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Proof Committee Hansard
Senate Select Committee on a certain maritime incident
Thursday, 18 April 2002 Canberra
The Public Service Commissioner, Andrew Podger, participated in a round table discussion before the Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident on 18 April 2002.
He participated in the round table with Vice Admiral (Rtd) Sir Richard Peek, Associate Professor Hugh Smith, School of Politics, Australian Defence Academy, Ms Ann-Maree Tiernan, Senior Research Assistant, School of Politics, Griffith University, Dr John Uhr, Senior Fellow, Political Science Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, and Professor Patrick Weller, Deputy Director, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University.
The Commissioner's opening statement to the Committee follows. The statement is an extract from the Proof Committee Hansard and a full version of the proof copy may be accessed at http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s5440.pdf
CMI 1192
Mr PODGER-I am the Public Service Commissioner. I had also been a secretary of department for about eight years before that and have worked in the public sector for the last 30 years. I was, at one stage, President of the ACT Division of the IPAA.
CMI 1201-04
CHAIR-Mr Podger, would you like to say a few words?
Mr PODGER-If I may, I would like to say a few things. The first point in your note to us was about sound practice in public administration. I thought it might be useful to make a few comments about that in the light of the Public Service Act 1999. There has been a major shift over the last 20 years in devolving authority to agency heads and away from a central body of the Public Service Board and away from prescriptive rules in the Public Service Act. The provisions in the act now are around values and a code of conduct. There are some people who view those as aspirational things that you put on the wall and you hope people think about. But I want to make it clear that it is a lot more than that. The values and the code of conduct are in the law. They are in sections 10 and 13 of our act. There are obligations in the act on agency heads to uphold and promote the values and to ensure that there is compliance with the code of conduct, and the Public Service Commission has an evaluation role in its functions on both those scores. The Public Service & Merit Protection Commission has put out some guidance on these things in terms of a document on values, and there are directions on each of the values.
We are currently looking closely at the guidelines on official conduct and bringing them up to date under the act. What I would expect agency heads to have in their own arrangements to ensure that the values are being abided by and the code of conduct complied with are in their chief executive instructions, in their governance arrangements, their various decision making processes within the organisations, their various plans, their performance management system and accountabilities and in their training and development. The values and the code of conduct, if you like, set out what is the institution of the Public Service, the relationships between the Public Service and government and between the Public Service and the public, workplace relations and the personal behavioural points expected of public servants in the Public Service, including their personal ethics.
The second thing I want to raise that was in your letter was about the Public Service and ministerial office arrangements. Pat Weller mentioned that there has been a swing of the pendulum over the last 25 years or so, and I think that is absolutely right. One of the major themes of the Coombs royal commission back in the 1970s was that the Public Service was not responsive enough to the elected government. I note that Prime Minister Howard in mid-1996 when he released the then values for the service made a comment about how much he appreciated the shift from when he had previously been a minister in the responsiveness of the service and its working relationships with ministers' offices.
I think behind the scenes what has been happening is, while the service has indeed become more responsive to the elected government, as it should have been, the relationship has become more complicated, partly I suspect because of the increased pressures of communications in the modern world and the media that require ministers to have more support in their being able to respond immediately to anything and everything and the role of the service being to provide depth and a longer term perspective in the interaction. That interaction has become more complicated. The response has been both to increase the size of ministers offices and also that departments have to change their own ways in order to be able to help respond to that pressure.
In the relations between the Public Service and the government there are particular values that should be drawn out. The first ones are the traditional ones about what is the Public Service as an institution. The first value is about being an apolitical, impartial and professional Public Service. The fifth value is about being accountable. The sixth one is about being responsive to government, and there is also a value about results and performance, which I think also has a major impact on relationship.
If I turn to the code of conduct, there are a number of points in that which are particularly relevant. The first one I draw your attention to is that the public servants are required to comply with all applicable laws. This is not a trivial point. It means that, apart from the Public Service Act, there is financial legislation, there is a whole barrier of administrative law. Most agencies have their own legislative provisions that they must abide by. That governs a great deal of the relationship between the Public Service and the ministers.
There is a provision in the code of conduct about confidentiality, an essential one which refers to confidentiality not only with the minister but also with the minister's office, and that goes to the need for trust between the service and a minister and the minister's office. There is also a code of conduct provision about the proper use of resources, which also can have a major impact on the relationship between a department and a minister and his office.
There is some tension between the values, and we should recognise that. The value about being apolitical, impartial and professional does not actually say we are independent. If we took that value on its own to an extreme, we would have major problems about responsiveness of the service to the government of the day. I also note that the responsiveness value actually includes within it the terms 'frankness', 'accuracy', 'comprehensiveness' and 'honesty'-that is, if we are truly responsive to the government of the day we have got to be careful that we understand that a short term responsiveness to meet an immediate apparent requirement is not being responsive if we fail to give the frank and more detailed advice that is necessary and with full accuracy.
I would like to say a couple of things on the relationship with ministers' offices. I mentioned that we are looking at the guidelines on official conduct. The current guidelines are very brief on the relationship, and I think this is an area we need to expand upon to clarify for public servants their relationship with ministers. The issue of trust is important to get the relationship working and I would see that, therefore, the relationship has got to be professional and cooperative. But we need to remember the basic line of authority-that is, that staff are responsible to agency heads, who are responsible to ministers.
In this context, you need to have a close relationship, but the minister's office is not there as a power to direct. The minister needs an office there to help in the process and to handle the scale of activity, and by nature there will be a lot of relationships between the minister's office and the staff of an organisation. But I think we do need to clarify that, in law, there is no power to direct. The relationships are between the staff and their secretary and between the secretary and the minister. Obviously, in making that relationship work, staff would normally expect that, when they are dealing with a minister's office, they will know what the minister is saying, that they will understand the requirements and that this approach will work very easily and properly. But I think there is a need within each agency to clarify the protocols of the relationship. If there are things that are uncertain, when can you escalate these issues up the line to the point where a secretary might need to talk to a minister at a certain stage if there are real uncertainties about the advice being passed between a minister's office and the staff of an organisation? I also believe that it is probably good practice, when public servants are providing advice, that any written advice should be addressed to the minister, albeit it will go to a minister's office. It might be dealt with by a minister's adviser, but I think the important relationship of authority needs to be abided by.
On the issue of codes of conduct for ministerial advisers, that is outside my specific jurisdiction but I would make a couple of points which may be relevant. As I have mentioned, the Public Service Act has a set of values and a code of conduct in it. There is, in fact, also a Parliamentary Service Act-and I am also the Parliamentary Service Commissioner-and it also has a set of values and a code of conduct. There are particular areas of difference between the two sets, recognising, in particular, the different lines of accountability that the two sets have. In my view, there is a case for some articulation of the values and code of conduct of ministerial officers. Whether that should be in legislation or somewhere else, I have no view. It may simply be an issue of some statements from the Prime Minister or something of that sort, but I think it would be of some assistance if there were some approach there to clarifying the principles.
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