The APS has placed longstanding emphasis on the need to take a whole-of-government perspective to its work. This will become even more crucial in the years ahead. The opportunity is for a system geared to consistently provide robust advice to government that integrates and balances the emerging international, social, economic and
The APS has placed longstanding emphasis on the need to take a whole-of-government perspective to its work. This will become even more crucial in the years ahead. The opportunity is for a system geared to consistently provide robust advice to government that integrates and balances the emerging international, social, economic and security pressures facing Australia and Australians.
What we think is needed
- Measures to ensure the APS overcomes cultural and structural silos, with people understanding other perspectives and disciplines, and looking to find shared solutions, without eroding healthy contestability. This should be developed through explicit professional and career development and movement between portfolios.
- New frameworks and structures to underpin high quality and whole-of-government advice on cross-cutting social, economic and security issues. This could include a Secretaries Board committee to frame and commission work on such issues, and a cross-disciplinary Integrated Strategy Office in PM&C to coordinate policy advice to the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
- Regular whole-of-government scenario exercises to identify key pressures on international, social, economic and security matters, and possible approaches and actions for government consideration.
What is shaping our thinking
- The ongoing challenge for the public sector, domestically and globally, to ensure silos do not undermine the quality of advice to governments. This includes grappling with fragmentation and the cultural and behavioural change required to tackle cross-cutting issues.
- The experiences and lessons of multiple international jurisdictions (including the UK, Singapore and Finland) in establishing inter-disciplinary or future-focused units, with dedicated resources and strong mandates.
- Feedback that these models are more successful when they are empowered to consider a wide range of inter-disciplinary issues, rather than focusing on a specific policy challenge, such as national security.
- The Intergenerational Report, which assesses the long-term sustainability of current government policies with a focus on demographics.
- The legislative requirement for secretaries to ensure their portfolio has a strong strategic policy capability that can consider complex, whole-of-government issues.
What we are still exploring
- Options to embed and resource integrated policy development functions, with the necessary capability, across the APS.
Comments
Thu, 02 May 2019
Policy advice is given by career public servants - people who have only been west of the Great Dividing Range when in a plane flying overseas. The majority do not have any awareness of what goes on in the places they are making decisions on behalf of, and they are the bureaucrats that make the public service so disreputable and inefficient.
Wed, 01 May 2019
It is helpful if staff from policy agencies undertake outbound visits to service delivery agencies and community agencies - and meet with their clients. This gives them a better understanding of the issues faced by citizens and leads to their having greater empathy for those likely to be impacted by specific policies.
Wed, 01 May 2019
Policy agencies sometimes work in isolation when developing proposals. It is important that service delivery agencies are involved at the beginning of policy development. These agencies can provide input about issues faced by citizens and how a policy, or the way it is implemented, may impact on individuals. Besides engaging service delivery agencies in policy development, departments could also involve other policy agencies in developing their proposals - to ensure different perspectives and opportunities are considered.
Tue, 09 Apr 2019
There was a MAC Report for Secretaries in which I was involved, around 2004, focussing on whole of government approaches. One lever is to improve arrangements for agencies to put together joint NPPs which involve cross agency co-operation. There has been the example also of the Departments of Agriculture and the Environment putting together a cross Departmental team on natural resource management - pooling the talents and expertise of the two agencies to address specific issues. As that MAC report noted, the APS seemed much more able to pool and share resources and expertise in crisis situations that at other times. An interesting comment about values and culture that may be worth the Review commenting on. I suggest that any recommendations concerning integrated advice should include environmental along with economic and social considerations. It may not fit the current government's priorities or political disposition, but I think it is most obviously a priority for Australian communities - be they in the Murray Darling Basin or in major cities.
Tue, 09 Apr 2019
Put in place initiatives to have advice reviewed which is prone to existing departmental bias. For example Tax Office policy is always skewed in favour of the revenue and not to fair and reasonable views that the community would expect.
You should have independent reviews of contentious policy or positions by the AGS.
Likewise, Centrelink policy is skewed such that overpayments can be recovered far more easily than underpayments addressed- this impacts the parts of our society who need the underpayments the most but policy change can never happen from within. Again, an independent policy reviewer such as the Ombudsman or AGS would assist in change.
Tue, 09 Apr 2019
Workteams with key skills and neurodiversity to rotate threw departments to work on projects from beginning to end and bring expertise via each area to achieve outcomes. Cross pollinate ideas, people and projects. Remove fixed ideas that work is only performed in one area and other areas consulted. Give fair pay across all depts with adequate pay rises in line with inflation/CPI. Share ideas and collaborate across state and territories with people who have a shared vision yet diverse skill backgrounds to identify intended and unintended impact, overcome barriers and build new bridges
Mon, 01 Apr 2019
I think there is opportunity under this priority to reflect on a couple of key inputs to good analysis and policy-making:
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it would be good to have more modern approaches to data modelling for policy and a strategic relationship between policy designers and data modellers. The reaosn i say this is because the quality of the data model determines the questions you can ask about the economy, society...etc and how much you can differentiate based upon location, cohort...etc to make more nuanced policy interventions.
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In a related way, we often talk about data literacy, it think this is great, but I think it would be useful as part of this to explicitly think about literacy in understanding what the data is not telling us. One key example is that policy is often made on medians/averages - but I often say as an analogy, if half the population were 7 foot tall and half were 3 foot tall - then making a 5 foot tall policy serves no one. Without understanding our data, disconnected policy-makers are often doing just that - making 5 foot tall policies.
