TOPIC 3.1: Accountability – How do we keep governments honest?

What is accountability and how do we measure government activity?

Government is a significant feature of the Australian social and economic landscape and poor decision making, corrupt practices, and inefficient operations makes a significant impact upon the lives of ordinary citizens through poor service, higher taxes and uncompetitive business.

In the formal Westminster sense, accountability is derived through the convention of the Minister being responsible to Parliament.  However, we noticed in Module 2 that this is challenged: As Mulgan (2012)^[1] says:

For these reasons, attention on accountability in this module will concentrate upon other aspects of accountability. A significant aspect of accountability is actually measuring government activity.

The OECD (as cited in McPhee, 2011) has made the point that:^[2]

Establishing the correct strategy and targets, setting the correct measures, and investing in collecting the data, is a major aspect of accountability and one the modern public sector manager needs to be able to master as part of their role of performance management. Portfolio, departmental, program, project and contact level indicators of performance are required often for reporting, if not for operational, purposes.

Accountability in policy complexity

With modern Government being encouraged to engage in contestable processes and, also outsource (“steering not rowing”)(Bell & Hindmoor, 2009)^[3], the ability to hold third party providers (e.g. a job search NGO) accountable, is adding complexity to an already difficult task. If a whole-of-government approach is taken, for example, to improve the life of the citizenry in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, how much of the benefit was realised by the contribution of an efficient grants management scheme instituted by Treasury head office, or a new stretch of ‘all weather’ road by a transport department; or by a better trained school teacher graduating more students in the local school? The modelling to answer this question needs to be increasingly sophisticated to target specific inputs and their link to outputs and/or outcomes, and it may be near to impossible to construct.

In an environment of “Globalisation”, how will we measure the impact of a local emissions policy on the lives of the people of Kiribati whose nation is being submerged by rising sea levels, or the impact on the permafrost in the Canadian tundra, which stores frozen methane, hypothesised to cause major disruption to our planet (all communities) as it melts from global warming? More importantly, how will we use the impact of evaluation on these incidents outside our borders to feedback into the policy making cycle of our national agenda inside our borders, where the effect is not so immediately obvious but the cost is potentially high?

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the issue of government accountability and responsibility with regard to the issue of Federal/State constitutional powers once again to the fore since March 2020. The complexity of developing and managing policy responses in quickly changing circumstances with uncertain, but rapidly evolving knowledge has presented huge challenges for all levels of government. The significant constitutional threshold required to create change to improve clarity of government accountability and responsibility has meant that Australia has relied upon on informal governance arrangements along with the political willingness to act in the public interest, via the National Cabinet – the COVID-19 inspired successor to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).  Despite this attempt at national policy harmonisation the constitutional ability of individual jurisdictions to make decisions contrary to the decisions of other jurisdictions has added to the complexity of governance and at times confusion in the public mind with respect to the respective COVID-19 regulations across Australian states and territories.

It is when things go wrong that accountability is most highlighted. Usually, we look for someone to blame, but modern governance aims to ensure there is someone nearby to correct the deviation before catastrophe occurs.

Two of the major issues in accountability in Australia are: first, the short-term focus of the three year electoral cycle (wanting quick wins by suppressing symptoms and perhaps not addressing causes); and second, the vagaries of our Federal system, which allows the players to blame other jurisdictions for a break down in service, or for a lack of service. This second issue happens especially where the Commonwealth government has involved itself in a policy area alongside state/territory governments (e.g. roads or education).

The role of whistleblowers in holding governments accountable

When the system breaks down, the last line of defence may be a concerned individual like you blowing the whistle on a serious issue of illegal or unethical behaviour. Many instances of whistleblowing go unnoticed by the public and media while others become very high profile. In 2018, two whistleblowers at the ATO (Richard Boyle and Ron Shamir) worked with the ABC and Fairfax papers to expose alleged seriously unethical practice in tax collection at the ATO (Ferguson, et al, 2019)^[4].

There is ongoing concern amongst experts in Australia, that the system of protections for whistleblowers is not strong enough (Brown, 2022).^[5] For example, Richard Boyle was subsequently charged with 24 offences over the ATO affair (Knaus, 2023).^[6]

Best practice accountability measures prevent the public service from engaging in unethical, illegal and poor practice, and provide measures to report and address concerns. As in this case, it may still be necessary for ethical individuals to become whistleblowers to help prevent these from occurring. But, it is far better to have systems which are well-designed, robust and effective in the first place.