Hard to think of a better time than now
to discuss the question of whether and
how we need to reimagine the way we are
governed. In Australia and around the
world the challenges that governments
have to address today - from climate
change to rising inequality - the creating
economies that work for people can seem
overwhelming and it helps to explain why
a lot of polling suggests that trust in
governments and in their capacity to
improve the lives of citizens is at an
all-time low. Yet one of the remarkable
features of this COVID-19 crisis is
in recent months trust in and
satisfaction with many governments and
leaders - not all - has risen sharply. Surely
that indicates that the public reservoir
of goodwill is not dry, that the public
still believes that governments matter.
To discuss these and other questions we
have a great panel today. Terry Morin is
one of Australia's most distinguished
former public servants - he has been
Secretary of Victoria's Department of
Premier and Cabinet and of Australia's
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet,
serving under prime ministers Kevin Rudd
and Julia Gillard in his current role as
Chair of the Center for Policy Development.
Terry continues to think
deeply and write often about how
government should work, and so does
Catherine Althaus. Catherine is
Deputy Dean of the Australia and New
Zealand School of Government and the
ANZSOG Chair of Public Service
Leadership and Reform at the University
of New South Wales. Catherine has taught
and researched in Canada and she also
writes very thoughtfully, with a
wide range on how to reinvent public
services for these times. Finally Thea
Snow is a former public servant here in
Victoria with the Department of Premier
and Cabinet. Thea has recently returned
to Melbourne after working with the
innovation foundation Nesta in the
United Kingdom. She's now working here at
the Centre for Public Impact, and it's an
article that Thea wrote recently on the
enablement paradigm that forms the basis
of these webinars and particularly the
webinar we're hosting tonight. The first
question is "Why do we need to reimagine
government? What does this term
mean to you?" Second, "Can government be
reimagined in a way that empowers
communities and citizens?". Three,
"How can a reimagining of government help
us to address our great challenges,
including climate change the place of
nation-states in a globalized world and
how to create and share prosperity in
the time of rising inequality?".
Four, "Can you offer some tangible
examples of governments who are
experimenting with reimagining of government?"
Five, "How does the reimagining
of government work at this time in the
context of COVID-19?" And finally
six, "How do we align
reimagining of government with all the
other things that governments have to
address: risk, ensuring an equitable
distribution of resources, and keeping
their budgets balanced?" So there's going
to be a very short period of silence
while you all vote and then I will
present those questions to our panel.
Okay, we've now done the poll and in fact that
one question that - interesting -
people have gone straight to the
concrete, which is really interesting.
Very popular question was question four:
"Can you offer tangible examples of
governments who are
experimenting with a reimagining of
government?" Terry I think this is a great
question for you to address - you've been
in government for many years and you
still watch government very closely.
Tell me about governments you see in
Australia and around the world who are
actually doing innovative things in
reimagining the way they are working.
Well I think you can find some of it in
some departments of the Commonwealth
government, you can find it similarly in
some departments of the New South Wales
and Victorian governments, and a good
example would be the trial in the City
of Wyndham - west of the centre of
Melbourne, it's in the western suburbs of
Melbourne - to come up with a new approach
to provide coordinated services to help
refugees get employment,
and it's been very successful
and it suggested new ways in which you
can organize to deliver services, but at
the end of the day authority to deliver
them rests at the local level and there
isn't an iron link back into Spring Street
or Canberra, so that even minor
decisions can be taken at that level.
And I think this is the future of much
delivery of services and a good example
of well tried approaches that have
worked over a long period. For instance,
public hospitals - they do it
differently in various states but all
now have gone towards much more
independence in their management and
government with boards, chief executives,
clear budgets, activity-based funding and
strong accountability. And you could
replicate the elements of that approach
in quite a number of areas and I
think that we've got to have a much
stronger debate about how to do those
sort of things because the old-fashioned
hierarchical, centrally controlled
department structures just aren't working.
So Terry, before I throw this to
to Catherine and Thea, can you just say a
bit more about Wyndham - what is it about
Wyndham that is new and is innovative
in your view? And for that Wyndham trial
to be expanded more broadly what would
have to change at government at the
higher levels, at the central level, to
in a sense to take the risk, I suppose,
of driving decision-making down to a
lower level of government.
