Chapter 1 : Overview
As Public Service Commissioner, one of my key roles is to respond to issues of public trust in the bureaucracy. Any such response should include fostering the right kind of leadership, providing credible evaluation and benchmarking to underpin strategic responses, and celebrating public sector achievements.
The public service’s identity and its reputation are matters of substance. They affect how public servants feel about working in the APS and about their agencies. They affect the readiness of the community to embrace government programmes and initiatives and to trust that government tax-funded services will be delivered fairly. They affect our international reputation. And, in the long run, they affect our ability to recruit quality people into the public service.
Public servants should take pride in being part of an important national institution that supports Australia’s democratic system of government, in which we are bound by a common ethos of public service. The work we do makes a significant contribution to the social and economic health of Australia and to the well-being of the Australian community.
The environment public servants operate in is complex and challenging. Nevertheless, the Government, the Parliament and the Australian people have high expectations of us. They expect that we will do our duty properly, exercise good judgment, and work efficiently and effectively for outcomes that are in the national interest.
In doing so, public servants are supported by the APS Values (the Values) and are required by law to behave at all times in ways that uphold the Values and the integrity and good reputation of the APS. Our Values are fundamental to our identity and to how we are perceived by the community and internationally, and are important in building trust in the APS as an institution.
The annual State of the Service report is part of a process of understanding our identity and of building trust in the APS. The evaluation process is not simply about providing realistic data and analysis concerning the state of the APS: the review process itself should become part of building public servants’ trust in the APS and internalising its values. This is because trust is linked intrinsically to how organisations and people behave—their competence, honesty, whether or not they work in the public interest, act on undertakings, listen to others’ views and learn from their mistakes.
It is critical that we all listen to what Government, agencies and other APS employees have to say and consider the implications of the data collected each year. Eighty-two agencies provided responses to our survey in 2004–05, and heads of nearly all of the agencies large enough to participate in the State of the Service employee survey (those with at least 100 employees) actively supported the survey process. Public servants have provided us with a more than credible response rate (59%) to confirm the reliability of our data.
This level of responsiveness across the public service gives us ground to hope that this annual evaluation process itself is becoming part of the larger picture, building commitment to the APS and its goals, ensuring that the goals themselves are clear and widely understood, and that the public service is accountable.
Beyond this, it is important for all of us to increase our understanding of how the APS and individual agencies sit in terms of broader inter-jurisdictional and international benchmarks of organisational performance. This year we have introduced inter- jurisdictional comparisons based on a limited set of shared data items agreed through the Public Service Commissioners’ conference. I am hoping that the number of comparable data items will be able to be extended in future.
We have also introduced a practice of referring in the course of our analysis to relevant international developments, in order to present developments in the APS within a broader framework of continuous public administration reform. The intention here is not to suggest that developments either in Australia or overseas should be taken as a template for reform in other jurisdictions. That would be to ignore the different composition of the public services in different jurisdictions, as well as different government philosophies and approaches to public sector management (such as the more devolved and agency-focused arrangements in the APS). Nevertheless, there is value in understanding Australian developments, such as the recent emphasis on whole of government collaboration and e-government, in the context of responses to similar issues by other jurisdictions.
While this is far from being a formal benchmarking exercise, and while Australia is often and fairly judged to be a leader in public sector reform, it is worth observing that we appear to be trailing other jurisdictions in a few areas. There may of course be lags between articulated policy and actual implementation in other jurisdictions, just as there are such lags here, but I suspect that in some areas our progress is simply constrained by the resources available to fund it.
A significant part of building trust—both public trust and trust in ourselves—is that we recognise the achievements of public sector agencies in the State of the Service report. While many people cite the Palmer report, how many Australians know of our achievements? How many Australians know that the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) has driven the development of the world’s anti-doping code in sport; that DIMIA delivered the biggest migration programme since the 1980s; that Customs has been involved in some of the largest ever detections of illicit drugs and prohibited and restricted goods; or that the DVA is the second biggest insurer of medical services in the country?
As part of our State of the Service data collection, we have asked Management Advisory Committee (MAC)1 member agencies to provide us with their own assessment of their major achievements for 2004–05. A number of these are cited throughout this report as case studies; an overview is provided at Chapter 13, ‘Agency Achievements’.
1 The Management Advisory Committee (MAC) is a forum of Secretaries and Agency Heads established under section 64 of the Act to advise the Australian Government on matters relating to the management of the APS. It is chaired by the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), with the Commissioner as executive officer.
