"Machinery of government" is a curious phrase. At worst it has sinister overtones, the underlying workings of a dystopian fantasy. At best it elicits the image of a Theo Janssen Strandbeest - an awkward and gangly concoction with limbs aplenty, that somehow manages to move in a harmony that drives the whole thing forward.
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In practice, the machinery of government is more like whatever contraption underlies the clown game at a carnival. The heads turn to see where they are getting their next ball from, and there’s always a couple that are broken.
To the uninitiated, machinery of government defines how the roles and responsibilities are divided among departments. The merging of AusAID into DFAT is such a change. The process is referred to in the public service as “moggings” - MoG, of course being the acronym, although as a verb it sounds like something that might happen to you out the back of Mooseheads on a Friday night.
Moggings usually follow a change of government and are among the first ways to interpret how the new leader sees the world. In this case we are told the changes are about ''simplification'' and improving efficiency which suggests the new government has been casting a careful and impartial eye on the internal flow of policy making. Imagine our surprise then, to find that many of the responsibilities that have shifted - such as Environment, Border Protection and Foreign Aid - were all policy areas that the new government campaigned on. Does somebody need to tell the new Prime Minister that simply taking “Climate Change”, “Broadband” and “Science” out of the list of departmental names, and perhaps even downsizing the numbers of people who work on them doesn’t mean that those issues will go away? Or even that the overall opinions of public servants towards them will change?
However, the new Prime Minister does deserve credit for respecting the traditions of the public service. He understands that before you can dismantle a department or retire a secretary who worked for your opponent two decades ago, your first duty in mogging is to find a new home for the Arts portfolio. People who think mogging is about politics will tell you that Arts is always given to a minister who wants to attend a lot of red carpets and gallery openings. But the biggest actual benefit of having Arts within the portfolio is a massive and immediate upgrade to morning teas and the annual Christmas Party. The Attorney-General’s Department is certainly a good fit for that makeover, and will finally have a use for the shiny karaoke rooms in their new building. Concerns have been raised that Arts may struggle to get the attention of a minister who also covers the national espionage infrastructure. But we prefer to think that Australia now finally has the infrastructure in place to make a national push for Hugh Jackman to take on the mantle of 007.
Recently Arts has been attached to the political football, pun intended, of Sport. That now sits within the Health portfolio which must now find ways to ensure kids get jabbed with needles and athletes don’t. They will also oversee the 2015 AFC Cup, although on recent form it is likely that Sport will have moved on by then.
The final stage of mogging is double checking the name changes and what that means for acronyms, email addresses and letterheads. Many public service conversations this week have been devoted to the hunt for the least pronounceable or rudest acronym (may you rest in peace DIICCSRTE, holder of both crowns under the previous government). Early favourites for most ridiculous are the Department of Immigration and Border Protection or “DIBP” which sounds like the noise a Coalition frog might make or the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, whose acronym sounds like... well, let’s not pick on regional Australia.
In totality, the mogging process is a long and drawn out one. Many a neglected APS 6 will pine for the process to happen whilst their EL1 is still on the leave they took during caretaker, resulting in the EL not being able to defend their window-seat in the administrative maelstrom that follows. It doesn’t work like that unfortunately, or fortunately. Decisions take time to filter down, and by the time change is implemented, the EL1 will have secured their spot and already be on their next tranche of annual leave.
Beyond the cheap laughs though, there’s a humanity that’s sometimes neglected when a PM decides that it’s time to shuffle portfolios around their office whiteboard. From the outside, amogging results in a few superficial changes to stationary and the laborious task of shifting an IT backend. Inside departments though, they create anxiety about work plans, career paths and possible departmental reassignment. The slowdown in house purchases prior to an election is natural, but not because public servant buyers are skittish about the political climate. They just don't want to watch the ink dry on their sale on a house in Tuggeranong, close to their department, only to be comprehensively mogged and presented with a commute to another building in faraway Belconnen - or worse, Gosford.
Mogging is not all bad, it is necessary to adapt in order to have appropriate staffing for the policy platform of the new government and the reshuffling of the deck has probably kick-started more careers than it is ended. And of course, organisational change is not unique to the public service. But more than a few public servants this week are struggling to reconcile these apparently political and ideological changes with the seemingly notional idea that their job is to serve in the public interest.
The Cubicle Brothers are two young public servants who toil at a department near you.