Well CPD and
the Boston Consulting Group did a major
piece of work on how we could do better
by refugees and it was outlined in a
report called "Settling Better." We then
approached the CEO at Wyndham and said
well, if we could get the money would you
be interested in running your trial?
So we went off to
prominent foundations, the buyer
foundation and the Vincent Fairfax
Family Trust and they were very generous in
their funding for us to get this going.
There was a lot of early uncertainty but
there were some terrific people and
Wyndham on the ground who knew how to do
things and when it comes to getting
people who are facing obstacles into
jobs, those obstacles that refugees face,
they knew that one - you've got to be able
to activate local networks to get jobs
because you can't do it with some sort
of a computing system that will
automatically put people in contact with
employers. And secondly - you've got to
have other associated services: skills,
learning English, perhaps help with
housing perhaps, even assistance in
knowing how to negotiate banks and
shopping centers and all that sort of
stuff, and Wyndham quickly found scores
of jobs for refugees in that area that
had been having great difficulty. And so
we've extended it to discussions in
New South Wales including in the City of
Fairfield, and Commonwealth ministers and
state ministers have been to Wyndham to
visit the site. And I think that it's
just a small scale version of what's
been going for a long time, which is how
do you run efficient public hospitals -
which by the way in Australia at the
moment are more efficient than their
private sector counterparts.
That's really interesting, we might come back to that in a moment, Terry.
Thea, this sounds very similar to
the work that you've been doing on the
enablement paradigm. I'm struck by some
of the things that Terry talked about:
the centering of services in a place
and because the people who are in the
place know know more about what they
need and what can be delivered on the ground.
I wonder if you couldn't say a
bit about what what the enablement
paradigm is and perhaps provide some
concrete examples of where it's working,
either here or around the world?
Yeah sure. So the enablement paradigm is really, I think,
fundamentally about an
acknowledgement of the fact that the
world that we're operating in is complex.
And like Terry said, when you're talking
about refugee settlement, you know, it's
so multifaceted, there are so many bits
of the puzzle that need to be addressed
in order to make the change that you
want to change. And what we believe at
CPI is that the version of government
that can best support people is a
version of government that doesn't think
about how can we control the levers and
how can we deliver services to people
and do things to people, but rather a
version of government that identifies
that there are great assets already that
exist within communities. And so the role
of government becomes an enabler, an
enabler of communities and it
shifts to a model where the role of
government is to help communities thrive,
rather than tell them what to do, and the
there's a power dynamic that shifts with that.
So it's around different ways of
engaging with community, as Terry just
described, and it's also a mindset shift
within government. So it's not just about
changing systems and structures, it's
also about changing beliefs and values
and principles, and I think that Hilary
Cottam, who has written 'Radical Help',
which is a wonderful book that everyone
should read, describes it really nicely
when she says - and I'm actually gonna
read it so that I get it right -
she says, "the role of public servant [in
what we describe as being the enablement
paradigm] is no longer that of
controlling the mechanical levers. It is
that of Head Gardener, setting out the
design, planting, tending,
nurturing, and where necessary weeding."
And I think that's a beautiful analogy
to describe the role of government as
Terry just described and as we see it as well.
It is a lovely metaphor but is it
happening? Can you cite some examples?
Yeah I think it is happening - I actually
had a fantastic conversation, so I
can think of some examples
overseas but sometimes that feels a bit
abstract and it feels far away from
Australia. But I had a fantastic
conversation just the other day and with
some people from DHHS who are doing some
work on what they call the 'Social
Landlord Framework', so it's a new model
of, you know, community regeneration in
public housing and they're thinking
really deeply about their role as
enablers of those communities and
they're having different kinds of
conversations. So they're not treating
community engagement as a sort of
tickbox consultation exercise, they're hosting
basketball games and hosting meals and
through those types of interactions are
able to have completely different
conversations than you can when you
invite people into a roundtable that's
intimidating and full of people who are,
you know, really different from the
community that they're working with.
And so it's, you know, I think this
social landlord framework is a
really great example of how to have
different conversations, how to engage
communities in a co-design process, you
know, asking them what's working really
well for you, what's not working so well
and what changes would you like to see,
an co-designing a program of work and
then involving the community in the
delivery and the implementation of that
program as well. So I think that's a, you know,
I'm sure there are many examples
that are happening on the ground in
sort of little spots all over Australia,
but that's just one that came to my
attention the other day.
