Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Is social media blurring the non-partisan status of appointed public servants?

A separation that is widely understood within governments, but often less well understood in the rest of the community, is the separation between politics and public service.

Elected public servants, politicians, ascribe to specific political ideologies and policy positions which form the basis of how people select which politicians and parties to support and cast their votes for.

Unelected public servants, the appointed public service, strive to remain politically unaligned and non-partisan, neutral advisors and implementers of the ideological and political wishes of elected politicians.

This system is designed to balance the instability of democracy with the continuity, stability and certainty of continued governance and public service delivery, allowing appointed public servants to continue on an ongoing basis while elected politicians of various political stripes come and go.

Shifting the balance to largely political - where the majority of the public service is replaced at each change of government - would make governance unstable, with nations unable to rely on the continuity of contracts, laws, support or services they need to conduct their lives and businesses.

Whereas shifting the balance to largely apolitical - where elections are rare or of figurehead positions only - would remove the democratic option for nations to change their minds as to how they prefer to be governed, effectively dictatorships in all but name.

Therefore preserving the separation between politicians and public servants is a primary consideration of Australia's system of governance - as it is in most democratic states - while a delicate balance needs to be maintained where public services willingly and proactively carry out the will of the elected (political) government, however unelected career public servants retain the independence to provide frank and fearless non-partisan advice in their professional lives and the ability to participate as full citizens (with their own political views) in their private lives.

Australia has legislation, codes and policies to maintain this separation, which have largely worked well over the last century, although I - and most current or former public servants - have seen cases where the lines can get quite blurry between serving the government of the day and 'signing on' to the government's political position and cases where individuals have let their personal views overwhelm their professional need to remain non-partisan.

Social media is adding complexity to this mix, providing channels for government agencies and appointed public servants to have a louder and more direct public voice whereas previously government communications was limited to traditional media channels - radio, television and newsprint - where comments could be tightly filtered through communications teams, media specialists and Ministerial offices.

Today's media landscape allows every government agency and appointed public servant to be a participant, informer or influencer, in public debate. They can establish their own communications channels at little or no cost and distribute messages with, potentially, little or no central oversight (or as many approval processes as they like, but at the cost of speed and relevancy).

While for the most part agencies and public servants have been guarded and cautious in the use of these new channels - ensuring they have sound guidance and principles in place to preserve their non-partisan position - a few channels have become more blurry, presented as government channels but presenting political views.

These channels - and their proliferation as precedents are established - could easily confuse the lines between partisan and non-partisan, politicians and the professional appointed public service. This risks politicising the public service, confusing the public and damaging democracy.

Let me offer a few examples.

Firstly, in the Australian Government's list of official government social media accounts, Australia.gov.au (managed and administered by AGIMO in the Department of Finance and Administration) lists the Twitter account of Julia Gillard (@JuliaGillard), Australia's Prime Minister, alongside the accounts of departments, agencies and government programs.

Unlike all of the other accounts listed by Australia.gov.au, Julia Gillard's account is operated by a politician (Julia Gillard herself) and her Ministerial staff - who are largely political appointments with strong links to the Australian Labor Party.

While Julia Gillard fills an official government role, that of Prime Minister, she is a politician, elected to this public office by her party, who happens to hold enough votes in the House of Representatives to be able to form government.

While her Twitter account (@JuliaGillard) does include apolitical tweets about the Australian Government, it is also used for her personal and party political purposes and cannot be considered apolitical or part of the professional and apolitical machinery of government.

Her account regularly tweets messages that slip into politically partisan territory, such as:
"As a government of purpose and strong policy commitments, we won’t be distracted by their weakness and negativity."
Source: https://twitter.com/JuliaGillard/status/275385120863703040

5 years of Labor. A lot done, a lot left to do. TeamJG
Source: https://twitter.com/JuliaGillard/status/272165948952285184

RT @AustralianLabor: Greg Combet today gave a great run down of how the is going and the Spring Racing form of the Liberals: 
Source: (Original tweet) https://twitter.com/AustralianLabor/status/263893246667812864

It is perfectly legitimate for our Prime Minister to have this account and to use it as she sees fit. However, on the basis of tweets such as those above, her account shouldn't be included in a list of official government Twitter accounts where it could be confused as the standard approach for all government departments and create a perception that the Australian Public Service is partisan towards the Labor party, rather than a non-partisan body that advises and implements the Australian Government's (who happens to be the Labor party) dictates.


A second example is from QLD, the @QLDStateBudget twitter account, owned and managed by the QLD Department of Treasury and Trade (see it linked from the bottom right of their page).

This account, which has provided good news and updates regarding the QLD government budget in a largely non-partisan way, has also (disconcertedly), published tweets like:
TOUGH CUTS: Wayne Swan should take a leaf out of Campbell Newman's book: 
Source: https://twitter.com/QldStateBudget/status/246439391512371200

Which is a very political tweet indeed.

