Did public service learn from welfare scandal?

A major academic study into the Australian Public Service’s (APS) response to the robodebt royal commission’s recommendations has found that the two biggest agencies in the Commonwealth simply ghosted their staff on the issue.

In a landmark paper published by the Journal of European Public PolicyAustralian National University researchers Daniel Casey and Dr Maria Maley have found that defence and home affairs didn’t offer their staff guidance on the wash-up of the scandal.

“The failure by the Departments of Defence (the largest department in the APS) and Home Affairs (the second largest department in the APS) to communicate with their staff is concerning, given significant cultural failures that have been uncovered in both departments,” the research paper said.

“Interestingly, in an APS-wide forum in July 2023, the Secretary of the Defence Department, Greg Moriarty, commented that ‘[w]e are dealing, I think, with a very fundamental crisis in the public service at the moment around robodebt’.”

The basis of the study, in many respects, is what makes it stand out: the researchers used freedom of information (FOI) requests to compel agencies to answer their questions.

“The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods and is based on data obtained under the Australian Freedom of Information Act 1982. FOI requests were sent to all 113 Australian government entities with staff employed under the Public Service Act 1999 (PS Act), as at 31 December 2023.

“The requests were submitted in January/February 2024 and covered 1 July 2023 to 31 December 2023. This six-month period was chosen because it includes the release of both the royal commission report (7 July 2023) and the government’s response (13 November 2023).”

The study documents that “five agencies initially sought to refuse the applications on this basis, but all agencies eventually released the relevant documentation”. The question it seeks to illuminate is whether, or how, the APS is capable of learning from its mistakes. A royal commission is a rich tapestry in this regard because you don’t really get a royal commission without a major stuff-up or failure.

What has intrigued the authors is whether or not APS leaders became sock puppets for their ministers, and where the practical boundaries are.

“In Australia, by law, public servants must be responsive to the directions of ministers, while remaining impartial and professional, providing ‘frank and fearless’ advice and ensuring the probity and legality of government action,” the paper says.

“Over-responsiveness has been described as ‘the unforced eagerness of officials to assist their government’s case’, and insecurity of tenure for public service leaders has been identified as a cause of the problem. However, the dangers of over-responsiveness are never discussed publicly by APS leaders.

“The robodebt crisis has all the hallmarks of such over-responsiveness. Yet did this fundamental cultural cause form part of the meaning-making undertaken by public service leaders in the aftermath of robodebt?”

So what is “meaning-making”? Basically, it’s corporate cognition, or institutional learning that sticks. The hard stuff.

“Using robodebt as a case study to explore leaders’ communication after a crisis, and thus their meaning-making, has several original contributions. The study focuses on how lessons were communicated across the entire Australian federal public service, arising from one crisis, within one jurisdiction, in a short period of time,” the paper says.

“Other studies have explored post-crisis learning within the specific organisation involved in the crisis; or how lessons have travelled across jurisdictions; travelled across time; or travelled between policy areas.

“Additionally, over-responsiveness of public servants is an issue of concern across political-administrative systems, but how public service leaders communicate with their staff about the problem is rarely examined, and is difficult to detect. Such exchanges usually remain hidden. Using an innovative method, we uncover new evidence of how public service leaders grapple with this challenging subject in their internal communications.”

For the 113 agencies concerned, it’s the research project from hell because they have to dredge up and redact all of the relevant FOI information. The results were not pretty. Nor is the analysis.

“It is telling that the response of the most senior leaders of the APS is called ‘Louder than Words’, since they expressed no words about the underlying cause of the misconduct in robodebt: over-responsiveness of senior public servants to the agendas of ministers.

“These messages demonstrated a failure to confront fundamental problems, without which there cannot be meaningful learning. It appears that naming the problems and responsibility for learning broad lessons from the robodebt case was delegated to individual departments and agencies. This represented opportunities, but also enabled moments of policy inaction,” the study said

“In a similar vein, the talking points sent to all senior executive service officers to use in their discussions with staff, which therefore define the ‘appropriate’ words to use, were not explicit about the problems seen in robodebt.

“They stated that robodebt ‘exposed failures in the APS’ and that ‘there were failures of leadership and judgment’ but these were not described and the caveat was that ‘it’s important to remember at the same time many good people were trying to do the right thing’”.

So, is there a cheat sheet for evasion and deflection? Sure, it reads like this:

“Where public service leaders did not communicate, or communicated in a limited or minimising way, we employ a framework from the literature on inaction. Brown and Stark (2022, pp. 51-56) suggest four moments of ‘policy inaction’, preventing lessons from being learnt:

• Moment one: reframing of lessonsfollowing the release of a report, ‘the fine print is rewritten in ways which allow nothing to happen’, often accompanied by ‘tokenistic gesture[s]’ to avoid substantive reform.
• Moment two: offloading of lessons‘a government actor rhetorically accepts responsibility … but then ships them off to other actors and takes no further action’.
• Moment three: pausing and refining, actors take additional time to consider and analyse the recommendations, often to ensure proper, thorough implementation. This inaction is deliberate and functional, often for good reasons.
• Moment four: refusing to acknowledge lessons ‘those who might take carriage of implementing lessons purposefully look away and refuse to engage in sensemaking’. This includes a willingness to blame ‘bad apples’ rather than recognise a broader cultural, systemic failure.

The piece first appeared at The Mandarin.