Module Two: How do we understand public value?

Introduction

The Australian political system is categorised as a liberal democracy, which is premised on society being ruled by the people (citizens), rather than by a hereditary monarchy, a powerful clan or a military junta.

How, then, do we ensure that those whom the ‘people’ select/elect to parliament as their political representatives do what the people have asked them to do on their behalf? As we learned during Module 1, Parliament is sovereign, comprising elected representatives with the Government made up of a majority formed by like-minded elected members. These days that means the party or coalition that commands a majority of seats. The Government is steered by an executive (Cabinet) from within that group and administered by a responsive bureaucracy (public service). If the Government does not meet the needs of electors, then a change can occur at an election, where the ‘people’ can show their dissatisfaction. When a new party or coalition comes to office it will have promised to achieve certain goals if it wins office. When the Government is accused of ‘breaking promises’, apart from being interesting theatre, it also violates a sacred tenet of democracy – to respect the people’s wishes. Meeting the needs of voters is considered to be ‘responsive’ government (Topic 1).

In turn, when government comes to power with a raft of broad policy promises, it expects the bureaucracy (of anonymous, neutral officials) to implement and administer that policy. This also falls within the notion of responsive government. Being appropriately responsive is one of the keys to a successful public service career.

Under the Westminster system of government inherited from the British, Cabinet as a whole is responsible for a decision (collective responsibility), and if there is a major mistake, or lack of judgement within a Minister’s portfolio, then the Minister is expected to resign his/her post (individual responsibility). How often the latter occurs appears to be more in the rhetoric than in the reality these days, with Ministers arguing that they should not be required to resign because they could not be expected to personally be across every decision made by thousands of officers in their department.

Where once Ministers were expected to take the blame for errors in their departments, they now seem to resign only for a personal miscalculation, or after issues of personal integrity come to light. Even then some ministers try to cling on regardless. The issue of Ministerial Responsibility will be covered in Topic 2, and may be of interest to you because if the Minister is less likely to fall on their sword, who is going to be held responsible?

New Governments spend a lot of time on ‘Machinery of Government’ design in an attempt to be more responsive. This entails packaging a combination of services and delivery mechanism within a portfolio under the responsibility of a Minister and often involves public servants aligning under new structures and relationships.

Where your Department ends up, and under which influential Minister, can provide an indication of the type of priority given to that area by the incumbent government (Topic 3).

As a consequence of a better understanding of the  intractability of many societal issues policy makers have come to realise that an issue might require a range of portfolios and jurisdictions to be involved to provide a solution, so efforts have been made to set up whole-of-government mechanisms (e.g. Cape York Partnership for indigenous development) to better deal with them. This, in turn, creates issues with administration (see Topic 3) and responsibility.

In the broader sense, the business of government is a contested reality, governed by some key paradigms. In Topic 4, the debate about the virtue of New Public Management (NPM), versus the virtue of the emerging paradigm of ‘public value’, will be introduced. In later modules (e.g. Module 6 on innovation), it will be taken up again.

Various frameworks have been established within the bureaucracy in an attempt to enable it to be more responsive and more responsible, including policy frameworks, people management frameworks, and financial management frameworks. These frameworks aim to ensure better decision making, improved quality, reduced waste and improved outcomes from government investment (Topic 5). You need to be aware of these frameworks to better understand the legitimacy of your decision -making.

The quality of government decision-making is a large factor in improving responsiveness and ensuring responsible government. A poor decision can cost the community many hundreds of millions (e.g. using Navy patrol boats to tow asylum seeker boats, which destroys the patrol boat’s infrastructure, and the naval fleet (The Australian, 2014) or cost lives (e.g. Housing Insulation Scheme). Alternatively, a good decision might save the nation in posterity (e.g. save the Murray River for future generations and biodiversity). Paying attention to the process and model of decision-making is becoming increasingly important (Topic 5) and you too might become more conscious of the frames you employ when making decisions.

Modern public service is relying more on self-managed processes to provide guidance to and control over staff behaviour, in recognition that in complex systems individual agents require more autonomy to meet the requisite variety of the communities they serve. Using values (Topic 6) to guide decision-making and behaviour enables improved responsiveness. The encoding of Commonwealth, state and territory jurisdictional values have demonstrated their virtue in helping public servants become aware of their personal values and the values of the governments the public servants serve. These values may come into play during decision-making and ideas leadership, when operating in an increasingly contestable environment.

Public sector middle managers need to be not only strategically, but also politically, astute (Topic 7) in order to meet the dual requirements of being both responsive to the government of the day, yet faithful to the code of an independent public service. What does it take to learn these skills? Read on!