Telling them what they don't want to know

The public service is no place to play politics but that is exactly what has been happening

AFTER the 2001 election, public service commissioner Andrew Podger tackled Prime Minister's Department head Max Moore-Wilton over something that troubled him.

``I said to him that I felt his attendance at the Prime Minister's election night party was inconsistent with his obligations to uphold and promote the [public service] values, including being apolitical,'' he writes in the latest issue of the Australian Journal of Public Administration. ``He firmly rejected my view, saying what he did in his own time was his business and did not affect the carrying out of his duties.''

You can bet that firm rejection is a euphemism for the more robust language for which ``Max the Axe'' is famed. His style is confrontational and intimidatory and Podger was brave even to raise the issue with him. Moore-Wilton, who these days is head of the Sydney Airport Corporation, demanded commitment to the Government's agenda and those who showed insufficient enthusiasm were shunted aside.

Podger's classic Westminister view about the role of public servants did his future prospects no good. His 37 years in the commonwealth public service culminated in 12 years as head of four departments, including the Public Service Commission, which acts as a guardian of bureaucratic professionalism. The Government did not renew his three-year contract in that job and his career ended two years ago at age 56 with a six-month special assignment in the Prime Minister's Department.

The public service lost more than just a traditional viewpoint with his departure and that of others who have fallen foul of modern bureaucratic culture. If episodes such as children overboard, the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon, AWB's $300 million bribes to Saddam Hussein and the faulty intelligence on the Iraq war have demonstrated one thing, it is the weaknesses in an attitude that emphasises doing the Government's bidding above all else.

``Don't tell me what I don't want to know'', was the message ministers such as Peter Reith conveyed with startling success to a public service that knew asylum seekers had not thrown their children into the sea. As for the numerous suggestions and warnings that reached Canberra about AWB breaching UN sanctions, the response was captured in evidence to the Cole inquiry by Foreign Affairs Department official Zena Armstrong: ``My priority, my focus, was actually on the wheat trade; it was not to investigate AWB.''

Before the 1970s, the public service used to go to the other extreme, with powerful, almost invariably knighted and permanent heads of departments often behaving as though they were the real government and the politicians were mere blow-ins.

Now the emphasis is on the responsiveness of the public service to the government. Of course, the role of the bureaucracy is to implement the priorities of the elected government. But it is also to use its expertise and experience to advise governments of the ramifications of their actions and to warn them off the wrong course. As Podger puts it, ``the question now, however, is whether the balance has shifted too far towards responsiveness and away from apolitical professionalism and its focus on the long-term public interest''.

He points to problems with performance pay and contracts for secretaries of departments. ``All secretaries are affected and they are being dishonest or fooling themselves if they deny it. They will hedge their bets on occasion, limit the number of issues on which to take a strong stand, be less strident, constrain public comments, limit or craft more carefully public documents and accept a muddying of their role and that of political advisers.''

The Government decides each year whether departmental heads should receive bonuses of 20 per cent -- which can be worth $60,000 -- 10 per cent or nothing. Podger quotes a departmental head as saying: ``How will someone be rewarded for rightly doing something a minister doesn't like (or rightly not doing something a minister wants)?'' And he recalls John Howard telling him that if performance pay did not send messages, then there was no point in having it. Podger argues that performance pay should be abolished and that contracts should be for five years rather than three: that is, across more than one term of government to provide continuity and distance the job to some degree from politics.

He believes contracts of different lengths have been used to distinguish between favoured and less favoured bureaucrats. Podger also favours adopting the practice in countries such as Britain and New Zealand of independent public service bodies selecting or recommending the appointment of departmental heads, rather than it being the sole prerogative of the prime minister and the head of his department.

Politicisation of the public service did not start with the Howard Government. It was the Hawke government that abolished the concept of the permanent public servant and the Keating government that introduced contracts. But the Howard Government has carried it further, sacking six departmental heads after coming to power in 1996, introducing three-year contracts for some and making appointments such as that of the gung-ho Moore-Wilton.

His successor Peter Shergold is arguably a more conventional public servant but he places just as much emphasis on being responsive to the Government's wishes.

Howard appointed him to head his task force on climate change and when he handed in his report the week before last, Shergold made a point of publicly singling out a finding that greenhouse gases could not be cut by 20 per cent by 2020 without devastating economic consequences.

This happened to suit Howard down to the ground because, although it is not Labor policy, ALP environment spokesman Peter Garrett had referred to it as an ``aspirational target''.

If Shergold stepped over the mark politically, Labor is not about to hold it against him. On Sunday, Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd promised Labor would restore the Westminister principles of an independent public service, while also saying he had no problem with Shergold.

Shergold probably would serve a Labor government well. But it is doubtful if one of his duties would be to restore traditional notions of independence to the bureaucracy. The present structure suits governments too well, even if it does not always serve the best interests of the nation.