Thanks Thea and when
we get to the chat with the participants
in the webinar, people might themselves
offer examples of projects they know are happening.
Catherine, I'm gonna throw to
you on this question: I've read some of
your papers now and it strikes me that
your range is broad - you write
very imaginatively about reshaping
Australian governance based on
landscape and environment rather than on
States, for example, I found that a
very interesting paper - but you've also
written practically, if I can use that term,
in that you and another public
servant, Carmel McGregor,
produced a submission to a review of the
Australian public service that has been underway
in this year - so can you address the
question of examples of 'do you believe
this kind of changes afoot?' or are you
more skeptical in the Australian public
service context. What is happening there
and what would you like to see happen
further?
Thanks James. I think I'd probably
make the first point that there's
something for us to think about - I was I
was struck when Thea was speaking that
there's this notion of the reimagination
of government, but I think in terms
of where we located in the Australia and
New Zealand place that we have the
opportunity to rediscover actually, even
more than reimagine, because of the
wealth of those people's wisdom in the
space and that's why I've got a
particular interest in that notion of
linking in with landscape, because I think
a very practical example I can speak to,
which is in the New Zealand context,
is the Whanganui River which has
recently been given legal status in
New Zealand law. So it's a very practical but
very new way of thinking about how we
treat the environment and deal with
intergenerational equity and
intergenerational stewardship, but based
on very old principles that come from
First Peoples and the wealth of their
expertise, if you like, which is very much
similar to what the Centre for Public Impact
and Thea are doing in terms of
talking about the enabling paradigm. I'm
struck that you know there's the
leadership servant sort of
idea that's promoted there, the
relationality, a whole range of the acts
aspects, the humility, those are issues
that are actually very fundamental to
Indigenous forms of leadership that have
been practiced in this region of the
world for many many thousands of years.
But to get back to your question about
practical examples then in the
Australian space, I guess Carmel and I
did a bit of a review, there have been
many initiatives that have been
attempted in the Australian scene but I
think we're a little bit more
sceptical, that we've heard these
initiatives for many years now but we
haven't seen a radical transformation
take place of our institutions. So in the
Australian scene I think there's more
that we can be doing actually
in the space, and this is probably linked
to what Thea and Terry have been talking
about, that there's a mixture of form and
function that we have to pay attention
to. So it's a mixture of not only
changing beliefs and mindsets but we do
have to pay attention to those systems
and structures as well, so that we can
open up new ways of how our public
administration operates.
Systems and structures
present one of the really big obstacles, right?
And "we've always done it this way
so we should keep doing it this way" and
it seems to me that what all three of
you are talking about is quite a radical
shift - it needs to happen really at the
top of government, I guess.
What are the obstacles, Catherine, do you think
to change happening?
Well I think, yeah,
there's a certain level of politics that
perhaps we need to readdress and I mean
that's really coming to the fore with
the lack of trust, but what are we
finding in this new era with COVID is
where the trust will get re-established
or not - a large part of that is actually
thanks to some expertise that's
being brought back into the system. So I
think if I talk to the public
administration arm, which I'm really
quite passionate about in terms of the
public service as an institution and an
entity that was created in a particular
time and space under Max Weber in the
1800s, it was a design extremely
effectively, for that time, and to address
large-scale mass population needs, so I
don't think we should get rid of it - it
does amazing things and it can be very
flexible but Geoff Mulgan's work from
Nesta and from the work that
Thea knows very well, is he talks
about the government does work with, to
and for communities, and so the current
structure of the public service deals
really well in doing work to and for the
public, but in this area of working with
communities I don't think our public
service as an institution is designed
yet to be able to deliver effectively in
that space. So we need to move beyond a
single paradigm of what it means to be a
public service, to multiple paradigms
actually,  to cater to those different
areas - so education, health, justice, those
particular areas where we need to work
so closely with communities, I don't
think our public server
yet fits the purpose for that because
it's designed from something from a time
past.
Thank You Catherine there's been a
lot of interest in question three, which
is a big one: "how can a reimagining of
government help us to address the great
challenges of our time?" And we know those
challenges seem at times insuperable -
climate change, inequality within
countries, between countries - Terry I'm
really interested to hear your thoughts
on this. Recently, late last year you gave
the John Cain oration and you talked
about the role of delivery of government
services at the local level and how
you see that as an opportunity to
reinvent government. Can you take us
through a couple of things - one is why
did you come to that thought? How did you
develop that thought? And what is the
relationship between those huge
questions that question three is
putting forward and the sort of delivery
of services at the local level which of
course is a small level. So I guess that
goes for the question of the
relationship between a national
government, say in Australia, and
a government at the local level which
obviously is closer on the ground, but it
doesn't have the reach that a national
government might have.
