Bleak House

Governments and public servants are now slaves to election campaigns and the spin cycle has left New South Wales lurching from one crisis to the next, writes Beverley Kingston

There is a temptation to see similarities between the current New South Wales government and the dying days of the long line of Labor governments that ran the state from the 1940s to the 1960s. In 1964, it was fairly obvious that the Labor government was tired. In desperation, it had appointed John Renshaw, a new and relatively young leader, but it had run out of ideas and was heavily weighed down with projects that had come to nothing or had never even been started. The differences between the 1960s and now however, far outweigh the similarities.

Several differences stand out. One is that the government is no longer able to call an election at a time of its choosing to reinvigorate its popularity or reinforce the opposition's weakness. Another is in the very significant changes in public expectations of what governments could and should do. We think that the health, education and transport services which government provides should match our rising standard of living. Indeed, we have come to expect that publicly provided services should differ little if at all from privately purchased ones.

The public service itself has changed significantly since the 1960s and is now recruited and managed very differently. If premiers Bob Heffron and Jack Renshaw were struggling in the 1960s to fulfill public housing and school–building promises with a public service that had become complacent, timeserving and in some cases irrelevant, the current government has an entirely different set of administrative problems. At a time when most infrastructure building or renewal projects require long timeframes and involve more complicated planning and fund–raising than ever, there is little likelihood that anyone will get the chance to carry them through to conclusion.

It used to be thought that a three–year term for state governments and the ability to call an election well before the three years had a negative effect on the quality of administration. Governments, it was said, had no incentive to embark on projects that would not deliver anything tangible before the next election. Fixed four–year terms would create some planning certainty and help alleviate this problem.

However, the shift to four–year terms has not greatly enhanced the government's ability to plan anything. More than ever, sound bites and daily press conferences drive government because of the pervasive nature of the modern news media, while the election cycle simply plays a different role.

Perhaps more importantly, the public service used to provide a kind of continuity, especially for long–term planning and management, and there used to be public servants capable of standing up to politicians. The public service could initiate major programs and carry them through, despite changes in government. After Peter Board restructured the NSW education system in the early years of the 20th century, he spent the next 17 years as director of education administering, refining and accounting for the system for which he was responsible.

More recently, there was Gerry Gleeson who, as an inspector for the NSW Public Service Board from 1961 to 1969, had laid the foundations of a formidable knowledge of the workings of government, which he put to good use as permanent head of the Premier's Department from 1977 to 1988.

However, since the late 1980s, the public service has been politicised, and with Nick Greiners 'reforms', senior public servants have been made dependent on short–term performance indicators for their bonuses and promotions. So they too have become sensitive to the election cycle and to government by 'spin'.

The kinds of planning and management that departments like health, education and public transport need to run their complicated businesses are not possible in short political cycles. They need people with extensive, often highly specialised experience and the ability to stand out against successive politically motivated ministers.

The management theory now dominating not only the public service but a whole range of institutions from universities to retail organisations asserted that management was management regardless of what was being managed and that specialised expertise could be relegated somewhere far down the chain of command. This goes a long way to explaining why the health services, for example, seem to lurch from one crisis to another. The instructions coming from the top of a huge organisation are not necessarily informed or relevant to the circumstances in a small unit somewhere down the line, but they frequently overwhelm the ability of individuals with expert on–the–spot knowledge to take an initiative or defy a direction.

Furthermore, the competitiveness introduced into management in the interests of efficiency has also had the effect of gradually discouraging co–operation and collaboration. Over the past two decades, a culture that aspired to service has gradually changed to one in which competition is paramount and that has, I suspect, gradually attracted a different kind of personality to its management levels.

In the history of NSW, many senior public servants have spent long careers in the railways, health, education, and the police. They were (mostly) men with professional backgrounds as engineers, doctors, teachers and so on, who really made a difference to planning and management because they were persistent, respected for their experience and expertise, and selfless.

