Week 12- Looking to the Future

Question 1

List the (4) requirements to be a public servant

Answer 1

• Possess ability to serve successive elected governments with equal commitment
• Required to give allegiance even when their private view of the competence and direction of government can only be delivered to ministers behind closed doors
• Can quietly influence but cannot publicly advocate
• Can provide forceful, frank and fearless advice confidentially (if that is their style) but they need always accept that it is for minsters, within the law and parliamentary conventions to make the final decisions on what is in the public interest

Question 2

What role do public servants and governments play in addressing intergenerational issues?

Answer 2

• Public servants are attuned to identifying the unanticipated consequences of policies being considered by governments. Yet evidence may take years, even generations to become fully apparent
• Now governments strive to address the thorny problems of intergenerational welfare dependence in a prosperous society
• Governments new focus on how best to provide assistance to people who are disadvantaged, without unintentionally creating a learned helplessness (from support and disincentives to work), reinforcing social exclusion and marginalisation
• Challenge of assessing competing interests is intensified. Impact of public policy on winners and losers, or even on relative winners, always has to be balanced

Question 3

What aspect has become more difficult in managing countervailing public perceptions?

Answer 3

• Citizen expectations seem to be rising faster than capacity of governments and public servants to deliver
• Yet, people who look to governments to provide assistance are becoming increasingly resistant to the growing intervention of government in the conduct of their private lives. Private behaviour has significant implications for public costs
• Raises issue of how to frame the expectations of citizens and nudge them in a responsible direction

Question 4

How might these issues of public perceptions be tackled?

Answer 4

• Productivity must be increased by enhancing the capacity and capability of public service organisations and ensuing more rigorous management of employee performance results
• Limited resources of public administration need to be allocated and deployed more efficiently and effectively, and no less ethically
• Recent initiatives such as ‘joined-up government’, ‘citizen centred engagement’ and improved ‘customer service’ need to be continued on a wider scale. Have been conceived too narrowly, they are necessary but insufficient

Question 4

What must Australia do to handle these issues?

Answer 4

• Rebuild and rearticulate the structure of democratic governance
• Greater collaboration between public and private and community sectors
• New forms of partnership to provide public benefit in unexpected ways, and revitalise participatory engagement of citizens in the life of the nation

Question 5

Describe the market for the delivery of public goods

Answer 5

• Much public administration has been outsourced
• It has created a mixed public sector economy based, at least in part, on contestability
• Governments remain the purchaser of services, but public service is less and less the provider
• The importance of third party agents has increased

Question 6

What must governments do on the supply side in delivering public goods?

Answer 6

• Routinely look to the private sector to fund and build public infrastructure
• Depend on community sector to deliver human services
• There are well-developed proposals, to attract private capital to not-for-profit social enterprises, by enabling them to offer investment returns for delivering public programs under performance based contracts

Question 7

What must governments do on the demand side in delivering public goods?

Answer 7

• Slowly, too reluctantly letting users have choice in the programs they require and the providers from whom they purchase
• Growing recognition that citizens as ‘customers’ need to be given informed market choice in accessing publicly funded institutions
• Becoming more widely accepted that choice should also be provided to those who need access to social housing, disability support or aged care. Recipients get to exert some decision making in what they are offered
• Diversity of programs and providers is cautiously being embraced

Question 8

Summarise how governments must deliver public goods moving forwards

Answer 8

• Must create and deliver public programs that enhance diversity and provide greater choice in citizens
• Requires that public services will no longer attempt to exert a monopoly power over the delivery of public services, nor seek to use the advantage of asymmetrical power with weaker community based organisations

Question 9

What should public servants be able to do?

Answer 9

• Be well-trained in the delivery of policy options and the marshalling of evidence to support them
• Provide strong and robust advice
• Added value in public servants having to fight for influence against the propositions put forward by advocacy groups etc

Question 10

Distinguish between political advisers and apolitical public servants

Answer 10

The distinction between political advisers and apolitical public servants should be acknowledged. Ensure ministerial staff are accountable for decisions taken on behalf of their ministers

Question 11

What are the impacts of delivery of government through third parties?

Answer 11

• Public service delivery should be benchmarked against and commissioned from private and not-for-profit (NFP) providers
• Increased efficiencies, programs are being delivered at a lower cost than by public service agencies
  -Partly bad as NFPs pay lower salaries, make use of volunteer labour and/or receive philanthropic support
  -Community sector can end up subsidising delivery of government. Unethical and unsustainable

Question 12

Outline the impacts (including risks) of outsourcing

Answer 12

• NFPs have increased the cost effectiveness of government implementation. Often organisations contracted to provide services also advocate on behalf of those to whom they deliver
• Potential of outsourcing has been undermined by the unnecessary intrusion of public service micro-management of third party administration
• Financial risk is devolved to the contractor with a high level of administrative interventions by public servants. Often motivated by impulse to avoid political risk on behalf of ministers they serve. Standardisation may stifle creativity

Question 13

Why are public services inefficient?