Well James, doing
things at the local level is okay for
the certain areas of welfare and health
delivery, but there are a lot of other
things that go on inside government and
the biggest problem that we've got is
that we have assumed that the
natural home for anything that's important
is in a traditional
department of state, and basically
they're not working very well. If you
look at the Commonwealth public service,
the formal public service is less than half
the total number of Commonwealth
employees because all the rest are in
independent agencies, large and small -
the RBA, the ABC, the Defence Force, it's the
AFP - and all of these agencies generally
are well known in the public and are
respected. And so the old Sir Humphrey
impetus to get stuff inside the partner
state where it's controlled by the
secretary, who in turn
responds to the whims and wishes of
a minister just doesn't get you good
results. And in Victoria, the ratio of
public servants to total public sector
employment is even more skewed in favour
of broader public sector employment, in
hospitals, in schools, all those sorts of agencies.
So we have to get away from the
notion that politicians being directly
accountable for service delivery is a
good thing.Let me give you one example:
the Commonwealth's got the Clean Energy
Finance Corporation it's chaired by and
as a board made up of people from the
private sector, mainly from the financial
services sector, and all its senior
people are essentially people with
private sector experience, but they're
established under legislation, they have a
mandate, they're strictly accountable to
government, but they have discretion to
get on and make sometimes risky
choices, and in doing that overall
deliver a positive return for their
investments in companies that can move
us in the direction of new technologies
for energy and its delivery. And this is a
great story which has escaped many of
the people in Canberra who otherwise
operate grants based systems to put
stuff out there in the hope that
something will happen, or try to use the
tax system to provide incentives. So I
think that we've got to get ministers
around to the view that try to control
all the detail of things usually is a
disaster, and public servants to
recognize that their colleagues and big
agencies like the RBA the ABC and all
the others that I mentioned, they're
actually more highly valued and admired
by the public than we public servants
are.
Thanks Terry.
Thea, I'd like you to reflect on what
Terry's just said I'm still interested
in this idea of the size of the change
we're talking about here and I wondered,
if you think, what would be the driver
of a change like this? Are we in a
position now where such change is really
on the table, is government at this
point, do you think? Or do you think we
have a long way to go before a change of
this size, where we in effect rework
the relationships between, on a
subsidiarity principle and a principle
of driving decision-making down to a
lower level, but of course maintaining
the, you know, the central role of
national governments in countries like
Australia as well, and working out that
balance. What needs to change, do you
think, within government, within
the society at large to make this a
realistic menu of reform?
Well I'll start by
saying that this is the first
conversation I've been in in a long time
where COVID hasn't been mentioned for
almost half an hour but I'm about to
mention it, so just remember that. Because
I think that actually, you know, the
catalyst for having this conversation at
this point in time was COVID because
it really is forcing, you know, everyone
in every field around the world to
confront a very different world, and I
think that for me in terms of sort of
change and how do we make change happen,
there are two different kinds of change
that I think about, and there's a
concept called the three horizons
framework by Bill Sharpe where he talks
about sort of: the first horizon is no
change,
the second horizon is changes to the
existing system, and then third horizon
changes are changes to the system itself,
and there are relationships between
those different types of change.
And the first article that I wrote which
sort of triggered this series was about
that third horizon changed, so big
system change and there's some really
interesting literature in public
administration theory and more
generally around paradigm shift and what
drives paradigm shift, and it's often
critical junctures or critical
moments that create an opportunity for
quite radical change. And to quote
another person who I really - her
writing I admire enormously as well,
Donella Meadows - speaks about
paradigm shift, and she says that the way
of paradigm shift is that there's a
moment, a juncture, like COVID,
people start to point out the deficits
and the shortcomings in the current
system, which is what I think we're all
doing and Terry just did so well just
then, and also there's an alternative set
of ideas that's put forward as a
different option and you
build a coalition of interested and
willing people who are passionate about
taking that idea forward. And that was
really their the catalyst for this
conversation, you know, we need to be
building this alternative vision and
finding the coalition of people who want
to take it forward, but also we're seeing
some really quite profound changes in
government at the second horizon level
as well, which have happened really fast.
