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This week several of Australia’s highest ranking public
servants, including the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the head of
the Australian Public Service Commission, publicly endorsed the position that Australia’s current Freedom of Information laws were restricting public
servants from providing frank and fearless advice to government.
To put this in context, the initial comments from theSecretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were made on the same
day that the Department was hosting civic sector leaders to cocreate the
development of actions for improving Australian government transparency.
As an attendee working on the Prime Minister’s Open
Government Partnership commitment (read about the OGP day here), it was unsettling
and disturbing to hear the Secretary effectively undermine the work of his own excellent
team, as well as the Prime Minister’s personal initiative.
The argument from the Secretaries was that public servants
are being cowed by public and media scrutiny of advice they provide, and therefore
either delivered their advice on potential decisions to government via routes
that could not be easily FOIed (such as verbally), or were failing to be as
frank and fearless as they should be.
When I worked in the public service and various Freedom of
Information Law changes were underway, I did hear other public servants talk
about writing less down, to protect themselves, their agency and the government
(generally in that order) from the eyes of the public.
Operationally the Secretaries may have a point, some current
public servants may fear public disclosure of the advice and input they
provide, whether due to fears of embarrassment should the advice be incomplete
or poorly considered, or due to the wide, and sometimes extreme, scenarios
explored when governments are considering decisions across a broad range of controversial
topics.
However this is a poor argument - any fears of
embarrassment, exposure or publicity that public servants have are a failure of
public sector culture, not a failure of effective governance. There's no evidence that openness has restricted the ability of public servants to give frank and fearless advice - it's only a culture of fear and secrecy that appears to prompt self-censoring behaviours.
Equally claiming
that requests from media for information under FOI are a nuisance makes me
seriously question the commitment to good governance of any senior public
servant making this claim.
In my view any senior public servant espousing that public
servants need to be coddled and protected from scrutiny in order to provide the
frank and fearless advice expected in their roles needs to be counselled,
rather than supported in their cultural groupthink.
The public service works for Australia, serving citizens by
way of parliament and has a contractual and moral obligation to provide the
best advice it can to the government of the day.
There is no caveat in this obligation for ‘the best advice
that doesn’t make a public servant feel embarrassed or uncomfortable’, nor is
there a caveat for ‘being inconvenienced’.
Frank and fearless advice can, and should, be given in an
open environment.
The public service should, by default, make its advice public
in order to both allow the public to understand the thinking behind why certain
decisions are made, or not made, and to provide the scrutiny required to ensure
that the public service’s advice to parliament is comprehensive and complete.
It is possible to place systems in place to reduce the FOI
burden, something that departments appear to have repeatedly preferred not to
do, in favour of making it as hard as possible to identify and request
information in order to discourage citizens from daring to question their
public sector ‘betters’. Taking an open by default approach, and redesigning systems appropriately, would likely significantly reduce the cost and time currently spent on keeping information unnecessarily hidden.
We live in a time when it is no longer possible for an organisation to hold all the wisdom needed in decision-making. Between limits to the expertise available within an
organisation, the lack of time available to busy staff to research emerging innovation ideas, staff at any large organisation will find it hard to provide a comprehensive view of a situation or the
available options without external assistance.
With less scrutiny of public sector advice there’s an even lower chance than now (with current restrictions on scrutiny) that the public
service will be able to effectively advise government comprehensively, leading inevitably to worse policy outcome.
This is particularly the case when innovative solutions or
on-the-ground insights are required.
Nor should frank and fearless advice be career limiting when
made public, or for that matter when delivered privately. Shooting the
messenger is a human trait and with limited public scrutiny it can be easier
for politicians or senior public servants to punish public servants who, in
being frank and fearless, step beyond what is considered within an agency or
portfolio as ‘acceptable options’.
Concealing decision-making processes in the shadows can easily
lead to good and well-evidenced options being buried by ideologues or those who
feel these options may not support their public sector empire building.
Of course more openly providing frank and fearless advice
can – and will – lead to greater public and media scrutiny. There will be more brickbats
than bouquets and the public service will need resilient as it shifts its culture
from a fear of embarrassment to embracing public debates that enrich government
decision processes.
Given the comments by Secretaries and the leadership of the
APSC, such a shift to a bias to open will require a reversal of their attitudes
and the culture prevalent at that level.
This culture, a remnant of these individuals’ journeys
through the public service over the last twenty to forty years, may have served Australia in the past, but has now become detrimental
to an effective future for the Australian Public Service and for Australia as a nation.
It will do Australia no good to have the current crop of
Secretaries appoint and promote public servants sharing their views. This will only perpetuate the cultural belief that frank
and fearless advice can only be provided in the dark, hidden from the citizens
on whose behalf it is being made.
So it appears that for Australia to make a clean break from
the ‘protect and coddle public servants’ perspective, to embrace
whole-of-society governance, where decisions are made in sunlight, significant guidance and culture change counselling is required for the leadership of Australia's public service.
