung parliament, or the demands of the 24 hour news media. </p>
<p>Among her recommendations are proposals “to halve the allocation of personal staff in ministerial offices and establish a mandatory code that prohibits them from directing public servants” and to “reinstate the tenure of departmental secretaries”.</p>
<p>It is worth remembering that Malcolm Fraser’s frustration with the intransigence of the Commonwealth Treasury was why he overcame his initial skepticism of the Whitlam government’s experiment with ministerial staff and developed serious policy expertise within his PMO. </p>
<p>From the late 1960s, Ministers became increasingly unwilling to tolerate a lack of responsiveness from some public service departments and sought support to bolster their capacity to drive policy and ensure responsiveness from their officials.</p>
<p>The Hawke and Keating governments implemented many of the reforms that Ms Westacott has now criticised: formalising the role of ministerial staff through the passage of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 and, later, removing tenure for “Permanent Heads” and placing Departmental Secretaries on contracts. </p>
<p>It is generally agreed the partnership that developed between ministers, their staff and the public service in this era drove wide-ranging and bi-partisan reforms that have underpinned our relative prosperity and competitiveness.</p>
<p>It is worth noting too that ministerial staff, in particular policy experts like John Rose, John Hewson, Ross Garnaut, Don Russell, Jenny Macklin and others, made important intellectual contributions to the economic and social reforms of the 1980s, breaking the public service’s virtual monopoly over policy advising. They are credited with introducing new ideas and greater contestability that many argue has improved the quality of advice.</p>
<p>But the provisions that allowed the engagement of policy specialists fell into disuse under the Howard government and have not been revived. The MOP(S) Act, which governs the engagement of ministerial staff, also enables public servants to be seconded to the minister’s staff and – recognising that offices are partisan - relieves them of their obligation to be impartial for the duration of their appointment. </p>
<p>Through the Hawke and Keating years, this was seen as a critical opportunity to expose officials to the pressures on ministers and the politics of policy processes.</p>
<p>Public service leaders like Graham Evans, Sandy Hollway, Dennis Richardson, Stephen Sedgwick, Ken Henry, Andrew Metcalfe and others followed this pathway, with benefits flowing both ways.</p>
<p>Again, this fell by the wayside as a more partisan approach took hold – it was seen as risky to align oneself with the political party in government by taking a role in a minister’s office. Ministerial staff roles became part of the trajectory of career politics – an essential (and publicly funded) training ground for professional politics. </p>
<p>While under Hawke and Keating up to 70% of staffers were seconded from the APS, from Howard onwards those numbers fell dramatically, with obvious consequences for knowledge of government processes and content expertise.</p>
<p>My book <a href="http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/isbn/0868409812.htm">Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard</a> advocated addressing issues of staff accountability, conduct and behaviour, management and “fit” within a Westminster-style system of government.</p>
<p>Many of these reforms became election commitments of Labor in Opposition and were later adopted by the Rudd government.</p>
<p>But I rejected then, as I do now, the argument that problems in the interface between ministerial staff and public servants are a question of numbers. There are complex reasons why Australian ministers have the largest number of personal staff in any Westminster-style political system – mostly to do with the demands on ministers from a more complex and uncertain political environment, the expectations of citizens, the demands of the media and for federal Labor, its status as a minority government. </p>
<p>We know from experience that cutting ministerial numbers is rarely sustainable – deeper structures condition the size and organisation of offices. But we should aim to ensure the system operates on the principle of complementarity, where there is mutual respect for the professional skills that staffers and officials each bring to their shared task of supporting ministers.</p>
<p>My research, which now includes a forthcoming study of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff and <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Learning_to_Be_a_Minister.html?id=L2A7lhHAmp0C">other work</a> examining the support needs of ministers, leads me to conclude instead that the reactive policy-making that Jennifer Westacott rightly criticises is attributable to the nature of politics and it is there we must look for solutions.</p>
<p>I concur we should value and invest in a professional, impartial public service. But I would argue we need also to be attentive to the organisational skills and capacities of our leaders: their ability to select a quality team (official and partisan) and get the most out of it; to create effective arrangements for priority-setting, deliberation and decision-making (in Cabinet, policy committees etc); and ensure as decision-makers they can get the advice they need (as well as advice they want to hear); and to maintain effective relationships with key stakeholders within and outside of government. It seems to me this, as much as anything else, could address the concerns that have been expressed.</p>
<p>I welcome Jennifer Westacott’s contribution to what I hope will be a spirited debate about the advisory systems that enable decision-makers to make informed policy choices in Australia’s long-term interests.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/9729/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Tiernan receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.</span></em></p>The provocative address by Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott to the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) International Congress in Melbourne yesterday achieved something…Anne Tiernan, Associate Professor in the School of Government & International Relations, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.