So government agencies which have
traditionally operated in silos all of a
sudden coming together and working
collaboratively, working really
collaboratively with partners outside of
government-  so doctors and hospitals and
and manufacturers, you know - everyone's
sort of coming together, government's
working quickly, leaders, politicians are
saying we don't have all of the answers.
And so we're seeing these new
trends emerging which are what
we've been sort of wanting and COVID's
been the catalyst for that. So then the
question becomes "What do we do? How do we
make this change stick? How do we use
this momentum and this moment to
really, I guess, not only reveal what's possible,
but start thinking about how we
embed the changes, the positive changes
that we've seen emerging from what has
been a terrible experience for a lot of
people?" And it's important to acknowledge
that, but also an opportunity.
I think that's a fascinating point you just made, Thea:
how do we make the changes that we
see as beneficial to stick? In fact
that's a great period for us to move
into groups. We're now going to divide
all of you,
all the participants into groups and
you're going to chat for about 10 to 12
minutes.
So I think we'll now come back
to the panel, and I'd like to
ask Catherine. Perhaps, Catherine, you can
tell us a bit about what your group
discussed, but I think one question that
we didn't get to - and I think we
should focus the last 20 minutes
or so - is how we align the sort of
reforms we've been talking about tonight
with the standard priorities risk
aversion of government and the things
that government has to do every day. You
know, what's the theory of change to take
these examples into mainstream practice
in government? Is that what your group
was talking about? It would be really interesting to
hear from you about that process.
Sure, thanks James. So I had a delightful
conversation with Sam Hannah-Rankin,
who heads up innovation work in Victoria, so
we were able to catch up personally
which is great too because we know each
other, so that was wonderful, but I think
we were chatting a little bit actually
about the sort of, the come back to work
post the physical distancing
requirements with COVID, and what will
that mean. So it sort of brought to my
mind, you know, the politicians know
the adage well that "never waste a good
crisis" and you know, this is certainly an
opportunity - not to put too light a word
on it - in terms of for all of us, as Thea
was talking about, as Terry mentioned, you
know, there's so many opportunities for
us to do things better with our
existing systems, but to also look beyond
at how we can make system change. I can't
get beyond the fact, as somebody
studying politics and economics, that
basically in order to get
effective you change you have to pay
attention to economics, we have to pay
attention to power, so money and power
are really important in this. I'm sure
Terry will probably offer some
interesting observations in terms of how
we might imagine a new form of economics.
So Mariana Mazzucato's work, of course,
many people will be aware of that, in terms
of how we conceive of the notion in
different ways. I was struck by work that's been happening in Bhutan,
where they have shifted the gross
national product measurement to gross
happiness index and you know, what does
that mean? How can we make that concrete?
How can we start to pay attention to
those intergenerational environmental issues alongside
ergonomics and politics? So I think
there's some serious work that needs to
happen - it won't be quick, it won't be
easy, but in the COVID environment if we
take the optimism that Thea has in terms of
how we can take advantage of this particular time,
when the whole of the world is paying attention
to how we might want to prioritize what
we do and what we value, then that's at
least a start.
Terry, let me take Catherine's
invitation for you to comment about
economists. I once heard you say that
economists wielded a lot of power in
Canberra in your time, and in part you
explained that they had a theory of
change and how the world worked when
other professions that abandoned that
sort of universal thinking. Tell us about
the role of economists in
affecting, in wielding power and perhaps
are they part of the solution as well as
the problem? And perhaps you might then
go more broadly to tell us how you see
the sort of change that people are
talking about in the chats, how that
becomes a steady state rather than just
bright spots in an otherwise gray landscape.
I don't know if anyone else has read Hermann Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game' but it
always seemed to me that economists were
like the priestly caste that played the
glass bead game - totally abstract,
unrelated to anything that was real, and
although highly regarded in society
didn't take anybody anywhere except for
the priestly caste that was able to
sustain a decent life by being of that sort.
Now that's a bit harsh
if translated to the world of economics but
we had a huge period of change driven
by economics, principally from
the early 80s through for the
next 20 or so years -
the second big period of reform since the
Second World War. The game's up - a lot of
useful things that were done but a lot
of bad things were also introduced that
haven't been corrected, and economists
have got to get serious about evaluation,
serious about criticism of the
consequences of what they do, and show a
bit of humility in realising
that you can't just throw it all into a
market and hope for the best, you've also
got to think about: well how the
organization is going to work, how we're
going to hold them accountable, how do
you give the clients of the particular
service some rights? And so there has to
be a big debate about a new style of
managing the delivery of government
services and getting as much of it out
of the hands of ministers as possible.
Can I ask you quickly, Thea
talked a bit about history, the big
shifts that have happened over time, and
Hilary Cottam whom she has mentioned,
talks about Beveridge in the 1940s in
Britain writing a report that led to the
institution of the welfare state and
the creation of, you know, a lot of good
service delivery, but also a lot of big
bureaucracy that ends up doing things to
citizens rather than with them. Do you
think, Terry, that we're on the
verge of some sort of seismic change? I
mean that came out of World War II,
the Great Depression, you know, a period of
just massive social and
change of all kinds. Are we on the
brink of the sort of change now that
would lead to a dramatic reinvention and
a reimagining of governments for 21st century?
Are the drivers there?
Yeah well
my view is that, apart from what I've
said about the source of policy in
economics, we're halfway there, we've
got a mixed system, we've got lots of
organisations, so to have a degree of
independence, to take risks, to spend
budgets according to agreed approaches
and deliver results. And where
that's happened in government, you
typically find that the delivery of
services is more efficient and better
regarded than in areas where mainstream
departments of state, in all their
grandeur, seek to control things at the
local level, although they never get out
and see much at the local level, it just
doesn't work. So I think we've just got
to be quite honest and admit that the
current approach to government - if you
seriously are on about greatly improved
delivery - has got to get over the
nonsense ideology of the Reagan-Thatcher
period and what it said about the public
sector - which was a means of denigrating
the public sector and reducing its
confidence - and build further the systems
we've already got for putting resources,
accountability and a sense of strategic
direction out there to delivery agencies,
who in most cases after a while do a
better job than the mainstream
departments of state, frankly.
Thanks, Terry. Thea can we just take a very quick
thought from you on what you heard
Catherine and Terry say, and what you
discussed in your chatroom?
Yes, and I'm actually just going to talk because I'm
conscious of time and I want people to
be able to jump off at six, so I'm just
going to very quickly share one really
lovely thing that came out of our chat,
which was a really tangible example of
having different kinds of conversations,
and I'm not going to say who because of
Chatham House Rules, but someone from
local government spoke about
her experience working with a local
community that was known to be a
difficult community, and she said she was
new to government so she just went
and sat in the pub with that community
and just chatted to them, you know, had
just a chat and at the end of an
hour and a couple of drinks they said
"but you haven't even asked us the
questions, you know, you haven't asked us
the questions that the government always
asks us" and she's like "well that's
that's not important to me" and over the
course of 18 months, by having different
kinds of conversations she has
completely shifted, it sounds like, the
dynamic and the perception
that these people have of government. And
I think that was just, for me, that's
exactly the kind of micro innovation, you
know, there's sort of this stuff
that needs to happen at the macro level
which was sort of what what Terry and
Catherine have been speaking about, but I
think at the micro level that's sort of
the little shifts, the different
conversations, the different sort of
mindsets that people are bringing to
their work can also be incredibly
powerful in driving change from
the bottom up as well as from the top down.
Thanks Thea. So let's in the
last 15 minutes that we have talk
about the difficulties. Can we talk about
risk a bit? Risk drives government,
doesn't it Terry?
We've been talking about
these ideas for 20 years, in a way the
government needs to put itself at a
lower level close to the citizens as it
needs to open up its information
and data banks - you know - for citizens
to use. Sometimes I worry that the
rhetoric outruns the reality
significantly - is risk something that can
eventually be overcome, you know,
the fear that in an adversarial system
something that happens at the
local level will end up on page one of
the paper and that won't be good. How do
you see the problem of
risk within government and
overcoming it so that experiments that
might fail and can be tried sometimes.
because that's how we learn?
Well ministers don't have to accept
all risks - they've got to take political
risks on a large scale, they've got to
take risks about judgement of the
economics of budgets and what's put out
there, they've got to take risks when
they consider what can be legislated by
means of empowering others to do things,
but the the key to good public
administration now is how do you
take as much risk away from the
minister's desk and deposit it outside
of department of state - because they're
all accountable to a minister and you've got
to acknowledge the minister has some
responsibility - and into an independent entity?
