Reforming the Australian Public Service

A mix of apprenticeship and graduate recruitment, a return to larger teams and the decentralisation of services are a few recommendations to reform the Australian Public Service (APS) efficiently.

The Rudd-led Labor Government commissioned a review of the Australian Public Service, led by the head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Terry Moran.

The Government eventually accepted the recommendations made by the review team and allocated a substantial sum to support a reform program based on those recommendations.

The Gillard-led Labor Government then removed most of that funding, to help fund promises it made to ensure it retained power. This was received poorly by commentators and insiders, who wailed in unison that it would be impossible to reform the public service without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

Well, they are wrong. There is another way to do it – and here it is.

Reduce the bloated senior executive services by thirty per cent and make a similar reduction at the level below (executive level 2).

I did something like this in one month in one agency some years ago and freed up sufficient funds to open several small service centres around the country. Picture that happening across the whole public service and you will get an idea of what could be done by cutting from the top.

Then, start recruiting public servants at the base level again, restoring the apprenticeship model to the service that was abandoned in favour of the graduate model in the 1990s.

I am not saying the public service should not hire graduates. I am saying that the service needs both types of intake to restore balance lost during the profligate Howard years, when salaries kept going up and higher salaries for the ever increasing ranks of senior staff were funded by removing the support layers.

At the age of 24 I was given the responsibility to supervise eight staff at a level equivalent to APS 2. I learned a lot about how to manage people in that and successive roles, as I rose through the ranks to the level of First Assistant Secretary.

Now it is not unusual for executive level 2 officers to have fewer than three or four people to supervise and for branch managers (senior executives band 1) to have fewer than ten people to manage. It is no wonder that the quality of management in the public service is falling, given the lack of opportunity for people to learn the challenging craft of leadership.

A reasonable span of control in the public service would be ten to twelve for executive level 2 staff and twenty to thirty for senior executive band 1 staff. Such ratios would enable huge efficiencies to be realised, would give public servants more meaningful jobs and would give the Australian public much more value for their tax dollars.

Oh, we could also then shift a lot more people to front line service jobs – perhaps in the areas where the clients actually reside.