Thu, 28 Mar 2019
I was pleased to hear Gordon de Brouwer state that the SES should not be super analysts but build and develop teams. How do we wrench policy making from the hands of the SES and move it back to EL levels where it should be. It needs to be removed from higher levels.
Wed, 27 Mar 2019
We need standing organizations with multiagency composition and a multiagency mandate to: develop staff; build relationships; create processes and agreed policy statements; and to manage those policy issues that can fall between portfolios - at least until they are mature enough for mainstream adoption.
One such model is the Australian Civil-Military Centre which has representatives from Defence (civilian and military); police; DFAT, Home Affairs, the NZ government; private sector contractors and civil society organizations such as the Australian Council for International Development.
The ACMC is responsible for coordinating and advising on whole-of-government scenario exercises (live, constructive & virtual); conducting whole-of-government lessons learned reviews (Afghanistan, Ebola response, MH370, contribution to regional peace operations, disaster response scenarios); and identifies and promotes best-practice for interagency collaboration. It retains capacity to support interagency Task forces, such as the ASEAN-Australia Leaders Taskforce & the APEC Task Force. It has the capacity to provide an 'interagency taskforce in a box' if a bespoke multiagency policy, planning & execution capability is required.
The Review Panel might wish to request a briefing from the ACMC, which sits as a division-level organization within Defence.
Wed, 27 Mar 2019
Strongly agree with the comment above - the key piece that is missing from this priority is an environmental perspective. If we don't incorporate this into our policy making frameworks across a broad range of policy domains we'll continue to treat the environment as an externality limiting government's ability to decide between policy options which harm or don't harm our environment.
Tue, 26 Mar 2019
It is disappointing to see that environmental issues are not reflected in the list of emerging issues. Given that all six panel members have backgrounds in the social sciences, including three economists, it is not surprising environmental issues have been omitted.
This is despite the Government establishing recent taskforces to deal with drought and floods, and the Opposition announcing a taskforce to deal with the health of the Murray Darling Basin and large scale fish deaths.
The World Economic Forum 2019 Global Risk Report identifies the failure to address climate change and extreme weather events as the two biggest risks to the global economy over a ten year scenario. In fact the report indicates that three of the top five risks to the global economy in terms of likelihood and four of the top five risks in terms of impact are environmental issues. In addition to climate change and extreme weather events, natural disasters, water crises and loss of biodiversity are also major risks.
The 2018 State of the Climate report produced by the BOM shows Australia is experiencing increasing air temperatures, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, increasing acidification of oceans, decreasing rainfall in southern Australia and increasing rainfall in northern Australia.
The BOM indicates that these changes will affect many Australians, particularly the changes associated with increases in the frequency or intensity of heat events, fire weather and drought.
The US Department of Defense has cited climate change and environmental issues as major threats to domestic and international security as well as the operation of its military.
Maybe it is time for the Australian Public Service to get real and include environmental issues in its robust advice to government.
Mon, 25 Mar 2019
I believe it is important that the advice to government (i.e. from our SES to Ministers and Ministerial Advisers) does not only present what the government wants to hear. While we must, as an apolitical service, undertake the requirements of the government of the day, I believe we have a duty to think about and report on the potential impact of our policies over the longer term. This means providing advice that may be politically unpopular and hard to sell. Parliamentarians are, by the nature of their engagement, bound to think of the popular, short term and easy to justify policies. The APS must represent Australia and Australians over the longer term for the generations to come. We must provide all the relevant information and then proceed as instructed. At least if we are fulsome in our advice, we can take comfort that we didn't shirk our duty in presenting uncomfortable facts. We must also embed this culture and understanding in the APS, so that those people who are up and coming do not fall into the trap of trying to 'please' and, further, that they understand the challenges of presenting difficult advice to our potentially difficult key stakeholders.
Fri, 22 Mar 2019
THe APS has traditionally held a siloed view of policy development vs its implementation and running. In practice this means a very sequential approach to policy development and decision-making by the Cabinet, in the minds of many "policy people" by the simple step of implementation.
In fact, whether you're in the private or public sector - it is once you start implementing things that any gaps in your thinking become evident. In mature organisations this is dealth with through staged exception-based decision making. Unfortunately in Government, by contrast, once a decision is made it is rarely changed resulting in the implementation of things that simply were never going to work.
To address this it would be good to see an explicit reference to a staged approach to policy development and implementation (the two pass process managed by FInance is a notable example). Such a process should involve not just policy professionals, but the implementers and evaluators as well.
Also it would be nice to see Programme Logic become a part of of the decision-making process. All too often cabinet submissions and new policy proposals, contain a lot of words but don't really articulate the desired outcome, not the logic for getting there, and in particular what the "disbenefits" or drawbacks are. Embedding programme logic into the cabinet decision-making process would be a way of forcing policy designers and decision-makers to think clearly in terms of desired outcomes, Inputs, activities and outputs of a policy intervention.
It is in this program logic that you could articulate the outcomes from "social, economic, security and international perspectives".
Wed, 20 Mar 2019
With the pro-integrity and cultural shifts etc that the Review suggests, this can become a norm. It may not require much more than mindset and time.