Owning purpose: what do we want the public service to be?

May 2

“We need a clear and inspiring purpose statement with a unified vision… The Service has to own its purpose.”

– Gordon de Brouwer, Secretary for Public Sector Reform

Recently we’ve seen what happens when a public service fails to do its job, and when individuals are either afraid to speak up, not listened to, or absolve themselves of responsibility. While the final report is not due until the end of June, the Royal Commission into Robodebt reveals the dire state of the public service and shows an institution utterly failing to serve the public good. As journalist Karen Middleton writes, “[We see] a public service expected to comply with what the government wanted and discouraged from applying any ethical test, succumbing to any bout of conscience or asking any troublesome question.” Robodebt exposes a public service unable to serve the public good due to structural and cultural realities; a context where the worst stereotypes of public servants come alive.

And while we must be critical of Robodebt and its devastating impacts, we also must be careful that it doesn’t become the excuse neoliberalism needs to garner support for a further retreat of the public sector. Robodebt must become the wake-up call and the reminder that the renewal of the public service is an essential piece of work in the coming years.

Of course Robodebt should not come as a surprise. In 2019 the Independent Review of the Australia Public Service made clear that, “While the APS [Australian Public Service] is not broken, it must make substantive changes to address current issues and prepare for the future opportunities and challenges that our nation will face. To become a high-performing institution, deep cultural change is required. It is now time for bolder action.” (p8) It concludes that the APS needs to:

work more effectively together, guided by a strong purpose and clear values and principles;
partner with the community and others to solve problems;
make better use of digital technologies and data to deliver outstanding services;
strengthen its expertise and professional skills to become a high-performing institution;
use dynamic and flexible means to deliver priorities responsively; and
improve leadership and governance arrangements.

(There is lots to unpack in terms of these findings and I recommend a quick read of the Executive Summary – but the top two conclusions are most relevant to us here, hence the bold emphasis.)

This report, known as the Thodey Review (after the Chair of the review committee, David Thodey) was written by an independent panel of six individuals with public and private sector experience, handed to the Morrison government in 2019 and promptly shelved and ignored.

The new(ish) Labor government has dusted it off and committed to APS reform. For the first time in years we have a Minister for The Public Service (Katy Gallagher) and a dedicated Secretary position within Prime Minister and Cabinet leading public service renewal (co-author of the Thodey Review, Gordon de Brouwer).

Both the Thodey Review and Robodebt point to the need to reassess the public service. And for me, both raise questions about what this institution should be doing.

Interestingly, recommendation #5 from The Thodey Review speaks to this question and notes the articulation of purpose and vision as a key action:

“Develop a common purpose and vision as the first step to achieve a united APS, one that is more than the sum of its parts — with tangible benefits of improved motivation, increased collaboration and better outcomes.” (p 87)

Gordon de Brouwer, now the newly appointed Secretary for Public Sector Reform, has obviously thought about this a lot and has some interesting things to say about his own vision for the APS. Although the quote below from Work With Purpose (a podcast from the Institute of Public Administration Australia) is lengthy, it gives you a sense of what he, and the ACT Chief of the Public Service Kathy Leigh, think the public service should look like:

Interviewer: What does a modern, responsive, adaptive public service look like? The best practice one that we will always be striving for?

Kathy Leigh: It needs to be there to serve the government that the people have elected, but it needs to be able to do that impartially. It needs to have all of those hard skills – analytical skills, professional skills but it needs to be able to jump to whatever the current challenge is. To be up for it, to be finding solutions. It needs to be able to engage with the community so it can really understand what is going to work on the ground. It needs to be able to deliver on the ground – which again is about being able to properly engage with the community.

Gordon de Brouwer: If all of those things worked the Minister would say, “Gosh the Service is really good to work with because they understand the issues, they can put context, they can see the issues, they can see how things are connected and work. And when it comes to their policy advice, their implementation and their service delivery they’re second to none. They know how to do it. They really are a great public service for me”.

And then the public, community, businesses go to the Ministers and say, “Gosh your public service are really great to work with... They are really good to engage with! They listen to me! They help me solve my problems, they’ve got my interests at heart as well in finding solutions. They know when I’m trying it on but they’re good to deal with and they really act with integrity. They know what they are doing, and they act with integrity” [bold emphasis added].

What does it mean to have a public service that acts with integrity?

There have long been calls for a national integrity commission with the power to investigate allegations of misconduct in the federal government and public sector. We now have a National Anti-Corruption Commission which should come online in the middle of the year to investigate breaches of public trust.

