The Public Service: The Quiet Machinery of the State

The Public Service: The Quiet Machinery of the State

The People Who Actually Run Australia, Anonymously, on Reasonable Superannuation

Behind every minister announcing a policy, every press conference, every budget night revelation, and every royal commission into a previous government’s decisions, there is a public service – a body of approximately 170,000 federal employees whose job is to implement the decisions of elected governments, advise those governments on the consequences of their decisions, and, in the quieter moments of their careers, wonder whether anyone read the brief.

The Australian Public Service is, by international standards, capable, well-educated, and professionally committed to the principle of serving the government of the day regardless of political persuasion – a principle called "apolitical public service" that is considered one of the great institutional achievements of the Westminster system and is tested, at regular intervals, by governments that would prefer a public service that serves the government of the day with rather more enthusiasm and rather less frank advice about why the policy might not work.

The tension between these two positions – frank independent advice versus enthusiastic implementation – is the defining feature of the APS’s relationship with its political masters, and has been since federation. It produces, in practice, a public service that is politically neutral in its formal operations, quietly opinionated in its written advice, and occasionally resigned in its private assessments. The private assessments do not appear in Senate Estimates. They appear in memoirs, ten years later, when everyone involved has retired to a comfortable consultancy.

The Structure: A Hierarchy of Increasing Caution

The APS is organised into departments and agencies, each headed by a Secretary or Chief Executive who is responsible to their minister, accountable to parliament, and answerable – in the specific procedural sense – to Senate Estimates committees twice a year, during which they demonstrate a mastery of saying a great deal while committing to very little that constitutional scholars describe as "impressive" and opposition senators describe as "evasion," both assessments being accurate.

Below the Secretary sits a hierarchy of Senior Executive Service officers, Executive Level staff, and Australian Public Service classifications one through six – a structure of sufficient complexity that new graduates joining the service frequently require several months to understand where they sit in relation to everyone else, and several years to understand what that actually means for getting anything done.

"The public service," observes Professor Reginald Clipboard III, who once spent six months embedded in a Canberra department as part of a research project and emerged with a monograph and a mild anxiety disorder, "is organised around the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level. In practice, the appropriate level is usually one above wherever the decision currently sits, and the decision spends considerable time travelling upward before anyone is comfortable signing off on it."

The Art of the Brief: Saying Everything Without Recommending Anything Awkward

The primary output of the public service is the ministerial brief – a document that informs the minister of a situation, outlines the options available, and recommends a course of action with the careful diplomatic precision of someone who knows their recommendation may be ignored, their analysis may be leaked, and their document may appear as an exhibit in a future parliamentary inquiry into why things went wrong.

The ministerial brief has a structure evolved over decades: executive summary (one page, written last, read first), background (comprehensive, assumes the minister has not been briefed on this before, even if they have), options analysis (usually three options, the first of which is clearly inadequate, the third of which is clearly excessive, and the second of which the department actually wants), and recommendation (stated with appropriate tentativeness, qualified with appropriate caveats, and followed by a financial implication note that nobody reads until it becomes a problem).

The email that accompanies the brief says: "Please find attached our advice on the above matter. Happy to discuss at your convenience." The email that the department sends internally after the minister ignores the advice and does the thing the brief recommended against is not archived under the Freedom of Information Act, technically.

Canberra: The City Built Specifically to House This Operation

The Australian Public Service is concentrated in Canberra – the purpose-built national capital located in the Australian Capital Territory, approximately equidistant from Sydney and Melbourne, in a position specifically chosen to prevent either city from having the capital. Canberra was designed by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who won an international competition in 1912 with a plan of such geometric elegance and practical ambition that it took forty years to implement and still has streets that curve for reasons only fully legible from the air.

The city is home to approximately 450,000 people, a significant proportion of whom work for the government, work for organisations that work for the government, or work for organisations that work for organisations that advise the government on whether its other advisors are advising it correctly. The consulting sector in Canberra is, by any reasonable measure, operating in ideal conditions: an institutional client with an inexhaustible need for external validation of internal recommendations, a procurement process that favours established firms, and a political cycle that regularly produces reviews of previous reviews.

Canberra’s other notable features include excellent coffee, a surprising number of good restaurants, the National Gallery, the War Memorial, and a collective disposition toward the phrase "on notice" that distinguishes it from every other Australian city.

The Machinery of Government Changes: Musical Chairs at Scale

Every incoming government conducts a "machinery of government" review – a process by which departments are renamed, merged, split, or reshuffled to reflect the new government’s priorities and to give the incoming ministry a set of departments that correspond, broadly, to their portfolio responsibilities. This process is undertaken at considerable expense, produces new letterheads, new email signatures, new org charts, and new intranet homepages, and has no discernible effect on the actual functions performed by the 170,000 people doing them.

The staff of the former Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, which became the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, which became the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, which became the Department of Industry, Science and Technology, greet each machinery of government change with the serene equanimity of people who have updated their email signatures before and will update them again and whose actual work remains, across all iterations, the issuing of grants to small and medium enterprises in regional Australia.

For coverage of bureaucracies that persist regardless of which party is nominally in charge of them, The London Prat’s Whitehall dispatches – prat.uk – document the British version, in which the same institutional arrangements have survived every government since 1854 and several that would have preferred they hadn’t.

See also The Daily Mash on the question of whether the civil service runs the government or merely appears to while the government runs itself into things.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com