Public Sector Informant: An open letter to Glyn Davis

We apologise for the familiarity but we feel we know you very well. You have been around so long in our world. As Education bureaucrats we watched in awe and mild trepidation as you completely revamped the University of Melbourne's degree structure. A truly astonishing feat (academics are the most forensic, and toughest, of critics). As teachers of public policy, we have been using your Australian Policy Handbook for more than a decade. As the head of ANZSOG's Research Committee in 2020 you launched the book Learning Policy, Doing Policy edited by two of us. We have listened to talks you have given as CEO of the Ramsay foundation on inequality and disadvantage in Australia. The list goes on and on.

We know that your latest gig, as head of PM&C, is going to be pretty rough. Maybe not the toughest - there is a good argument that running a university is tougher than leading the APS - but no doubt the next few years are going to be "challenging".

You have deep knowledge and experience for leading the APS. In particular as a member of the 2019 Thodey review you and also Gordon de Brouwer (now secretary for public sector reform) are well across the urgent need for APS reform to address the decline of analytic and policy capability.

Despite your knowledge and experience you are both going to get copious advice as to how to revitalise the APS.

We, however, have a different message to what you are likely to hear from others. We consider that at the heart of the matter is the decline in public service agency over the last 20 years. The instruction from above to "just do as your told" and "just deliver" has led to micro-control of agencies, as well as public servants unrewarded for initiative and proactive advice. This means public service agency - the basis of good policy advice and effective implementation - has been eroded.

By public service agency, we mean the inherent capacity of public servants-and their organisations-to influence the formulation and implementation of government policies.

As we have written in these pages before, public servants exercise a form of agency that is: baked in - it is inherent in the modern state; morally neutral - there are examples of both 'good' and 'bad' public service agency; malleable - it can be deployed where and how governments need it, but can also be distorted and misdirected; and not necessarily 'zero sum' - it can be deployed without necessarily undermining the agency of others, including ministers.

This form of agency resonates with the metaphor of public administration as network captured in the Thodey review: in your words, a public sector that is "a complex arrangement of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, a web of connections linking public and private partners around shared programs."

In our experience, partnership between public servants and their ministers has long been an integral component of public service agency. Indeed, ministers who achieved significant reform have been known to acknowledge this privately to senior public servants. The innovative policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic sharply displayed such partnership, with public servants standing beside ministers and fielding questions in media conferences and public servants talking directly to cabinet about options that would not have been considered in another time and place.

The public service has agency by virtue of the place it occupies in the life of the nation. Cheered on by theorists championing 'public choice' models of government, there have been many efforts to suppress that agency. But public sector agency will emerge in one form or another, and the risk for those who try to keep the lid on it is that it will curdle into something corrosive of good governance. Would 'Robodebt' have happened, for example, if more active agency had been exercised by public servants with direct experience of the perils of relying on automated data matching for debt raising purposes?

We argue that public service agency is best directed primarily at supporting and enhancing the agency of others. Obviously this includes ministers and the parliament. Less obvious are the broader community: program recipients and stakeholders, interest groups, civil society, other levels of government and citizens in general.

What does all this mean in practice? What would we see if agency was encouraged as a cardinal set of behaviours and skills?

Firstly, the Secretaries Board would take the lead, since this is the institution that can bring about powerful change in the exercise of agency.

Secondly, we would see people talking about it and the power, influence and significance of the public service in our polity. Traditionally, if it is ever mentioned within the public service, agency is usually seen as a negative, something to be regulated, controlled, minimised, not a force to be harnessed and directed. Senior public servants are aware that they exercise agency but are reluctant even post-career to talk about it, given the portrayal of Westminster as a system where public servants advise, ministers decide. The current research attention to the positive contribution of government (called "positive public administration") hopefully will enable public servant agency to be more widely recognised.

Thirdly, public servants need to expect and notice that agency is rewarded. This is where the rubber hits the road. Like anyone, public servants tend to do what's rewarded. If they exercise some agency - especially if it is aimed at promoting the agency of someone else - that needs to be noted and commended. In our teaching contacts with young public servants, we have observed high levels of energy and enthusiasm about the opportunity to contribute to public policy. However, over time many public servants come to feel disempowered, and stay hunkered down in the bunker of administrivia or, at best, do what they can in a small, local way. It would make a huge difference for public servants to know that if they have an idea, it would be listened to and even acted upon. The early signs that new ministers are encouraging public servants to challenge them and to be creative will facilitate an active partnership, if it is sustained.

And small things matter, in establishing agency in the institutional culture. Senior officers who bring junior colleagues along to important meetings and give them the opportunity to speak. Front line managers who make the time to engage with the local community to find out how services can be better delivered. Evaluators who offer their findings and expertise to colleagues working on policy development or program delivery. Middle managers who take their teams to visit (virtually or in person) organisations who deliver programs they fund and manage. Branch heads who facilitate the work of auditors or the Ombudsman's Office rather than obfuscate and impede. All of these things happen at times, but they need to happen much more.

Fourthly, agency needs to be studied, measured and reported on. We need to understand better where the balance sits in the exercise of agency, and how to nurture the requisite skills and good judgement. Evidence and data on this area, such as Mackie's groundbreaking research on federal environment policy-making, are scant. As 'pracademics' we have developed a survey instrument and plan a series of interviews and focus groups to gather baseline information on public servants' views and experiences of their professional agency. There is a real opportunity to build on such work and to employ the annual State of the Service survey to ascertain the scale and the nature and extent of agency within the APS. This would allow the Secretaries Board to judge whether agency is growing and how well it is being deployed.

Finally, public service agency can help with the governance of the nation. We now have an extremely diverse parliament, with a large cross bench hungry for policy information. The history of governments that need to manage an upper house minority shows the value of having policy-informed and articulate officials who can provide briefings and information to the cross benches on topical policy issues.

We know you have a lot to do. By making the agency of the public service a key touchstone of your actions, we consider that you would greatly improve the energy, capability and happiness of an APS that actively contributes to an effective Australian democracy.