3 months ago
17
Victoria’s former top bureaucrat didn’t need much time to put her finger on where the state public service she previously led – a public service for many years considered Australia’s best – has lost its way.
Helen Silver’s interim findings were provided within weeks of starting her review, and her final report was handed to government just four months after it was commissioned. The central problem it identifies has been hiding in plain sight for years.
Since 2019, the size of the Victorian Public Service (VPS) has grown by 16 per cent. Over the same, six-year period, executive numbers within the service have ballooned by 52 per cent.
There were 1666 public servants employed on executive or senior technical salaries before the pandemic; at the last count, there were more than 3000. New executive roles, some with vague titles and responsibilities, have been created and shoe-horned into unwieldly departmental structures, which in some instances, put six layers of management between staff and their secretaries.
The result, aside from a bigger public wages bill, is in the words of Silver, a public service that is top-heavy, slower, less agile, less accountable and less able to learn from its mistakes. Victorians are served well by our public servants, Silver concludes, but not as well as we should be.
This should surprise no one. On the day that Treasurer Jaclyn Symes announced the Silver review, the swollen ranks of public service executives were already in her sights. Her predecessor, Tim Pallas, promised to reduce public service fat cats but never quite got the cream.
Where the Silver review goes further is in examining what this means for the culture of the public service, how it engages with the government and the quality of advice it provides.
“While there is no doubt the VPS is generally working hard, excessive hierarchy and layering creates unnecessary distance between decision-makers and advisers,” she says.
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“It slows decisions, reduces agility, blurs accountability and inhibits learning. It also limits career pathways and places a higher priority on risk avoidance, which ultimately weakens capability and culture. It also costs more.”
Silver goes on to explain why this has happened. As she notes, it has not taken place in a political vacuum.
“The review has heard that, in recent years, the scale and pace of executive government’s ambition and demands for responsiveness have at times outstripped the VPS capacity. This has seen growing delivery risks and rising staff burnout, and strategic functions being deprioritised to meet short-term demands.”
Silver says the result is a “misalignment of expectations and capacity”, which in turn erodes the quality of the work being done by the public service and the trust Victorians have in the VPS.
In other words, overworked public service staff, responding to greater and more complex demands from government, are having to report to more and more bosses who, in order of ascending salary, each have their say on what advice should look like before it reaches the in-tray of a government minister.
This is not a recipe for frank and fearless advice, an efficient public service or a particularly happy one.
Symes says the government’s response is less about making job cuts than rebalancing a public service that, she agrees, is badly out of shape. “We have a situation where we have too many executives, too many in the top of the range, and not enough people,” she says.
While the government accepted Silver’s recommendation to slice 332 executive and senior technical positions, it has budgeted to lose just 1000 of nearly 55,000 full-time equivalent positions across the VPS, rather than the 2000 positions recommended by Silver.
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This represents a reduction of fewer than 2 per cent of total VPS positions. Symes said this would be achieved through national attrition, rather than redundancies, as fixed-term contracts expire. Many of these jobs have already disappeared.
“Departments have been on notice,” she said. “We have wanted efficiencies in savings since I became treasurer. There are a lot of vacancies that have not been backfilled.”
A rebalancing of the public service is just one reform proposed by Silver’s review, which also seeks to rationalise a sprawling public sector and reset the state’s fiscal boundaries with the Commonwealth.
Given the extent of the problems identified, Silver’s proposed changes are modest and the government’s response more modest still. The total savings forecast by Symes amount to $1 billion a year from a $108 billion budget. Opposition Leader Jess Wilson describes it as a drop in the ocean.
Symes would have been happier to book the full savings recommended by Silver, but the government’s response reflects its anxiety about making any cuts to services, programs and public service jobs.
In the weeks leading up to its public release and the government’s response, every minister and departmental secretary was briefed on what the review had recommended for the bureaucratic patches under their control. They were given ample opportunity to push back, lobby and reduce the impact of what the government was planning to do.
Whoever forms government after next November’s election will inherit the remainder of an important to-do list.
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