Australian governance is drifting off course

SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT SERVICE ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2025

Starting point

Look around the world today and western democracies are struggling. On our screens we see polarisation and anger. Particularly in the US, but not only in the US.

Australia has, to date, avoided the worst of what we are seeing overseas. But we are not completely immune. Underneath the surface challenges to our democracy exist.

 Democracies are not built on the quiet acquiescence of the people. They are built on contest. To work well, democracies need passion. They need people to express their competing views and wants to government. They also need something else. Democracies need to resolve the competing claims democratic contest encourages in way that is worthy of citizen trust.

This doesn’t mean that citizens need to agree with the decisions of government. But it does mean that citizens must have confidence in the processes and behaviours of government are, to use an Australian phrase, ‘fair enough’.

 Like every system, government is a balance between rules and behaviours. Guiding these behaviours are what we sometimes call conventions. Conventions are the behavioural norms – the soft guardrails - that hold systems together.

 In the United States today, a President seems willing to trample over both soft guardrails and hard rules to get his way. He is not alone. Across the world, so called ‘strong men’ are trouncing the traditions of democratic government.

 To be clear, Australia is not the United States. Our system of government has some protections which help avoid the worst of what we are seeing in the US. Compulsory voting is one. Drawing our ministers from within an elected parliament is another. Having an independent, apolitical public service is a third. But, as I have already said, we are not immune from problems.

And the enemy of democracy is rarely revolution, it is unconscious drift.

Of[f] Course Minister

 If I am being honest, none of this was really in my mind when I started to write Of[f] Course Minister. My purpose in writing the book was to bring people behind the usually closed doors of executive government. The goal was to explain and inform, and hopefully, to bring a little fun to what is usually a serious topic. It was only about half-way through the writing process that things changed.

 The title came to me as I was driving to the coast from Canberra to visit my mother. My idea was to highlight the tension that exists in the relationship between senior public servants and ministers. For the most part, in working with ministers public servants say (and should say) of course minister.

Public servants are after all, as the name suggests, servants. Their job is to ensure that the decisions and processes of executive government are implemented. But public servants have another role. They are servants yes. But ultimately, they are servants of the public. This means that, on occasion, rather than of course minister, they need to say off course minister or even no minister.

 In the scheme of government, it seems a small thing - the difference between of and off. Yet it isn’t. As it turns out, navigating this tension – between saying of course and off course - is a key health marker for our system of government. It is, if you like, a canary in the coal mine.

 In Australia, the canary is not dead. But it is wheezing and looking a bit poorly.

 Royal Commissions

 Part of the reason for our canary’s ill health can be found in the reports of recent Royal Commissions. I am not sure what the collective noun is for Royal Commissions – perhaps a crown might be appropriate. In recent times, Australia has had more than a crown’s worth of Royal Commissions reporting on various aspects of federal government activity. Banking, disability care, aged care, veterans, child abuse, Robodebt. These topics and more have been scrutinised by Royal Commissioners.

In all of these areas, government plays a big role. Actually, for most of them it is a dominating role. Government is funder, regulator and, in some cases, service deliverer. A common feature in all of these commissions has been a failure of executive government to meet basic standards of governance and probity.

Executive government has also failed in the deeper responsibility it has for providing long-term stewardship of the services established by parliament. We should also be clear that failures have also occurred in the private sector. But my focus today is on government.

Issues that should have been front and centre in the consideration of ministers, public servants and the parliament were left to fester until they reached breaking point. Inside government, when someone should have been saying off course minister they were saying of course minister.

To be fair, in some cases, people were indeed saying off course. In Robodebt, for example, it is clear that some public servants were doing this. But they were not the public servants who had the minister’s ear. They may have been saying off course, but they were not saying it to a minister.

A different example involves the aged care royal commission. In the years before the royal commission, departmental annual reports revealed no sign that serious problems existed. Indeed, successive Secretary’s reviews provide upbeat reports on what the department was doing in aged care. Performance benchmarks were being met. Everything was going, if not swimmingly, at least well enough.

The Royal Commission it is fair to say held a very different view about the performance of the aged care system. The enormous gap between these assessments begs an important question. Why was parliament not being told about emerging, and indeed longstanding, issues in the system. Why were they not being told that the aged care system was off course.

I want to be clear at this point that I am not criticising individual public servants or individual departments. The aged care example is one that is replicated across the public service. The reason for raising it is not because it is unusual, but because it reflects standard practice.

 In the words of a song from the 1940s, public servants and ministers alike act to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative’. Doing so may be good politics, but it is not good government.

Evolving practice

It is tempting to see the practice of government as a stable part of our society. And in some ways, it is.

Australia’s constitution was written when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Since that time, it has changed only eight times. With most changes being very minor. It is, indeed, one of the most stable constitutions in the world.

Our constitutional stability is misleading. Rather than being stable, government in Australia is constantly evolving and changing. Some of these changes are formal - legislation which alters the operation of government. Other changes are informal. These are conventions I mentioned earlier. The ones which define the behaviours and relationships inside government.

Change is important. The context we live in today is nothing like that which existed when our constitution was first created. To remain healthy government must evolve to meet the changing needs of society.

However, it is rare for government to step back and look fundamentally at whether the practice of government is best serving the interests of the people. As a result, currents of change can result in government drifting unconsciously into bad habits.

Elections are too often seen as the ultimate protection in democracy. Elections do give citizens the chance to change a ‘bad’ government. But elections provide little protection against endemically bad governance.