There are still people like that, but a couple of decades of relentless competition in public life has reduced many to cynicism or despair, or driven them out. The likelihood is that as they retire, a different type altogether is succeeding them. But the important point is that the public service itself is no longer a counterweight to the relentless media–and–election–driven frenzy that has become government's modus operandi.

There are already important differences between the expectations of state and federal public services in Australia that generally are poorly understood. While the Commonwealth Public Service has mostly focussed on large questions of policy development, the states increasingly have become responsible for service delivery. The ways in which state and federal relationships have gradually been changing since Federation in 1901 add to the complexity. During the past hundred years, for example, largely because of the cost of fighting wars, the federal government has gradually taken over most of the taxation powers the original colonies were determined to retain when the Constitution was being drafted. Furthermore, much of what state governments handle in Australia is the province of local government elsewhere — which is partly where some of the enthusiasm for getting rid of the states comes from.

With the shift of taxation towards the Commonwealth, the states have lost much of their former ability to raise their own revenue. Not only are they dependent on handouts, often with conditions attached, but it has become harder to raise money for long–term projects, largely because they can't be sure of finding the money to pay back loans. This explains the resort to private–public partnerships. The shortage of funds and the difficulties surrounding long-term planning are now very noticeable not only in our ageing transport systems, but also elsewhere, where repair or renewal is desirable but not seen as vote–winning or even likely to gain support in an 'infrastructure bid' to Canberra.

NSW is in a particularly bad position economically and structurally because of our historic dependence on coal, both as the basis of much of what industry we have left, and as an export. With coal under threat because of climate change, the NSW economy has nowhere to go. Indeed, there is a sense that a push has developed to get as much coal as possible out of the ground and sold before it is banned.

But there's no secure future in the 'event-led economy', and not much to be said for trying to rely on tourism. Unlike South Australia, whose fragile manufacturing economy began ailing some decades ago and, along with its water shortage, seriously limited growth, and Victoria which faced up to its rust bucket status with a vengeance when Jeff Kennett became premier, NSW still has to recognise the implications of its historic dependence on coal.

In an interview in 1987, the highly respected public servant Peter Wilenski, who Neville Wran brought in to make a thorough examination of the workings of the public service, remarked that the administration of NSW 'was about ensuring the trains run on time, that roads are built, that there is sufficient electricity generation and so on'.

Increasingly, however, the business of government in NSW has become the delivery of services at a quite personal level through highly trained and educated men and women with their own ethical professional standards. Far from the clerical staff of former times, who were mostly required to answer queries promptly, file and retrieve documents accurately, and hope for promotion through drafting and commenting on policy papers, many of today's public servants represent the face of government to the people. They, as much as the politicians who journalists harass on the evening news, are the government. They are also actually people, neither superhuman nor ciphers but people who have homes, use the services, and vote.

In the clamour to reform the transport system, modernise the hospitals, improve the quality of teaching in the schools, little thought appears to be given to the fact that the intelligence, training, understanding and goodwill of a small army of real people, otherwise known as public servants, will be involved. Mostly they are people for whom the ethic of service is still alive, despite the trend to bury it in favour of self-interest and competitiveness. The measure of their efficiency or productivity does not show up in sales or profits or even the number of files processed in a given period.

As NSW heads towards the 2011 election, a change of government won't do much to alter the public service's now debased or demoralised culture. It could even make things worse, as everything is frantically turned upside down to create a semblance of 'doing something' before the next election.

Nor can I see the NSW Liberals providing inspiration and leadership for a thorough restructuring of the economy. The ideas have not been forthcoming. The planning, infrastructure and economic problems of the state cannot be turned around, whether in three years or even four. Once, it was sometimes possible for able and intelligent public servants to spend many years working through a problem and fixing it, piece by piece. In 1940, the legendary Wallace Wurth was still working to implement the changes recommended by a 1917 inquiry into the NSW public service. That could never happen now. Perhaps the electors know this too, in their bones, and may have known it since well before the last election.

Beverley Kingston is the author of A History of New South Wales