This account, as a purported departmental account, shouldn't stray into this type of political commentary and is clearly being influenced by a Ministerial office.

While this Twitter account hasn't been tweeted from for over 80 days, and may no longer be active, the tweets remain public and therefore the perception remains plausible.

Perception is reality
In both examples above the lines between elected and appointed public servants are blurred - which can create confusion and a perception that Australia's professional public service is no longer operating in a non-partisan and independent fashion.

While I don't believe this is the case, as for many things in government perceptions are reality. In a situation where the public and the media are often already confused about the separation between elected and appointed public servants, it is critical for agencies and governments to ensure that the separation remains distinct and clear in perception, as well as reality.

If social media makes this harder, due to the ease of posting publicly and the difficulty in removing material from the public domain, then it becomes even more necessary for senior public servants and politicians to understand social mediums, be aware of the risks, sponsor the creation of appropriate guidance and training for their staff and apply appropriate discretion at all times to minimise and resist any tendency to blur the lines.

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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Come along to the Gov 2.0 Canberra picnic (with fantastic speakers)

It is approaching the end of the year, so for the final formal Gov 2.0 event in Canberra, there's a picnic being held on Saturday 8 December from midday.

There will be a couple of speakers - starting with Julian Carver from New Zealand, who has had a long involvement with the open government movement, including working on NZ's Declaration on Open and Transparent Government.

The other speaker and the venue will be confirmed shortly.

For more information and to RSVP visit: http://gov2actdec12.eventbrite.com/

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Open Australia launches 'Right to Know' FOI request site

The process of requesting documents from the government, though enshrined in Australian law, can be difficult for many people - taking significant time, causing significant frustration and resulting in inconsistent and substandard outcomes - as I found when asking government agencies some simple question about which public social media channels they operated and which web browsers they used.

My experience saw 25% of agencies requested never respond to the request, several more withhold information on the web browsers they used as 'commercial in confidence' (although this information is automatically transmitted to every website visited by their staff) and several others ask for up to $800 for finding the documents that provided the answer.

In many cases there was little or no information on the FOI process on agency websites and in many cases agency FOI staff contacted me to explain their FOI processes (which differed substantially amongst agencies) - adding significant cost to a process where this information could be more clearly publicly explained through agency websites.

This is, of course, a single example and doesn't represent the bulk of FOI requests - for which there's no consolidated statistical data on whether the system works well and the satisfaction of people making requests (as agencies don't assess this or aggregate this information - as they do for most other customer service processes), making it very hard to quantify how effectively the FOI system is performing other than via anecdotal views, such as mine above.

OpenAustralia has now launched a website designed to simplify the FOI process for ordinary people, making it easier for Australians to understand what they request from which government agencies and the process of making and completing these requests, as well as collecting information on the complexities and difficulties of these processes.

The website, Right to Know, is based on a UK model which has been in operation for a number of years and offers both better transparency in the FOI process as well as potentially streamlining the process for government agencies, where they will have to spend less of their valuable FOI officer time on explaining how to make valid FOI requests.

The site will also help capture released documents and collect data on the complexity and issues with FOI processes, helping the government to improve them in the future.

The site is launching at a time when the government is reviewing the operations of the revised FOI Act, and it will also be interesting to see what this review recommends - and what is ultimately done with these recommendations.

I'm hopeful that the government and public service will look on the launch of Right to Know as a positive step that supports the goals of FOI, rather than considering it as yet another impost on their operations, even if long-term FOI stalwards such as Allan Rose believe that the culture change necessary in the public service to support FOI are yet to occur.

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Friday, November 23, 2012

The latest infographic about Twitter - Australians the third most active users

The Twitter infographic below has been brought to my attention by The Wall and I thought it worth reflecting here.

As you'll see below, Australia is rated the third most active nation on Twitter, behind the US and UK and just ahead of Brazil, Canada and India.

There's some useful general demographics on Twitter's global audience, though I'm still waiting for the time when Twitter releases country-based demographics before it becomes possible to really assess Twitter's value as a promotional medium.

Right now for I'm tracking 633 government accounts in Australia (excluding politicians), including the latest addition, @ACTGIO.

The infographic was compiled by www.website-monitoring.com.



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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Hindsight: Government by the people, for the people but not yet OF the people -

This is a great video regarding innovations in participation, citizen engagement and deliberative democracy, with a panel discussion involving,

  • Professor Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Mr. Richard Dobson, Founder of Asiye Etafuleni, South Africa
  • Mr. Robert Miller, Director of the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program, USA
  • Dr. Henry Tam, Deputy Director of Community Empowerment Delivery, UK
It took place back in 2008, but remains extremely relevant and current to the trends of today.


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