Westminster through time

In writing the book, I went back to the beginnings of Westminster. Indeed, I went all the way back to the 11th century to when a marshy swamp called Thorney Island was bring made into the seat of power in England. Don’t worry, I am not going to give you a history lesson. Not even I am that boring.

The reason for going back in time was to do two things. The first was to understand the foundations upon which our system of government was built. The second was to judge whether the evolution of government was healthy or unhealthy. Actually, there was another reason. I am a sucker for a quirky historical story. And the book has plenty of those.

 Of all of the principles underpinning Westminster governments, three stood out to me. All three struck me as being just as important for the practice of government today as it was when the modern version of parliamentary democracy crystallised in the 19th century. One is the rule of law. The second is what is known as the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. The third is the idea of individual conscience.

 None of these things is mentioned explicitly in Australia’s constitution, but all three are important to a healthy democracy. And, in all three cases, we have been drifting away from healthy practice.

Rule of law

The idea of the rule of law has been around for a while. Since the Magna Carta was written in 1215. The idea is simple enough. No one is above the law. Not the ‘king’ not anyone. To adhere to this ideal, executive government must operate within the constitution and the laws laid down by parliament.

Around the world today, the rule of law is at a low ebb. In Australia, Robodebt provides one example of government acting outside the law. Robodebt is not a one-off. It is an example of a long-term trend.

Rather than going to parliament to change the law or the courts to clarify what can be done, executive government has become less assiduous in its compliance with the law and more willing to take legal risks. These risk often justified because those in government see action as beneficial. This approach has created a double standard in our society. One where government is willing to take legal risks that it would not support individual citizens taking.

It is the very opposite of respecting the rule of law.

Ministerial Responsibility

The doctrine of ministerial responsibility is much newer than the Magna Carta. But it remains an important underpinning of our system of government. Under it, public servants are responsible to ministers, ministers are responsible to parliament, and parliament to the people. We sometimes forget that Australians do not elect ministers. Ministers are drawn from parliament and are appointed by the governor general.

Too often, ministers have avoided taking responsibility for the failures of government. It sometimes feels as if anyone is responsible but the minister.

In truth, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility has never quite worked as once intended. It may need some refinement. But too often, rather than clear lines of responsibility. Government has become a morass of uncertain collective and individual responsibilities.

When things go wrong – fingers are pointed everywhere. It is an increasingly unhealthy practice.

Individual responsibility

 When a person is elected to parliament, they are elected as an individual. Nothing in our constitution mentions political parties.

 Political parties are a reality of our system of government. It is impossible to conceive of modern democratic government system without political parties. Over time, however, what I call partyism has dominates the operation of government. This has weakened the connection between individual politician and electorate. It has also weakened the diversity of contributions made in our parliament.

Most importantly, it has resulted in the power of the executive government (the Prime Minister and ministers) rising and the power of our parliament (the people we elect) falling over time. Parliament rather than being seen as supreme as intended in our system, is often seen as an embuggerance to getting things done by the executive.

It has also weakened the ability of parliament to hold ministers to account. Proper accountability is hard to achieve when parliament resolves into two cheer squads, rather than a collection of individual consciences.  

Conventions

The weakening of these three things – rule of law, ministerial responsibility, and individual responsibility – is a big reason why Australia’s governmental canary is gasping for air.

Interestingly, it is not the letter of the law that is our problem. Public servants, for example, operate today under a much clearer legal framework than has existed for most of our history. Ministerial codes of conduct, members of parliament legislation, legislation governing government spending all provide a strong formal framework.

Improvements can doubtless be made, but the formal rules are not where the problem lies. Instead, our problem has been a drift in the conventions which help define the relationships between the three key players at the heart of government – the ministers and public servants of executive government, and the members of parliament to whom the executive is responsible.

A political thing

I am sure there are a few in the audience, those who are still awake anyway, who are saying – surely, this is really only a problem for one side of politics.

Some governments do treat the conventions of good government less well than others. But the drift I have described is longstanding. It has occurred under many different governments, and both sides of politics. My own experience is that good and bad practice exists no matter who is in power.

Final thought

 In the book, I propose some changes to address the issues I have raised. Some are, let’s say, more creative than others. But there is one area I wanted to highlight before I go.

 Australia is a mature nation. Many of our fundamental governmental service structures and legislation have been in place for quite some time. Yet much of our governmental effort is wrapped up in what I call the change game.

The change game is a feature of all democracies. Governments want to make things better. To do that they make changes. Public servants, as servants of government, busily design and implement that change.

New ideas and things emerge from government all of the time. Government, not just executive government, but also parliament has been organised to be, in effect, a change machine. This is, to a degree fair enough, but as a series of Royal Commissions have found in making all of this change, government keeps taking its eyes off the bigger service picture.

It is time for government to put more effort into looking at the services it delivers on behalf of the parliament more holistically. As part of Of[f] Course Minister, I argue that departmental annual reports should include a ‘health’ assessment from the secretary for each major public facing service provided by the department.

In that health check, departmental secretaries should identify endemic, emerging and over the horizon issues that are likely to have a material impact on future service quality and delivery. A joint parliamentary committee would then look at each health check and have the opportunity to question ministers and public servants about each service.

It is a small change. But one which I think will make big difference. Over the rest of the conference I would encourage everyone to reflect on what the health check of employment services should say.

Thank you.