But when I was Secretary of the
Premier's Department I can recall there
was a significant public hospital where
something that shouldn't have been done
was done and it was unfortunate and it
could have land on landed on the
minister's desk, but it actually belonged
on the desk of the chair of the board
and the CEO, and the minister made it
plain to those people that it was theirs
to carry and there were heads
taken at the level of the hospital and
the problem was remedied. Now if you're
in a department of state that operates
in a detailed way what goes on in
hospitals, which is the case in some
other states, well you can't do that, but
if you've got an intermediary
layer of governance accountability,
ministers can focus on the big issues
and do the big plays rather than being
dragged down by fear of the minor things
that can distract you.
It's really interesting,
definitely a new paradigm. Catherine,
I'd like to bring it to the APS, if we
can - you've looked at the ideas closely
in your paper with Carmel McGregor and
you take all those questions head-on in that
paper - could you talk a bit about the
potential within the APS to move on
these questions and the obstacles? You
know, you're quite frank
in that paper about the difficulties
that exist within the APS to affect
this sort of transformative change we're
talking about - be great to hear from you
about what it looks like to you on the
ground.
So I think that some of the
things that Carmel and I identified,
speaking to a whole range of people
across the APS and beyond, was we need to
move away from thinking about things as
service delivery and we really need to
truly talk about empowering communities.
So that does require a different way of
not only talking about what we're
wanting to achieve with sharing power,
but actually delivering on that very
tangibly.
And I think we sort of hinted at it in
the paper, but couldn't really go into it
in a lot of detail, which was that I
think we're stuck in our theory of
representation in our political system.
Terry's helpfully pointed out
how we've got a particular form or
system of governance which places a lot
of power with the minister and that's a
single representative for many, many
people and yet the public service plays
a very significant role and can play
more of a significant role in terms of
assisting political actors to be more
representative, actually, of what is
needed in different communities. So if
anything we believe that there is a role
for a new set of ideas in the area of
representation. Too often we just say
it's inappropriate for public servants
to exercise discretion and yet we know
that it's the frontline delivery workers -
the police, the nurses, the teachers -
who are actually very trusted by
communities. We need to take advantage of
that and we need to be able to empower
them in different ways and say that
discretion in particular forms and with
particular parameters is actually a good
thing for politicians and not something
to be feared. So I think we need to
harness representation in new ways.
Catherine, can you talk a little bit about the
Indigenous policy landscape? It's
probably been 20 years that we've read
reports saying, you know, the way to move
forward is to empower Indigenous
communities, for them to have a say in
the decisions that affect them - I've read
so many reports on that - you talk
about it in your paper -
and yet the same mistakes
being made over and over again.
You know, there's changes and new light comes in,
they start doing everything, reinventing.
Where are we with Indigenous policy? Are
we still just going around in circles or
are there genuine attempts now to wrestle
with all the challenges of bringing
decision-making down to the ground level?
Well I'll speak as a non-Indigenous woman here,
and I think you're absolutely
right, I mean it's a pretty bleak picture -
if you take the the state of
Indigenous Affairs in terms of Australia
and indeed for Aotearo New
Zealand - because we're not seeing the
outcomes and it's not as if the recipes
for success have not been given to us
over many, many reports many, many times
and years - so that's pretty frustrating
obviously for First Peoples and for
people who
want to see change happen, positive
change happen. But I think, you know, in
order to give effect to the serious
change that has been, you know,
sought for many years, we need to take
seriously that shifting of control and power.
So you know, there's lots of scope
for positive change there in terms of
activities that are happening, you know,
we can take notice of what's happening
in the New Zealand landscape there in
terms of taking the Treaty quite
seriously, so we're starting to see a bit
of a wellspring of positive change
happen in the Australian scene in that
regard, but of course there's many, many
questions there in terms of whether
Treaty is the right way to go and this
is a question that First Peoples
themselves of Australia need to wrestle
with and come up with their own
solutions, community by community, nation
by nation. So I think the difficult thing
for modern government is that we tend to
treat First Peoples as a homogenous
group instead of treating them as
separate nations with their own
identities and cultures. So for
governments to do that, that takes a new
way of thinking of how we deal with
diversity. So there'll need to be changes
that happen there, but I put a call out
for all the Indigenous public servants
who are actually operating already in
government for making huge
changes and exercising a very practical,
very different way of exercising
leadership as a public servant - one that
goes beyond that notion of
representations I talked about before,
because they are serving their
communities in incredibly fulsome ways
and yet simultaneously serving the
minister and the political system that
we operate in, and their ability to do
that is absolutely incredible and one that
we should be taking more notice of.
