The appointment of a new Commonwealth Public Service Commissioner highlights deeper structural problems inside the Public Service Commission, from flawed remuneration policies to weak accountability and confused reform priorities.
On 14 May the Prime Minister announced that Jacqui Curtis, the Chief Operating Officer in the Taxation Office, is to be the new Commonwealth Public Service Commissioner.
The position had been substantively vacant since February after the resignation of Gordon de Brouwer. The time taken to fill the position could be a sign of due diligence in finding his replacement or it could be down to the lethargy that so often retards appointments. What processes brought Curtis to the fore are unclear. The Prime Minister didn’t say if the position was advertised – it should have been.
Yet congratulations to Ms Curtis and good luck too – she’ll need it.
The Public Service Commission (PSC) is a small agency whose influence depends largely on the weak reeds of exhortation and ministerial backing. It lives in the cramping shadow of a Secretaries Board specialising in the lowest common denominator.
As the Commission has allowed self-congratulation to outpace achievement, its recent record has not been awesome.
Its discussion papers on public service “reform” have run to a few pages containing little justification for their largely trivial proposals. One of the papers has disappeared into the bureaucratic mists. Thus, some of the amendments to the Public Service Act have been inconsequential and others, like making all public servants subject to discipline if they don’t take into account the long term consequences of their actions, have been foolish. Big problems have been neglected.
Meanwhile policies within the Commission’s ambit on public service remuneration and the use of consultants and labour contractors are pitifully flawed.
In recent years the Commission has been overly secretive and it has run unsupportable arguments in favour of reducing the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.
One of the things at the top of Curtis’ in-tray will be the next round of pay negotiations for the Public Service. The current policy requires pay increases to be “underpinned by productivity growth”. But as productivity in government departments can’t be measured, negotiations reduce to farcical mixtures of baseless claims and counter claims in the hope that one or the other will just give up.
If the Commonwealth is to be able effectively to recruit and retain staff, it must match its remuneration to that paid by other employers for comparable work on an occupational basis. Incredibly, this fundamental element is not mentioned in the current remuneration policy. Curtis needs to fix that up before any negotiations kick off.
The second thing she should do is revise the PSC’s so-called ‘Commissioning Framework’ that now is the basis for regulating the use of consultants and labour contractors – an important part of the Government’s attempt to rehabilitate the public service.
This document is based on the false notion that there are “core” public service functions. There are no such things. Indeed, all of the “core” functions listed in the Framework could be done by consultants or contractors.
Why, for example, should cost-benefit analyses or delivering programs be regarded as “core” public service functions as the Framework says? Cost-benefit analyses and consultants are a good combination and government aged care programs are largely contracted out. As the Framework is nonsense, it has contributed to the political controversy about the number of staff in the public service.
When it comes to the functions that should be performed by public servants, it’s to be hoped Curtis will appreciate the critical Constitutional provision that when people are engaged in a contract of employment (as distinct from a contract for services), that should be organised under the merit recruitment provisions of the Public Service Act. So, Curtis needs to ensure that the regulation of the use of consultants and labour contractors is put on a rational and defensible basis that shuts the now wide open door on nepotism and corruption. Where staff are in the public service on contracts of employment, they should be engaged on the basis of an assessment of their relative merits not on because they’re associated with a consulting or contracting firm.
Then in her second week, she might turn her attention to solidifying improvements in legislative change. These could include provisions that would:
- eliminate the threat of arbitrary dismissal for departmental Secretaries so they’re better able to provide full and honest advice to Ministers as didn’t happen in the Robodebt scandal;
- require, as a protection against arbitrariness, the public notification of reasons for the dismissal of Secretaries;
- provide the means for tidying up the shambolic senior management structures whose numbers have galloped out of control and allowed, for example, an SES officer to be paid $100,000 more than one two rungs up the hierarchy;
- make the Secretaries Board properly representative of the wider public service but modify or remove its executive powers that are unsuited to a body of its type;
- restore merit as a public service value;
- require recruitment to the public service to be via the Public Service Act where, as per the above, there are to be a contracts of employment; and
- regulate conflicts of interest in post-separation employment.
Consultation about these and other matters should be based on a fully and comprehensively explained discussion paper, not the cliched, flimsy, documents for which the Public Service Commission has in recent times become notorious. And the consultation should not be confined to passively asking for comments on the paper but by using it to actively promote discussions in forums within and outside the public service in which Curtis should take a leading role.
Importantly, she must realise that the backing of her Minister and, indeed, the Cabinet is essential if significant improvements are to be made to the public service. If that is not forthcoming, she might as well forget about it, put her feet up on her and fall back on the feckless optimism of Charles Dickens’s Wilkins Micawber who ran his life in the hope that “something will turn up”. Although Micawber was rewarded with a ticket to Australia, that would be a worthless consolation for Curtis as she is already here.
Paddy Gourley is a superannuated Commonwealth public servant.