In some cases this breach of trust will be obvious — such as if decisions are made that financially benefit the individual making the decision. But an anti-corruption commission won’t truly serve us unless we have clarity of purpose and clarity of values by which to measure success; it’s a minimum bar, not an aspiration or purpose.

A functional public service with integrity has to be about more than policing personal power and profit. As de Brouwer says, it must be a service with empathy and integrity at its heart. And that, my friends, means we need these and other shared values driving a shared purpose – and we need to articulate them.

To act with integrity means to stick by your moral principles. But who decides these principles? And is it the morals of individuals or society as a whole? And how do we keep room for different contexts? How to ensure not just equality in service delivery, but equity?

It’s worth noting here that the APS is not without some written moral guidance; we’ve got the Public Service Values outlining that a public servant should be committed to service, ethical, respectful, accountable, and impartial, and the formal Code of Conduct. Obviously these are important to have (although they didn’t stop Robodebt so something else is clearly necessary), but I think they are different to a collective purpose.

We need a social contract between public servants, government, parliament and the public as to the purpose of the public sector, and specifically, the purpose of the APS. Beyond how individuals should conduct themselves, or the personal integrity they bring, what do we (the community) want this wonderful bureaucratic institution to actually do?

Clarifying this together is going to be important if we’re going to reform the public service in a way that strengthens it as an institution that serves the public good across different governments.

While the government of the day has the authority to set the policy agenda for their term, a key pillar of our democracy is politically-neutral public service that is willing and able to give frank and fearless advice to politicians in service of the Australian public. While I don’t believe anyone can be entirely neutral, the bigger issue has arguably become the increased pressure from ministers to provide ‘palatable’ advice that may serve a particular political agenda, but is not necessarily the best solution to the challenge at hand.

As ex-public servant Associate Professor Russell Ayres says: “One of the ongoing challenges for public servants is finding the balance between being responsive to the government of the day (apolitical professionalism) and operating with a sense of the overall needs or expectations of the community as a whole (characterised by the idea of the ‘public good’).”

But what are the expectations of the community? Do we even have any? The distinct absence of reference to the public service in our community listening work suggests that perhaps this is a conversation we really need to have in a loud and visible way.

It’s quite a big ask really, to expect a large institution full of diverse individuals to pull together in a way that serves the government and the people; an institution required to be neutral, and adhere to stated values (which are inherently non-neutral things).

The process for reform…

We’ve got a government-backed internal process in place to reform the public service, starting with clarifying purpose, values and integrity. While this just one piece of the reform work required it’s one that is essential to get right. So what's their plan?

They want to develop a clear statement about the purpose and values of the public service.

Pleasingly to me, a key element of the public service reform is a big and open conversation about purpose, values and integrity. Importantly, de Brouwer notes that the process for finding this purpose should be led from the bottom up, involving opportunities for all public servants to contribute their perspectives and led by a diverse group of 40 public servants from across the sector (details on this should be released publicly in May).

The immediate opportunity for engagement is via the APS reform website and while anyone can contribute to the review, it’s difficult, circuitous (yes, reinforcing stereotypes about bureaucracy) and uses a language that doesn’t make a lot of sense to an outsider. But we’ll come back to my frustrations with this in a moment.

They want to put in place structural reform that backs in these values and commitment to integrity.

In the podcast referenced above, both Leigh and de Brouwer note the need for structural change that supports such a cultural shift, arguing for clarity not just about what the public service does but how this work should be done. I’m summarising from their conversation here but together they say the change requires four things:

Public servants need to talk about the culture, leadership and values that we want — openly, often and publicly;
Reviews of departments and agencies must look at not just the outcomes but the outcomes and behaviours — how things are done — as a whole (the government has already agreed to legislate independent and transparent capability reviews);
An understanding that good delivery and good behaviour are equally important and this must be built into performance, management, and career development systems;
Rewarding and acknowledging (both formally and informally) those who create cultures of integrity.

Finding the balance between spelling out what adhering to values and purpose looks like, and trusting people to find their own way, is tricky.

During the initial phase of our public good research I chatted with a retired accountant from regional Victoria. He saw integrity as a key public good but explained that broad brush statements rely on the honesty of individuals, while detailed instructions often mean people just do the bare minimum. Speaking of his experience developing standards for auditors and accountants he said:

“Sometimes we’d do standards that were really top level and rely on good judgement [by those implementing them]. Then that wouldn’t work. So standards would be really detailed. And then people would just tick off the minimum required without thought. The only thing that works is to have ethical players in the field.”

Leigh and de Brouwer would agree with that and are seeking ways to ensure the ethical players are supported.

Really what we’re talking about is a fundamental shift in culture about what we expect from our government and how we expect it to be done.