Can I add a postscript to what has just been said?
Please do.
I was Director-General Education for Queensland in the
late nineties, and in that role I decided to
do a review of Indigenous education, and
as part of that went to Cape York, and
two things struck me about Cape York at
that time. One: planeloads of public
servants from different departments
and agencies would come in for their
monthly or two-monthly visit and purport
to do business on that basis, there was
no coordination and frankly the
Commonwealth was as bad on that score as
the state was. Secondly: this is
when I first met Noel Pearson, and what
became Noel's idea of Empowered Communities
developed through the job
and organisation that has been operating
in Cape York for decades was actually
the beginning of the thinking about how
do we deal with communities and the
services they need,
for instance employment services and all
that goes with it, so that we get a more
successful approach not dependent upon a
tight line into Spring Street or Canberra.
And the problem that Noel has
had in getting any concessions out of
government so that he could pursue
Empowered Communities as an approach were
frankly, they've just been disgraceful
over a period of time - I don't think
we'll have the same problem with the
sort of approach that I mentioned in
Wyndham because ministers got involved
in the early stage, I think state and federal
ministers liked it,
they want to roll it out and now the
Centre for Policy Development with BCG
is developing a whole model for how you
could do it at scale. So if we get it
right and if people want to roll it out,
I just hope that everybody is
disciplined about doing all the things
that need to be done.
Thanks, Terry. Just before
I throw to Thea to finish our
webinar, I just want to raise a couple of
really interesting things that have come
up in the chat. There's a lot of
discussion about the power and the
importance of storytelling and
narratives - I think to move this
discussion along it's the stories we
tell. I looked at Hilary Cottam's TED
talk the other day - it's a brilliant talk
about what she has done in Southwark
in the south of London and she tells
stories, she used it to tell stories of
individuals and how a new government
paradigm has changed their lives, and so
that's obviously something that is
resonating with people in this
webinar tonight. And related to that
is the importance of trust and
relationships and building those over
time. So that might be a good point to
throw to you and I think over the course
of the next five webinars we need to go
in more deeply and we need to be, you
know, we need to be sort of candid and
sceptical about the obstacles that lie
ahead of us in this journey of
reimagining government, but for now why
don't you tell us a bit about your work
looking at those issues and
relationships, building trust
and why that matters so much in terms of
reimagining government. And if you wish
to reflect on what Catherine and Terry
said, well please do so.
Thanks, James. So I think I just did want to pick
up on one thread around risk, and I think
that risk is a huge roadblock
for this kind of new operating
model, but at the same time risk is much
greater in a traditional expression of
government where public servants sit
dow, you know, spend six months
designing a strategy that
spans ten years, that predicts that
certain interventions will lead to
certain outcomes - because then you can
fail, right? You've sort of set
yourself up to fail because that's not
how things work, you know, the world is
complex and every intervention triggers
a stream of ripples, which then
means that you need to reassess what you
did and so what we need
is a much more agile and
adaptive form of government that learns
as it goes. And in a way if you
move away from that version of
government where you design a plan,
you predict what's going to happen, you
say this intervention will lead to that,
then risk and failure sort of
become less of an issue because you
actually go in and you test things,
you prototype, you adjust,
and you learn. And it's
through this experimentation and
learning that we at CPI really feel
that progress is made, and in a
way that does away with that sort
of - there are still risks and it requires
a very different mindset - but it does
away with that sort of "we designed a
policy and failed" type of scenario.
Thanks, Thea. And I imagine the Center for Public Impact
will continue to be doing work in
this field, and part of your role and
part of ANZSOG's role and of other
organisations, is to change that
narrative, to tell those stories and give
examples of success. We're out of time
everybody, but please come back in two
weeks,
keep your questions, and thank you all
for your participation tonight, for your
contributions. So once again, thank you
all for coming and see you in two weeks
when we look at Systems thinking with
Adrian Brown, Luke Craven and Deborah Blackman.
Thanks everybody, and good night.
