Governments need watchdogs and public service needs reform

I had to read it several times. But this was not for being challenged by the novelty of its exposition or of the recommendations it made. It was for the patient and very firm reiteration of classic words about the duty of governments and officials to the public interest. These are concepts that have seemed novel in Canberra in recent years, particularly in the unlamented days of Scott Morrison. His poor leadership may have set the example, but ministers were quick to copy, and so, I regret to say, did many administrators in the public service.

Now that we have a new government, claiming to be determined to restore value and integrity into public administration, many public servants will be fervently declaring that they had always believed in the classic values, but were restrained by the politicians. Alas that is untrue, or, if it is, those unable to carry out their duty were not - are not - of a calibre worth retaining. The truth is that many senior leaders in the public service think openness, accountability and the overriding duty of stewardship of public assets is an unnecessary burden. A bit like equal opportunity, distaste for bullying, or being frank in estimates committees - something for lip service, but hardly core business, and mostly an unnecessary distraction from it.

The words of the Coaldrake review could have been taken from Fitzgerald himself, or from any number of the excellent reviews by the Queensland Electoral and Administrative Review Council about the remaking of Queensland administration following the collapse of the Bjelke-Petersen government in a sea of corruption in the late 1980s. Some of the phrases were written by Coaldrake then and could have been cut and pasted into this week's report.

Right now, most public servants discussing reform are focused on the Thodey review of the Commonwealth public service, commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull. It was dismissed out of hand by Morrison, who said public servants were there to do things and follow orders, not offer advice. He claimed to have received a report from a committee of senior mandarins each frankly and fearlessly dismissing the trust and worth of its recommendations. Oddly, many of these same mandarins are now personally, as much as professionally, enthusiasts for the report. This contradiction (or was it a case of Morrison verballing senior officials who, as usual, lacked the guts to contradict him?) is one for which no explanation has been offered.

The Thodey report is very weighty, if overfull of slogans that could mean anything. But if it mentions any of the practical ideas contained in Coaldrake's report, other than about the general idea of revitalising the public service, I must have missed them. Its defenders will insist concepts such as integrity, probity, accountability and openness are to be assumed, and do not have to be spelt out. One might well ask why then departments have ignored courts and administrative tribunals, made a conscious farce of FOI legislation, and have presented such rich pickings, on basic issues, for auditor-general's reports.

I don't think modern public administration in Queensland is under anything like the stress it has been under in Commonwealth administration. But there is no denying there has been a lot of slippage from the noble intentions of 30 years ago, and that this has been reflected in some poor administrative outcomes, and some deplorable practices, at both the public service and political level. Every organisation needs regular, searching, external and independent review - if only so that the public can be sure it is on the right track and has not come to believe its own public relations.

The public service is run down, not well arrayed to face many modern policy and program challenges and may no longer be attracting the best and the brightest. It needs reform.

After the report came out, I heard Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk denying that anything said reflected on her. She reminded people that she had asked for the report. This is special pleading, on a par with the claim by Morrison that he stood up to the banks, and established the Haines royal commission, or with the claim by Eddie Maguire that the Collingwood racism report was a great day for the club because it provided a platform for addressing the (and his) problem.

Coaldrake has a host of recommendations for drawing fences to keep politicians away from appointments and grant schemes. He wants supervision of the integrity of tenders. And publication, after a month, of the agenda of Cabinet, and of the appointment diaries of ministers, particularly including their meetings with lobbyists. Much of this would have been regarded as anathema by the Morrison government, and in some cases, for example of appointment diaries, ministers went to court resisting it.

We must take it for granted that Anthony Albanese and his government have no intention of behaving as the Morrison government did. And that, even if one tried, loyal minders and public servants, and the Commonwealth Integrity Commission would quickly expose, denounce and punish it. Yet those with experience of the temptations of government know that even politicians with good intentions weary of the scrutiny, and sometimes harbour unworthy thoughts about securing some private benefit, doing a favour for a mate, or doing some dodgy deed for a noble purpose.

One need only look at the anti-corruption inquiry in Victoria involving Labor party branch stacking. In NSW and Western Australia, Labor has had scandals over dodgy land deals, the transfer of public assets into private hands, and the illegal receipt of developer cash, in shopping bags, into party funds. None of these prove the whole party is corrupt. But they show the temptations that some will find difficult to resist, unless there's a good chance of getting caught.

Such scandals have involved party faction leaders, and a traffic in seats. Some have not been about genuine disputes about politics or philosophy, but the determination of people in the system to secure improper favourable outcomes for mates, cronies or themselves in political decisions made at local, state and federal levels. This is not to say that one side is as bad as the other. Or that a change of government makes no difference. Labor, from opposition, has seen how public confidence in government has declined with poor administration. It realises that the public is sick of the rorts, the weasel words and the prevarications. The public wants politicians to behave with honour and decency. And they want the system policed to make sure they do.

We need effective checks and balances, financial accountability legislation, Ombudsmen, judicial and administrative review, FOI, and public watchdogs such as the Auditor General. We have learnt that integrity cannot always be taken for granted. People of integrity in public life should expect and accept the obligation to show that the public interest has been their only consideration. The culture of this needs continuous reinforcement.