I think it's worth noting here that no amount of nice purpose plaques over doorways will stop another Robodebt. (The findings of the Royal Commission are due at the end of June and I am sure they will have some scathing critiques and some hopefully useful suggestions for structural change.)

While values and purpose statements on their own are not enough, we’ve long argued that articulating vision, values and purpose is a key strategic step to shift culture and practice.

We know from our recent work with public servants that many are eager to carve out time and space for engaging with such questions of purpose. In a previous blog I wrote:

In the final round of comments for the day, there was a rousing cry to find the courage and the capacity for public servants to start, as one person put it, “Talking about things that are really important in national life, in vivid big ideas language!” This cry certainly resonates with my own work and the hunger we’ve seen for talking about national purpose, vision and ideas in ways that lead to real changes to community life.

Those within the public service have identified that these conversations are needed to enable them to do their jobs well.

The crucial link: involving the public

There is one critical, and I believe missing, piece. The creation of a values and purpose statement — if done well — offers an opportunity to significantly change culture and, with enough community support, make sure any changes stick. So how do we achieve that?

We know such statements are only as powerful as the process that creates them, and the very act of sharing assumptions, ideas and possibilities for purpose can create a new type of culture and focus in a big institution.

The small but mighty country of Wales gives us a great example. Outgoing Welsh Commissioner for Future Generations, Sophie Howe, has recently been in Australia talking about her role in shifting both culture and purpose of government policy making in Wales. During the John Menadue Oration she spoke about the importance of involving (not “engaging” or “consulting”) citizens in finding solutions and creating a vision. Wales has a Future Generations Act made up of seven wellbeing goals that came out of deep and wide-ranging community community involvement that mirrors many of the 'kitchen table' -style conversations we've seen in Australia that catalysed the community independents movement. The Commissioner’s role is to work across silos and to support government and public service to ensure all policies and programs work to achieve these goals. And what they’ve been able to achieve is truly astounding and inspiring.

Imagine that kind of approach applied here.

A key conclusion of the Thodey Review was the need to “partner with the community and others to solve problems”. Don’t you think the process itself offers a fantastic opportunity to start putting this into practice?

Currently it is possible for the public to submit suggestions and responses to the APS reform via the website, but it’s not clear how those suggestions will be used, or followed up, if at all. Nor is it clear whether the public will be invited into any bigger conversations about this institution’s purpose or values. That’s just not good enough if we expect real, lasting change.

The only way to get an engaged public is to invite us in to genuinely be part of the process to determine the purpose of an institution that exists to serve us. Ask us questions not about ‘stewardship’ or ‘The Public Service’, but about what we need and want from government and how we want it provided. Ask us what we need for our communities to thrive. Ask us what makes our lives easier and better and how we see government and the public service supporting this.

Not only should leaders want to capture good ideas from the public, but for any long term cultural change to stick, the purpose of the public service and its values need to be backed and supported by an engaged public.

This is particularly important after decades of neoliberal approaches to the public sector, which have defunded, privatised and subcontracted out much of the APS’ expertise, and directly led services to decay. This further reinforces narratives about public sector dysfunction, and the vicious cycle continues. A publicly-backed narrative about public sector purpose will help to guard against further privatisation, demonisation and under-resourcing.

Not only that, but engagement on purpose provides a fantastic opportunity to educate people about how the public service works — why bureaucracy is both beauty and the beast — and to co-create a confidence that we can build a system that serves us.

The whole idea of a bottom-up approach to clarifying shared purpose and values and structural support to help this stick is something that obviously aligns with an Australia reMADE approach and I’m excited by the intent of those running the reform.

But fundamentally, we would argue that the vision, values and purpose element of the APS reform is only going to be useful if it involves the broader public, and refusing to do so is a huge missed opportunity to strengthen our public service as a whole.

Conclusion

The purpose of the public service will only truly stand up to difficult tests if those outside of it believe in it. So what do we all want from this potentially wonderful institution?

While the deadline for the most recent opportunity to engage has just passed, whether you’re a public servant or not, I’d urge you to keep your eye on the APS Reform website and prepare to contribute as opportunities arise.

For us, this is just the beginning of our engagement and excitement with the possibilities of a public service that centres and champions the public good. Imagine that.

DR MILLIE ROONEY

Millie is a Co-Director for Australia reMADE. She has a qualitative research background and has spoken in-depth with hundreds of Australian's about their lives, communities and dreams. Millie is also a carer for her family and community and is passionate about acknowledging this work as a valid, valuable and legitimate use of her time.

Selected Other blogs by Millie:

Underlying issues: why language matters at election time

democracypublic goodfinding purpose

Australia reMADE