Professor Glyn Davis’ vision of public sector reform is taking shape, with the PM&C secretary explaining that achieving better government services will require public servants to shake free of the compulsion to take the lead in coming up with solutions. The shift will also be a learning curve for political masters as well.
Davis used the 2023 address to the APS, hosted by IPAA ACT and delivered by the head of Prime Minister & Cabinet each year, to explain that knowing what services were best (be they provided by government, contracted out, or a mix of both), required judgment and evidence.
It was in this context — where the public sector ecosystem rather than the lone public service rises to meet community needs — that Davis declared a “whole new world” of different structures, practices and accountabilities would become the norm.
The future of public administration, he said, would be characterised by so-called ‘place-based’ services.
“A place-based approach asks the community to lead; it says ‘it isn’t the government that makes these decisions, it’s the community, and the government falls in behind the community and backs the community’,” Davis said.
“That rhetoric sounds great until you think about consequences for how we do accountability, how do we count, what are our results, how we do our auditing?
“And yet, it is clearly going to be an important part of the future because it does things that fail elsewhere,” he said.
The APS boss pointed to an Aboriginal community-led initiative in Bourke, NSW, known as the Maranguka project, which aimed to lower disproportionately high incarceration rates.
Adapted from a US model, the concept of the Just Reinvest program relies on the support of the state government to agree to redirect cost savings that would have otherwise gone towards locking up offenders, and invest them in other areas of need identified by the community.
Davis said the success of the program required the community to reckon with the flow-on effects of domestic violence. Dealing with this one issue and facing up to the problem, had a positive effect on other areas such as keeping young people off the streets, and school attendance rates.
“The NSW government, to their immense credit, agreed to back the program, and it’s had extraordinary results,” Davis said
“It allowed the community to face up to some really difficult issues that were of its own making, of which domestic violence was the key. By making changes they halved the rate of domestic violence … which, in turn, has produced the savings program promised.
“[Maranguka] only works because the NSW government agreed not to lead but to follow; [agreed] not to impose the standard public sector accountability over the top, but to put funds in and allow the community to make decisions, including bad decisions.”
In addition to shifting public service culture when it came to program delivery, Davis said projects like the Just Reinvest one needed a political step change too.
Ministers had to be prepared to let go of the performative formula where they arrived in a community and announced significant investments based on ideas inspired by their own policy preferences.
“That is going to be part of our future — it’s not going to be everything but it’s going to be a significant part of the future, and none of our current systems are well-geared to that,” Davis said.
“It is another part of where the public services have to go. Government has to learn how to follow and not to lead.
“It’s an approach that makes public servants truly servants of the public,” he said.
Designing and delivering citizen-centred approaches was another prevailing theme of future government services, the secretary noted.
Professor Davis said traditional public administration models did not align simply with a place-based citizen approach because this new way did not fit neatly with existing auditing, accounting and results-tracking templates.
“Yet, empowered communities provide a really vital way to address consistent program failure, as [the example in Bourke] showed,” Davis said.
“We will never close the gap if we imagine the public servants in Canberra think we can solve the housing, health, employment and education challenges of Central Australia.”
The 2023 review of myGov, and work underway in digital identity were examples of how APS citizen-centred service delivery could shine, Davis said.
But the reality of public administration in these cases was not always perfect, and the reality was that bureaucratic processing — like getting through for phone support — was still “way too long”.
“The options opened by technology and public expectations about what good service delivery looks like, suggest that any future practice, our future practice, will be a hybrid. I think a synthesis looms,” Davis said.
“One expects [there] might form long-term alliances [between the public service, private industry and NFPs] around shared program responsibilities, with evaluation guiding further investment.
“This emerging public administration will pay close attention to private sector innovation — and I saw this at Services Australia, which has learned a lot about online delivery from industry, and also from the states and territories, which is in front of the commonwealth in this area.”
“It adopts lessons to the better management of claims and benefits, which is great because better service remains the goal,” he said.
The efforts of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to continuously improve the way people filled out what were once complex forms with pre-populated information that had been saved the last time a citizen lodged a return was another example of this kind of commitment to innovation.
Davis said he had met with design teams in the ATO’s Sydney office, and marveled at the public servant’s achievement. He told the IPAA ACT audience that the complexity of the problem the ATO solved, and the solution its people implemented with “remarkable little friction” was an impressive piece of public service innovation he expected all agencies would be able to replicate in their own way moving forward.
“We’re going to do lots of improvements on existing services, ‘cause we can,” Davis said.
“Here is our opportunity to support citizens through their lives in ways that resonate with enduring APS values — through services we already produce, and those to follow — a commitment to Australians that the APS will be proud to call our own.
“There is much to ponder, and quite a bit to celebrate as this year concludes, and even more to explore with relish in 2024,” he added.
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