The US Supreme Court's decision to overrule the Roe v Wade principle that the right to an abortion is a privacy right guaranteed by the American constitution has magnified the fears of pro-choice citizens. They are worried that in the red states that have already criminalised abortion, right-to-life zealots, including those in law enforcement, will be anxious to search out and punish those breaching these state-based laws. The text of some of these laws, and the rhetoric of some of their proponents, suggest the concern is by no means simply paranoid.

In any event Twitter, social media, and even what right-wing critics would call the "liberal" mainstream media have been reminding each other of the amazing capacity of police and other groups to track people, including in arrears, from signals coming from mobile telephones and computers, as well as the evidence of credit card transactions. Likewise, surveillance technology from cameras in the streets, face-recognition software, and amazing police and intelligence access to government and private data bases, as well as the use of algorithms in artificial intelligence, can identify suspects, determine those with whom they associate, and even get computer-based predictions of those likely to breach the law of some states.

I do not know how far some US state jurisdictions will go to prevent women having access to safe, legal abortion. We have seen enough lawless cops and legal figures, many corrupted by the US Guantanamo systems, and by practical Trumpism. Most of what is written about the technical capacity of modern police, law enforcement and intelligence systems, as well as hardware and software in use by some private businesses is accurate enough. It's not theoretical, and is in present use without enough in the way of controls.

I spoke recently at a protest outside the US Embassy seeking the return to Australia of Julian Assange. About 10 AFP officers were present - about one for every two protesters, who were of an average age of about 65. At some stage a drone rose in the air about 100 metres from the protesters and began filming what happened.

Protesters assumed the drone, which seemed to have originated on Embassy premises, was for American rather than AFP purposes. I am not sure of that but am quite certain there was nothing in the behaviour of the small group which was ever capable of inspiring such a police presence, creating concern about menace to police or American life or limb, or justifying the fabulous display of arms, armour, Tasers and batarangs they wore. It might have explained why police are now too busy to attend or investigate burglaries or minor traffic accidents.

Someone remarked the images would most likely be downloaded into American immigration data bases. It would probably result in our being denied visas if we applied for them - on the basis that anyone who gathers in opposition to US policy must be an enemy of the US. It is hard to dismiss such suggestions when agencies claim they cannot discuss their methods for fear of tipping off master criminals. We use the same excuses to prevent scrutiny of how we stop boat people.

Most powers now being routinely used by police, security agencies and a wide array of government bodies were granted under the theory they were sadly necessary if we were to catch and stop terrorists. But there has been massive drift in the use of such powers by law enforcement for purposes for which they were never originally intended, and which parliament would not, originally, have allowed.

There are some still within the system who have never encountered a capacity they did not want, or willingly accepted in practice a control or limitation placed upon its use. Controls are regarded as attempts to improperly hamstring investigators.

From time to time external inspectors discover widespread systemic breaches and require agencies to 'fess up. This they do cheerfully, as if this was an inadvertent oversight, and as if they mean heads to roll as a result.

Some of the equipment now in routine use is dangerously unreliable, incorporating, as police forces in overseas jurisdictions admit, serious bias. The use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and large databases combines with the fact most operators - and even people on the procurement side - are unable to accurately assess the accuracy of equipment (because manufacturers claim trade secrets) and are, in any event, inadequately trained on its use and its limitations.

MORE WATERFORD:

A recent report on the advent of new technologies in the justice system by a House of Lords committee, tabled on Thursday, is scathing about what it describes as "a new wild west, in which new technologies are developing at a pace that public awareness, government and legislation have not kept up with". It quoted, approvingly, a witness who remarked that "we are not building criminal risk assessment tools to identify insider trading or who is going to commit the next kind of corporate fraud ... we are looking at high volume data that is mostly about poor people." Some of it is a bit like robodebt, and no official ever suffers for abuse, excess of jurisdiction or a mistake of judgment or misunderstanding information. Except, of course, the poor people.

In Britain, at least, police are conscious of many of the problems, and there are lots of committees - probably too many - focused on standards, ethics and controls. These committees mean the public has some capacity to know what police are doing, and under what circumstances.

Talk about controls here, and some police will retort that police face the ultimate accountability of having to bring cases before the courts, where they face intense legal scrutiny. But their dodgy data hardly ever comes before the courts. First, much of it is predictive, even if it informs operations. Second, in Australia, police have more or less consciously decided to use the new technology mostly for intelligence purposes, without disclosing to courts or defendants how they discovered vital forensic facts. Thus, if they have used mobile phones, face and number-plate recognition technology, and information obtained from banks - mostly procured informally rather than by documented procedures - they can tell a suspect they have information placing them near the scene of a crime. As often as not, the broad-sweep way of finding suspects through AI allows them to find others at the same location, leaving suspects to infer they were dobbed in, or identified by witnesses.

Called on to justify their use of such powers, one can always expect that someone will point to the stranger-danger crusade against paedophiles abusing children abroad, or access abuse materials. These are, by definition, so wicked, that we are invited to think any investigative technique is justifiable, even if the crusade leaves entirely neglected the 99 per cent of child sexual abuse victims abused much closer to home, usually by relatives or authority figures. That it is much harder to inspire a moral panic about leaks of government information is one reason why police do not tell you that there are often 100 such trawls of the movements and communications of journalists and public servants for every paedophile hunt.