Answer 13

• Instead of focusing on results and monitoring performance, administrative guidelines focus too much on process and compliance
• Public services struggle to measure outcomes in ways which allow governments to evaluate the long-term economic and social returns on public investments

Question 14

What is there imbalanced focus on in public services?

Answer 14

• Instead of focusing on results and monitoring performance, administrative guidelines focus too much on process and compliance
• Public services struggle to measure outcomes in ways which allow governments to evaluate the long-term economic and social returns on public investment

Question 15

What can governments do to avoid imbalanced focus in delivering public services?

Answer 15

• Set the political goals and budgetary parameters of their programs
• Ask their public services to contract the task to a diversity of providers on the basis that they will be paid for results
• At that point governments and their public services should step aside

Question 16

How should finances be handled in relation to outsourced providers?

Answer 16

• Outsourced providers should bear the financial consequences of not delivering to expectations, but accrue the benefits if through good management they can make a gain on the contract
• Hierarchy continues to constrain the functioning of public administration

Question 17

Outline advantages and disadvantages to structured control and delegated authority

Answer 17

Advantages:
* Ensures public services maintain high level of quality control over processes and inculcate ethical standards

Disadvantages:
* Intensifies the natural inclination of public servants to avoid risk and intermediate (and thereby weaken) innovative ideas
* Slows things down

Question 18

What is the impact of rigid vertical demarcations?

Answer 18

Rigid vertical demarcations, in which decisions rest largely on situational authority, serve systematically to undervalue the considerable expertise that resides on the front-line

Question 19

Why does there need to be more effort to empower experience?

Answer 19

• Those who deliver services are too rarely given the opportunity to contribute to program design, much of their creativity is spent trying to find ways to achieve the objects of public policy despite conflicting rules under which they work around
• Community organisations which focus on addressing the multiple disadvantages of individuals by taking a holistic ‘citizen-centric’ approach, should be given the opportunity to become partners in governance. Should be fully engaged in the structure of the services they are contracted to deliver
• Those who receive public services are too rarely provided with a chance to influence the manner in which they are delivered. Governments increasingly recognise this

Question 20

Define localisation

Answer 20

The devolution of decision making to communities and community based institutions. Should become integrated into program design

Question 21

How should individuals be empowered in the delivery of public services?

Answer 21

• Individual citizens should be empowered to take control of the services that they need and to decide by whom they are delivered
• Particularly in disability services individuals (and carers and their families) are being given greater capacity to manage and direct their own budgets
• Need to be informed and supported in making their own choices, but not be an excuse for well meaning, misplaced professional paternalism
• People cannot continue to be categorised as ‘cases’ to be managed by experts
• Already know that ‘consumer directed care’ approach can be applied effectively to those who want to live a full life in the community despite their disabilities. Can be extended to those who are ageing, suffering mental ill-health or looking for work

Question 22

What impact will the empowerment of providers and recipients have on government services?

Answer 22

• Empowerment of providers and recipients will slowly build a new public sector economy based on diversity
• Community organisations can move from being public advocates for the clients they serve to becoming partners with public servants in considering how best to meet their needs
• Individuals can stop being treated as passive beneficiaries and become active decision makers
• Language of change is already being given voice in ‘compacts’ of collaborative principles and a range of ‘consumer-control’ initiatives

Question 23

What has been the impact of internet on democratic engagement?

Answer 23

• No longer necessary for political influence to be wielded through the traditional approaches of industry lobbying or community advocacy
• ‘E-government’ presently remains too narrowly conceived as the provision of government information or basic transactions
• Social media offers the means to create digital democracy, marked by far greater citizen participation

Question 24

What is the starting place for a digital democracy and how does this progress from here?

Answer 24

• Essential starting place is to ensure that governments and public services work on the assumption that all publicly-funded data collections should be available as ‘creative commons’ on the web
• If there are perceived reasons information needs to be protected for confidentiality, privacy or security, the case should be argued
• Now is the moment to ensure individuals and organisations can access and mash up the ‘evidence’ (in ‘evidence based policy’) in all sorts of creative ways, whether its engaging with public policy and/or developing applications for community benefit