THE ROLE OF VALUES IN SUPPORTING PUBLIC SERVICE CRAFT

The policy Jedi of the public service are responsible for providing ‘great’ advice to the elected government. To do this, they must master the mysterious practice of public service craft.

Craft, like the force in Star Wars, guides the actions of senior public servants. It helps them find the golden mean between being useful to government and being apolitically independent from government.

To play their role well, public servants must build effective relationships with those elected to govern. This, and the vicissitudes of human nature, complicates the balance they need to find.

Formal guidance and training support craft. But they play a minor role in helping public servants decide what advice to provide when. This part of craft only comes with the experience and judgment gained via an apprenticeship in the service itself.

The role of Cabinet

Cabinet is pinnacle of government policy decision making in Australia. It is, quite literally, the room where it happens. It is not the only room, but it is the main one. 

There is no reference to Cabinet in the Constitution. Like the policy advising role of public servants, it exists only by convention. Few conventions play a bigger role in our system of government.

The existence and power of Cabinet reflects some realities of policy making. One is that the citizens government serves want different, often conflicting, things. Another is that government has limited resources and cannot please everyone.

These dynamics give rise to what former PM&C Secretary Mike Keating and his colleague Stephen Bell describe as competing claims. In response, public policy must determine which claims are reasonable and which are not. It must also prioritise government resources to the reasonable claims which will have the largest positive impact on societal well-being.

Alternative governments have different views of what is reasonable and what should be a priority. This is the essence of democracy. In effect, election platforms represent the claims a potential government sees as reasonable and will give priority to pursuing.

After winning government, appointed ministers get to sit on the once ochre (now brown) coloured chairs of Australia’s modestly opulent Cabinet room. Here, they have two policy roles. One involves promoting the claims of the portfolios they represent (industry, finance, social services etc). The other involves helping to decide what the government collectively thinks is best for society overall.

One thing all elected governments genuinely believe is that it would be best for society if they are re-elected. Strange that. As a consequence, the electoral implications of policy decisions are always well considered in the room where it happens. Democracy demands nothing less.

Ministers do not take decisions to Cabinet, they make submissions. The word reflects the convention-based (but not legal, as the Robodebt Royal Commission pointed out) subservience of a minister to the decisions of Cabinet. Submissions outline a portfolio-based claim, not a whole of government, government position.

Supporting ministers to pursue portfolio claims, and to bring a portfolio perspective on the claims of other ministers, is the key policy role of public service departments. Even central agencies advise on the basis of portfolio interests, including the most positionally neutral department, PM&C.

Portfolio perspectives enter the room where it happens two ways. One is via portfolio ministers who each receive advice from their department. The other is via a departmental coordination comment which goes to all ministers. These perspectives inform Cabinet debate and decision making on what about what is best for society.

Deciding whether to take a submission to Cabinet involves more than an assessment of portfolio claims. It includes a judgement of whether a claim (and the policy to effect it) has a realistic chance of gaining agreement and being implemented effectively. Policy must also be achievable politically and electorally.

Part of craft includes advising a minister as they navigate all of this. Great public service advice promotes an apolitical portfolio perspective, while having a practical eye to what is likely to be achievable given the philosophy and priorities of the government. Anything else would waste precious decision-making time in the room where it happens.

The public policy equation

In abstract, assessing portfolio claims in Cabinet involves considering four variables:

• an understanding of the evidence base and the case it establishes for the minister’s proposal (evidence)

• the values and ideology of the government of the day, as well as those underpinning public service advice (principles)

• the need for government to win the support of the Parliament and electorate (politics)

• a need to convert a policy into reality (implementation)

The four variables are inter-related. Value-based principles play a role in determining how an uncertain evidence base is interpreted. They also influence what a government, is and is not, prepared to do as part of a political bargain. Evidence plays a key role in guiding policy design and implementation.

In Part 1, we found Alexander Hamilton doing a deal with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Part of that deal included relocating the US capital. It was a pragmatic compromise between two unrelated policies. The question was what advice an Australian public servant should provide in such a situation.

The answer is probably none. Politics is not the business of the public service. The world of evidence, principles, and implementation is. Public service advice might be valuable in deciding whether Hamilton’s proposed reforms are great policy. It might also be valuable in choosing between competing locations for a national capital. But the compromise which traded support for the two proposals was pure politics.

The second question posed in Part 1 on Robodebt is both simpler and more complex. Public service advice should have been provided and it should have informed ministers of the legal risks to the scheme. But it is less clear exactly what advice have been given in relation to scheme design. Evidence does not provide a complete answer. Instead, the answer depends instead on the values (principles) underpinning public service policy advice.

Policy principles

Public service advice is necessarily underpinned by a values base. Much as some like to argue otherwise, there is simply no such thing as values-free policy.

To a large extent, the values / principles used in providing public service advice are a hidden part of craft. This maximises the ability of the service to respond flexibly to the government of the day. But it also has the potential to undermine the transparency, consistency, and quality of public service advice. This includes allowing individual policy Jedi to promote their personal views rather than a departmental position.

Exceptions exist. Or at least they did. Perhaps the most famous involved Treasury’s principles-based and publicly available wellbeing framework which was developed in the early 2000s. The framework was explicitly intended to underpin Treasury’s policy advice. It formed part of a tradition known as the Treasury line. It seems, however, that even Treasury’s commitment to independence has weakened over time.

Treasury’s Jedi are often seen as representing the dark side of policy. Well, maybe. The values underpinning Treasury advice may not be everyone’s cup of policy tea. But the perspective they represent is an important part of the policy debate. Decision making is better for its presence.

It is moot now. But one wonders what difference a well-considered, transparent, and consistently applied set of apolitical policy principles might have made to DHS advice on Robodebt. What, for example, would have happened had DHS adopted the following three principles.

DHS advice will

• respect the rule of law and beneficial intent of the social security system, as outlined in the Social Security Guide. 

• seek to ensure that people entitled to income support receive their full entitlement, not more nor less.

• seek to ensure that overpayments are recovered quickly and diligently, in a way that treats people with dignity and seeks repayment only when clear evidence of an overpayment exists.

Ministers are perfectly entitled to override public service advice. They are the decision makers; public servants are not. But they, and the public, deserve a more transparent sense of the values base used in developing public service advice.

Supporting public service craft

Policy advice provided by the public service is not made public for very good reasons. It would interfere with the accountability of the elected government. This should not change.

There is, however, no reason why departments should not publish a document which clearly outlines the basic approach and principles it uses in advising its ministers and the government as a whole. 

Part of this document would likely be common to all departments and could potentially be developed as part of the broader service wide reforms currently underway. This would complement and deepen the technical requirements outlined in the Cabinet handbook.

Part of the document should be specific to each department and reflect the particular perspective it brings to the decision making of government. This part should be authorised by the relevant Secretary as principal adviser to the Minister. It should embody a set of clear apolitical values (principles) the Secretary expects departmental officers to use in providing advice.

Importantly, the Secretary should be responsible for ensuring that these principles are both independent from, and useful to, the government of the day. They should also be responsible for ensuring they are effectively promulgated and followed within the department.

Developing such a document will be uncomfortable for some policy Jedi. It would reduce the freedom they currently have under the guise of public service craft. But the potential benefits are significant. It would create clearer ground rules for the public servant-minister policy relationship. It would bring additional transparency and consistency to public service advising efforts. And it would provide a stronger basis for training and assessing the ongoing quality of public service advice. 

It might even help prevent a future Robodebt.