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Last updated: : 31 August 2007
Note for file: A report on recordkeeping in the Australian Public Service
‘Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee’ (or why it’s important to keep good records)
Dr Peter Shergold, Secretary,
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Canberra, 31 August 2007
National Archives
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here this morning. In my capacity as the Chair of the Management Advisory Committee (MAC) I am delighted to launch today our eighth Report. It’s on recordkeeping in the APS. It’s called Note for File.
I hope you will forgive me if I spice up my contribution by giving my speech a new title: namely, “Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee”.
For anyone who has missed the media in the last few days let me explain. These words of juvenility represent the unexpected contribution allegedly made by a member of my department to the continuously updated record of the online information source on everything, Wikipedia. The entry, to which it contributed, so I am informed, referred to fist boxing amongst monks – not a topic on which I have had to brief the Prime Minister with any great regularity.
As it turns out the submission, or at least its provenance, was incorrect. The creation and maintenance of records is important in part because it helps us to attribute specificity and context to the contribution of particular individuals and significance to particular dates. It is because such records are kept, that I can say with certainty that since early 2005 the electronic address owned by my department has in fact been allocated from us to another customer by our internet provider. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was not the one what done it!
Eager to proclaim our innocence, I made clear to the media on Friday that this was the case. I followed this up with a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald which has been running the story with extravagant flair and enthusiasm, unbridled by the need to establish the facts. Disappointingly they have failed to publish my correction. Nevertheless I have preserved my record of that letter and I assure Ross Gibbs (Director of the National Archives) that it will be placed with his venerable institution for posterity.
Meanwhile the story will live on in the mythology of Wikipedia. Indeed if you now to visit their site and type in “poo bum dicky wee wee” you will immediately be redirected to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. To the Sydney Morning Herald, who began this story and then failed to end it, I have only five words. I think you can guess them.
This musing on the challenges of locating truth in the digital age brings me to the importance of records. Like Ross, I truly enjoy records. That, I surmise, comes from my days as an academic historian. I loved visiting archives and opening the boxes of unexpected treasures, perusing with affection the old papers, basking in their musty smell and rejoicing in the sense of connectedness with the past.
Records offer not just unexpected finds but the opportunity to use them in unexpected ways. The final research that I undertook as an academic was to sift through thousands of the indents of convicts transported to New South Wales between 1790 and 1830. They contained an array of information on each convict that arrived in Port Jackson. With a colleague I was able to use those records for quite a different purpose from that for which they had been collected. For each convict that arrived there was recorded their date of birth and their height. As economic historians, Steve Nicholas and I were able to take more than 30,000 of those records, transcribe them into electronic form, plot how heights had changed over a 40 year period and then hypothesise the relationship to British nutritional standards. We were also able to examine where a person had been born and where they had committed their crime, thereby constructing a picture of internal migration in United Kingdom in the pre-industrial era. No scribe, carefully recording such information in the early nineteenth-century, could have envisaged how these indents might be used in the future.
In the last 20 years, since leaving university life, my relationship to records has changed profoundly. I now use records day in, day out. They are central to the life of a public servant. Today I not only peruse records but create, manage and archive them. It brings a rather different perspective – one from which this MAC publication is so important. It is a report that responds to a need to assist public servants in the essential task of managing the official records of the Commonwealth of Australia – our records.
The records for which we are responsible take many forms. They can be written or typed on paper. They can consist of photographs, film or sound recordings. They can be electronic, email, or even SMS. The value of a record doesn’t lie in the format: it lies, as this report shows, in its content, its scarcity and the context within which it was created.
Records have always been essential to the tasks of a public servant. They are the lubricant of bureaucratic endeavour. I remember enjoying an opportunity to go to dinner with Sir William Deane when he was Governor General. He said, in his welcoming remarks, that one of the first jobs he had as a young man (I think it was his only experience of working in the public service) was working in the ‘Office of Triplicates’. He noted that he had no idea of what happened to the primary and secondary records but it was his responsibility to look after the carbon copies, once removed. Such was the life of a clerical assistant.
I don’t want to pretend that managing records was ever a simple task for which public servants had an instinctive talent. Sir Paul Hasluck (who, too, became Governor General) wrote an account of his early years in the Department of External Affairs from 1941 to 1947. Life was obviously a little different in those days. He wrote:
“At the far end on the right was the Secretary’s office, occupied by Lieutenant Colonel William Roy Hodgson and his dog. The External Affairs record keeping system was badly designed and the index to files was a strange compilation in the much-thumbed handwritten journal. When we were working up towards the Allied Intervention in Syria in June 1941, Hodgson asked me one day to prepare some material in a hurry and I called for the files only to be told there was nothing on the subject. I reminded them of the dozen or more highly-classified telegrams that had been received during the past week. They searched in vain and then said Mrs So and so must have been looking after those papers and as she was only part time she would not be in until the afternoon. When she appeared she produced the papers in an instant in a file headed ‘Tasmania’. She said she could not find Syria in the index of files but one of the boys told her it was a town in Tasmania so that was where she put it.”
In such circumstances each professional officer had a tendency to accumulate a little private hoard of papers of his own. These squirrel archivists seldom had safes or cabinets so secret papers were stuck in all sort of unlikely locations. Apparently the favourite place was under a desktop blotting pad.
