The Australian Public Service carries a considerable amount of what many private-sector mangers would see as “”excess baggage”. This baggage comes in the form of detailed procedures for moving or dismissing staff, sometimes inflexible classifications of staff and long and costly review procedures. There are also seemingly excessive procedures for accounting for how money is spent _ sometimes more costly to execute than the amount of money at stake. Without this baggage, it is argued, the Public Service would be far more efficient. Let the managers manage, has been the catch-cry.
The latest cry of this catch came this week with the report of the Public Service Review Group. It recommended various reforms which would enable managers to move staff more easily and get rid on non-performing staff. The result would be that the Public Service would be more efficient, or so it is argued. The review recommended the end of the system of “”office” under which particular public servants are appointed to particular positions. In its place, public-service managers would be able to move people according to need. Superficially this has attractions. Modern government frequently embarks on short-term programs which do not require permanent offices.
The review recommended also that appeal procedures against dismissal be conducted through the industrial-relations system, as with the private sector. In general, the review recommended changes that would increase flexibility, such a streamlined promotions and more power to the secretary of the department to deal with personnel matters.
On their surface, these things seem worthwhile. They work in the private sector. The difficulty, however, is that disciplinary measures, transfering and removing people and personnel matters in general are invariably subjective. Streamlining those procedures will inevitably result in more subjective judgments being made by fewer people. In the private sector, where the owner or manager of a business is answerable only a bottom line financially or some other aim of the owner, that is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is probably necessary.
However, the public sector is different. Public-sector employees are not answerable to just their immediate manger; nor are they just answerable to the Government. They are generally accountable to the Australian public, the law and the spirit of public service. The danger of applying private-sector rigours to public servants is that the subjective judgments that come with that rigour can be misapplied to censure, move or oust the public servant standing up for the public good, the law or the spirit of public service in the face of the immediate wishes of the immediate manager or the government of the day.
In short the subjective judgments of the private sector which are applied to people not doing their job could be applied to public servants who are doing their job.
Further, the private-sector rigours and licences could also be misapplied in the public sector to undermine the merit principle. A private-sector employer has a right to employ a toady, the owner’s nephew or a favourite; a public-sector employer does not. It is understandable why the calls for greater efficiency and private-sector management techniques have come about. They have done so because the public sector has grown ever larger, invading and taking over previous private sector-roles or taking up roles previously just not regarded as worth doing. In this environment, the “”baggage” of public-sector employment methods _ security of tenure, reviews and appeals against dismissal or transfer _ do become excessive.
The answer, however, is not to remodel employment conditions in the Public Service to make it more like the private sector, thereby risking important safeguards against political toadyism or worse political or financial corruption. The answer is to protect core policy and other public-sector functions within a public service and those functions where it is deemed necessary to allow the managers to manage should be contracted out or privatised. Then the “”baggage” in what remains would be well worth carrying.
That said, the review made some very worthwhile recommendations about on reviewing other aspects of the Public Service Act and other Acts regulating public-sector employment. It presented a draft set of overview provisions that unify and codify general principles of public administration. Incidentally, the resemblance to the ground-breaking ACT Public Sector Management Act in this regard are remarkable. Alas, the detailed recommendations in review may well undermine that important overarching statement of principles.