Last June, in a moment of apparent weakness, I wrote a post in defence of our poor, struggling politicians. Perhaps tempered by that article, I have been resisting the urge to join the chorus of rants about the current batch of complete balls-ups by Australian governments, both federal and state. Then I read the astonishing and appalling must-read article by Canberra writer Myles Peterson in last weekend’s Fairfax press. I can resist no more.
Peterson describes his short experience as a speech-writer in the federal Health Department. He describes being head-hunted and employed despite having no relevant experience, being dropped into the job and assigned various ‘important’ tasks without any induction or training, and being involved in policy-on-the-run when the Prime Minister decided he needed a big health announcement at short notice.
In short, if you can imagine the most outrageous scenarios of Yes Minister or The Hollowmen being amplified ten fold, you might come close to the real life public service world described by Myles Peterson. It is a world in which the importance of message has entirely taken over from the importance of substance. It is a world in which the real people running the country have become unelected and unaccountable political advisors, with public servants reduced to truly servile status. And it is a world of waste beyond the limits of imagination.
Much of the commentary about Peterson’s piece has focused on the Health Department and the problems in the Australian health system, with the implication that the Alice in Wonderland world he encountered exists only in that department. (Unsurprisingly, the Health Department hierarchy have denied any link to C.S. Lewis, describing Peterson as having worked in a “low level position” – and the minister has asked for ‘advice’ on some of the allegations raised.)
But watching the complete debacle of the on-again off-again insulation scheme or, on a state level, the botch up of Melbourne’s public transport ticketing system – now the most expensive in the world – it is clear that disfunctionality in our public departments is spread from crust to crust across our toasted nation. Reading the comments attached to Peterson’s article, many from other public servants, reinforces this.
Some bloggers and commentators point out that the problem here is with the public service, not the government. This is rubbish. As a friend of mine likes to say, “the fish stinks from the head”. The public service might be separate from politics in theory, but it is the politicians who determine the public service agenda and, in so doing, establish its culture. When ministers and prime ministers require policy to be drafted over a weekend, when they specify that white papers include ‘announceables’, when their advisors take control of everything: in these circumstances the public service very much loses its supposed independence.
Others take Peterson’s observations as evidence of a Labor government out of control. This is rubbish too. The advent of subservient public service goes back at least to the early days of the Howard government, when the public service was slashed in size and a blanket of fear was cast across all departments. Howard, of course, took his direction from Maggie Thatcher long before that. The current state of the public service is not a party political matter, it’s a political culture matter.
We, who elect our politicians and pay for the public service, deserve better. It is time we got our money’s worth. It is time that substance was placed back on top of the political agenda. It is time that decisions are made on the basis of national, rather than political, interest.
None of this will happen, of course. But rest assured I won’t be defending policitians again until it does.
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I've been work- ing in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