In the years since Sir Paul’s experience we have made many advances, but the management of records is still not perfect. Meantime, the need to ‘note for file’ has expanded as the breadth and complexity of government responsibility has grown. Public services – and, indeed, business and community organisations - are producing many more records. In the APS more time is now spent in creating and managing records. Greater challenges are faced in implementing effective records management practices than ever before.
The volume of records has increased. Back in 1978‑79, my department handled 65,000 pieces of correspondence addressed to the Prime Minister. In the last financial year it had risen to 185,000. During that same twelve month period we provided more than 7,500 briefs to the Prime Minister and coordinated 1,500 Cabinet submissions or minutes. Most of those records had a rich documentary history, captured in layers of supportive evidence. All need to be managed so that they can be retrieved and examined as required.
The challenges inherent to record-keeping have grown in part as a result of the increase in the number of policy issues for which public servants are responsible and in part because of the rising expectations of the public with regard to transacting business or communicating with government. It is also attributable to the ease by which records are created, particularly through email. In 1987 (when I entered the Public Service) PM&C didn’t have an email system. Even in 2003, PM&C possessed less than 100 gigabytes of email data, which equates to 22 DVDs or about 69 000 floppy disks. Today PM&C has 730 gigabytes of email data, which equates to 156 DVDs or about 500 000 floppy disks. Now on occasion we can capture a minute by minute record of policy being negotiated, developed, implemented and amended. We can watch it happening, on our desktop screens, in real time. We can preserve it for posterity.
These electronic records present new challenges: what should be created, what retained and how should they be preserved? As I have said on an earlier occasion, we must ensure that we don’t suffer, either through lack of planning or of commitment, digital amnesia. But nor do we want to store e-dross.
As the volume and forms of records have increased over the decades so have the legal obligations and accountability requirements which public servants have to satisfy. We operate within a network of integrity, in which our records are subject to examination in ways unimaginable to earlier generations of public servants. The Auditor General and the Ombudsman can access our records. So, too, courts and tribunals, aided by legislation designed to provide administrative review of decision-making and afford considerable freedom of information to those affected. Records also assist parliamentary committees to question how, why and by what authority we acted.
So how can we meet these demands? The report I am launching contains a wealth of good advice on managing our recordkeeping obligation and looking after our records as valuable assets. It’s not just about enabling others to scrutinise our actions. We need to recognise that the way in which we manage records has a significant impact on improving productivity: we, not just our critics, need to know (or remember) exactly who made decisions, when and on what basis.
But it is important that we are able to distinguish between the records we need to maintain and trivia and duplication. This report makes it clear that not every record must be kept. If we think about our email traffic, we realise that much of the material we receive and send deals with matters of fleeting interest and minor importance that would in the past have been dealt with by phone calls or face to face conversation that did not warrant (or result in) a written record. We should not be cluttering our records with such material.
MAC’s message must not be misinterpreted. There is no suggestion that MAC encourages public servants not to maintain written records because they are sensitive or potentially embarrassing to ourselves or government. Nor is MAC proposing that we seek out and destroy records that may in the future provide a clearer understanding of Australia’s politics, history, society, culture and people. Rather the report states clearly that the preservation of such records must be one of our primary objectives. I don’t want to suggest to the media, by any oral shorthand, that public servants seek furtively to kick over the traces, intending to hide from the present or the future the actions of governments or the officials who serve them.
It is vital that we retain the records that will enable us to meet our legal obligations, to be answerable and accountable and to provide business continuity. Records may be important because of their content. They may be significant because of the context they provide to decisions. They may be of value because no other copies exist. But we do need to exercise judgement. We need to decide whether, and for how long, a record is worth keeping. Just because a record has been created does not mean that it needs to be retained. Just because it has been managed does not mean it needs to be preserved.
We need to make it easier for public servants to exercise their judgement. In a moment the Director-General of the National Archives will talk to us about new approaches that have been developed to assist us. His starting point is that if recordkeeping is to be conducted effectively, it must not be an unreasonable burden either on a person’s time or technical ability.
Electronic recordkeeping systems are being introduced and will be an essential feature of future recordkeeping, but they need to be introduced with care after appropriate testing and thorough education. The last thing we want to do is to build a Virtual Office for the electronic preservation of email triplicates.
We need to know that when records are judged to be of low value they are not unnecessarily retained. We need to ensure that when records, though once useful, no longer fulfil a business need or legislative requirement, they can be destroyed. And we need to be able to exercise our judgements quickly. I understand that the National Archives are now examining a one-step, straight forward process to obtain a records disposal authority. This should halve the time presently taken. I welcome this initiative.
The report recommends that good recordkeeping practices should be an element of the performance appraisal of public servants and a means of assessing the corporate health of the organisation in which they work. If we are going to take recordkeeping seriously that is an important proposal. Just as financial and human resource management are taken into account in the overall performance of officials, so too should their observance of sound recordkeeping practices. It is part of the managerial behaviours that we expect to be displayed. It is integral to good governance.
Note for File goes to the heart of how we protect and enhance our reputation as professional public servants. Good recordkeeping practices are central to the quality of our work. I am proud to launch this eighth MAC report. I urge all public servants to act on the messages it contains.
