For good or ill, much of the attitudes and strategies of the modern Liberal Party have been shaped by its greatest leader since Menzies, newly turned octogenarian John Howard.
After Bob Hawke defeated Malcolm Fraser as prime minister in 1983, Howard, his treasurer, reflected unhappily on how little the Fraser ministers had achieved during their seven years in office. Why was that? Because, Howard concluded, the public servants had kept talking them out of doing what they’d intended to do.
So when Howard became prime minister in 1996, he resolved not to let that happen to his government. He began with a “night of the long knives” in which he sacked the heads of six government departments.
When Tony Abbott took over from Labor in 2013, he repeated the process with a “night of the short knives” in which the heads of four departments got chopped.
Nothing could be better calculated to send a message to top public servants that survival in their jobs rests on the continuing approval of the prime minister and his ministers, and that any frank and fearless advice they offer will be at their own risk.
We can be reasonably confident that, by now, it would be rare for ministers to be given unwelcome advice.
Which doesn’t sound smart to me. No leader has all the answers. The manager who surrounds themselves with Yes-persons is more likely to fall in a hole than achieve great things.
Last week Scott Morrison did what’s become the accepted practice of prime ministers from both sides and moved to install his personal choice to head his department and, in effect, be boss of the other department heads.
He shifted a former chief-of-staff of his private office, Phil Gaetjens, from Treasury to Prime Minister and Cabinet. Gaetjens’ replacement at Treasury is Dr Steven Kennedy, a Treasury-trained and highly experienced macro-economist, with much experience in other areas. His appointment suggests a step back from the politicisation of Treasury.
Asked about public servants’ role in giving advice, Morrison said “it is the job of the public service to advise you of the challenges that may present to a government in implementing its agenda. That is the advisory role of the public service. But the government sets policy. The government is the one that goes to the people and sets out an agenda, as we have”.
Get it? He sees the bureaucrats’ role as to implement the government’s policy. If they see any problems during that implementation, they are free to draw them to their masters’ attention. But, by implication, they’re not invited to suggest items that need adding to the policy agenda.
It should go without saying that the government sets policy and the public service puts it into practice. Feeling you have to say it suggests a lack of confidence and a fear of having to debate with people who know more about the topic than you do.
But if the Morrison government used the recent election to set out a busy agenda of reforms, I must have missed it. Makes you suspect the agenda for the next three years will just be responding to problems as they arise. Policy without having a policy, perhaps.
But the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government’s seeming antipathy towards public servants runs deeper than that. I get the feeling ministers and their staffers regard them as class enemies. People who vote for the other side and so are neither likeable nor to be trusted.
This government took years to reach enterprise agreements with many of them. And though the disaster of Abbott’s first budget killed off almost all the Coalition’s enthusiasm for cutting government spending, it remains strong in two (not particularly big) areas.
It’s willingness to cut spending on public administration is exceeded only by its annual “crackdowns” on benefit payments to the disadvantaged. It knows there’ll be no objection from voters generally, while its heartland supporters will be much gratified see the leaners and loafers get their comeuppance.
The annual cuts to departmental admin budgets – laughably known as the “efficiency dividend” – long ago degenerated into rounds of redundancies that have significantly reduced the size of the public service.
Thus has the public service become less efficient – including taking longer to get things done – and lost much of its corporate memory, plus most of its policy experts.
So it may be just as well the Libs think they don’t need policy advice from public servants. When they do need it, they pay megabucks to the big four accounting and consulting firms. What would they know about public policy? A fair bit now they’ve hired many of the policy experts the government let go.
The great advantage of using private-sector consultants, of course, is that they invariably give the paying customer the advice they think it wants to hear. Good luck, Scott.
