Extract from ABC News
Analysis
For the ministers sworn in to their new jobs this week, there will likely be no sweeter moment than when they were congratulated by the Governor-General and posed for a picture with their colleagues on the front steps at Yarralumla.
All those years of political grind, climbing up the ranks, long days and late nights, the daily flummery — they all dissolve. They are replaced by a sense of having finally made it. It's not just about politics now but about being in government.
Being confirmed in your new job in front of your loved ones is a truly heady and emotional experience for most of those who have walked that path.
There's also the sudden weight of responsibility.
And then it is to work: an avalanche of briefings, crises, crash courses in issues that you may have thought you understood but realise with a sickening crunch are much more complicated than you ever imagined.
It's been a muted transition to government for Labor this time around. There was that whole reined-in expectations thing that was a hangover from 2019. Then the question mark over whether there would be a majority government or a minority one.
After almost a decade out of office, MPs and newly minted ministers were still accidentally referring to "the government" — as in the previous one — in interviews and sometimes realising with surprise that when people used the titles "prime minister" or "minister" that they were referring to them.
If you ignore the minority government 2010 election result, the Labor script for gaining government has historically been one of euphoria based on a big landslide, big ideas and big expectations from voters.
This government comes in with few expectations except those it now chooses to describe for itself, and no Messiah complex.
A government's first priorities — and crises
Even as the count in close seats continued in the days after the election, the question of what the government could and would look like was turned outwards as Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong headed immediately to Tokyo for the meeting of the Quad, and the attempts to reposition Australia's reputation on the world stage.
There were some important domestic signals and actions from the government: returning the Nadesalingam family to Biloela; starting work on getting rid of the cashless debit card; and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen meeting with the so-often previously studiously ignored former emergency services chiefs led by Greg Mullins.
The government has put in a submission to the minimum wage case arguing workers should not be going backwards; that is, a message to the Fair Work Commission that there should be a pay rise commensurate with whatever the best measure of inflation the Commission thinks appropriate.
The immediate crises and headlines for this government are about foreign policy and an energy crisis that has erupted with full force as a cold snap hit south-eastern Australia this week.
The energy crisis is a crisis without an easy immediate fix and one of a magnitude which will make voters very intolerant of anything that sounds like blaming the former government.
There is now a cabinet and a ministry in place, and the government has started restructuring the bureaucracy to largely look as it did when Labor was last in office.
Some public servants are quietly being shown the door; departmental secretaries whose retirement had been postponed pending the election outcome will finally be allowed to go. A new head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Glyn Davis, officially takes over on Monday, bringing in his experience of state public service, academe, philanthropy and the arts.
The call has gone out for staff for ministers' offices.
Who's filling new roles in ministerial offices?
There has been much controversy about the ever-expanding role of ministerial offices and their inhabitants in recent years, and the tendency to fill them with, well, party hacks rather than policy experts. It has not been uncommon for people filling the role of a specialist policy adviser to actually have no specialist policy experience.
Glyn Davis sat on the Thodey Review of the Australian Public Service — a comprehensive piece of work advocating significant change in the way the machinery of federal government works. Its findings were largely mothballed by the previous government.
But Labor has never been explicit, either, about exactly which of its recommendations it would adopt. Recommendation 11, for example, called for at least half of the policy advisers in ministerial offices to have public service experience.
The call for expressions of interest in ministerial staff jobs released by the new government doesn't go that far, simply saying applicants should have "demonstrated experience in providing advice on a wide range of policy, public administration and political matters in a public, non-profit or private sector organisation".
Both the experienced ministers, and the ones who have not experienced being a minister in government before, start their new roles understanding how difficult government has become since 2013, both in a geostrategic sense and in terms of expectations of what government does.
Some of the wiser heads in the public service would have been advising the incoming government that, if there was just one thing it did while in power, it would be to clean up the way the government delivers services to the public.
Improving government services for everyone
The traditional divide of responsibilities between the federal and state governments has been for the federal government to oversee the big policy levers, and fund income supports, with the states doing the actual service delivery in areas like health.
But in the last decade — and particularly as a result of COVID — that has become a very unclear divide.
The federal government is now running service delivery in aged care and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It effectively runs childcare, mental health and suicide prevention.
That's all hard to do from Canberra. And it is hard to do when most of those services are provided by contractors, and often contractors of contractors where you have even more constrained lines of sight about what is often happening in services provided in the homes of vulnerable people, rather than institutional settings.
Writing last year in his essay, On Leadership, Don Russell — former Keating chief of staff, federal and state department head, and Ambassador to Washington — observed of these situations that "when things go wrong, they can go wrong in an unconscionable way that brings a firestorm of public scrutiny".
"Ministers, ministerial offices and public servants get caught in an ugly melee involving royal commissions, corruption commissions and maladministration cases, processes that can be very damaging to them — to say nothing of the vulnerable members of the public who find that the system has failed them at a moment of great need."
He went on: "I suspect that Commonwealth ministers today are in the process of entering a world of pain, already familiar to state ministers, for which they are not well prepared."
The less glamorous part of being a minister, and running a government, must lie in making those services work better both for those who need them, and the taxpayers who fund them.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment