Paddy Gourley | Public Service Amendment Bill is an embarrassment

Introduced before the advent of the robodebt royal commission report, it fails to anticipate any of Commissioner Catherine Holmes's recommendations.

It will do nothing to repair the ills of robodebt, especially the weakened capacity to provide frank, fearless and sound advice, the wasting of which the bill itself reflects.

And it does nothing to address the many terrible problems now ripping at the public service's vital organs - the damaging overuse of consultants and labour contractors, a serial inability to manage contracts, the absence of a proper legal framework for decisions about community developments grant, the absence of a minimum standards framework for services to citizens, the irascible secrecy of many agencies especially the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, workable procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest in the post separation employment of officials, a legislated code of conduct for ministerial staff - the list is as long as the Book of Jeremiah.

The bill doesn't encompass the most important recommendations of the 2019 Thodey Review and it betrays a lack of capability and imagination on the part of those who developed it, with minimal consultation.

To top it off, the bill fails in its own terms. It's flawed and trivial.

Foremost among the trivia are the bill's pointless minor redraft of section 19 of the Public Service Act, its toothless provision urging jobs to be classified at the lowest possible level and a tiddling change affecting the Secretaries Board, an unaccountable body at its best in forming sub-committees. A vague proposal for "long term insight reports" doesn't add up to much as only one a year is suggested.

But the bill's flaws take the cake.

First, its proposal on "stewardship" is cockeyed. It defines it as a "value" by saying "the APS builds its capability and institutional knowledge and supports the public now and into the future by understanding the long term impacts of what it does."

The APS does no such thing and whatever that definition might mean, stewardship is not a "value". The public service "builds its capability" by ensuring it is properly resourced and has proper structures, laws and procedures for its operation. These essentials of stewardship, without which there will be no "long term impacts" to ponder, are the responsibility of ministers and senior officials.

The Public Service Commissioner, Gordon de Brouwer, says stewardship for junior staff could be looking after the files. But how do junior officers, who may not have read or understood the papers they are filing, assess "the long term impact" of what they're doing? If this bill becomes law they'd better find out fast because in making stewardship a "value", they could be put through the disciplinary wringer for not taking into account "the long term impacts" of their actions.

That is, they could be sacked for an offence that is essentially unmeasurable. Junior staff must be surprised at this anti-worker legislation from an ALP government which has been waved through by their main union, the CPSU.

Needless to say, it has been applauded in submissions of notable intellectual flaccidity belatedly sent to a Senate inquiry by the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Public Partnership and Impact Hub from the University of NSW.

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Second, a proposed "purpose statement" for the public service is also out of whack. The purposes of the public service and its 80 or so statutory authorities have been already legislated by the Parliament. Staff don't need to be patronised by an over- riding purpose statement which is likely only to confuse them.

Staggeringly, the bill has the "statement" being approved not by the Parliament but by the Secretaries Board which has set up a 40 member "deliberative committee" to advise it and which is already beavering away in anticipation of the bill's passage. This is a democratic affront to the Parliament and the public will which should be firmly rebuffed. Can anyone name any organisation in the world that cedes to its staff the power to determine its purpose?

Finally, the bill's proposals for "capability reviews" may be useful but these beasts will forever remain relatively minor especially in a public service now drowning in an ocean of ills.

Moreover, these reviews are only to be mandated for about 20 per cent of public service agencies. Why not all of them? Happily it's not necessary to ask if such reviews would deter another robodebt because they didn't do so for the first one.

The Department of Human Services was subject to a capability review shortly before it played its part in hatching the robodebt. That review said that one of the great things in the Department's favour was "a highly capable secretary who is widely respected and well-skilled to lead the department into a challenging future".

That secretary was Kathryn Campbell. Former public service commissioner Andrew Podger says the bill is "hopeless". That's right in more ways than one. It's hopeless in conception and it offers no realistic hope of fixing a public service that's short-changing governments and citizens. If those responsible for this pygmy of a bill have taken into account its possible "long term impacts" it doesn't show. That is, the bill's public service designers may have not practised the stewardship discipline they're proposing for junior staff. If they have, let them bring forth the documentation to prove otherwise.

Chances to make wholesale amendments to public service legislation come around about once in a generation. The present bill misses that chance. It should be withdrawn and replaced by comprehensive legislative proposals capable of getting the public service off life support. That may be embarrassing but the bill itself is an embarrassment.

And that will be of little compared to the embarrassment to be suffered if this bill is passed as it will not stop a continuing pile up of the policy and administrative disasters of recent times. To crib from an infamous American poet, the Public Service Amendment Bill is in a world where "error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered."