In your view, what will matter most to governance in the coming decade?

In many ways, things are more challenging now than when I was a full-time public servant. So many of the issues we face go beyond our national borders: war; global pandemic; climate change; world trade; social media. We have a set of very large, long-term global problems, and we are having to address them at the national level, with a political system that is not very well designed to deal with them. All nations have found it difficult to keep our processes of government in pace with change.

A key role of civil servants is to help the political leadership understand this. Ministers may come in with big, bold, strategic ideas. But then the day-to-day pressures and endless crises take up their time. As civil servants we try to give ministers the chance to think longer term and articulate what they can contribute, as their small part in any global response. That said, any sense of a global community or world order is becoming increasingly fragile, which is part of the challenge.

Social media has led people to increasingly communicate only with those who broadly share their views. This lends itself to division and polarisation, as well as to the notion that every political problem has a simple solution, whereas we know public policy issues are wickedly complex. This is compounded by social media accentuating identity politics and allowing views to be broadcast very quickly. What all this ends up doing is to engender distrust and undermine social cohesion.

The key challenge we now face is maintaining trust in the processes of government. By this I mean that citizens must feel that public officials are acting with integrity, and that our public services are accountable, responsible, and answerable for decisions made. This is a deep-seated societal problem, because in fact trust is falling in all established institutions: businesses, faiths, the media.

What can governments do about this challenge?

At one level, we need to avoid having citizens thinking that public leaders are all self-serving “snouts in the trough”. We need a high level of transparency, so citizens understand why decisions are being made, who actually made those decisions, and can then assess the way they are being implemented.

We must ensure that when the government makes decisions, people see these decisions being implemented in the way they expect. Citizens are losing confidence in the ability of governments to deliver results. It does not help that when governments announce a new policy, programme, or service, they tend to overbake the cake: to overpromise, which then leads citizens to believe they are under-delivering.

Here, I believe the civil service and public services have a part to play. When you ask who people do trust, it comes down to those they actually know: trust in teachers, doctors, nurses—professions people interact with—tends to be quite high. That is why frontline public servants are so important. They are the face of public administration.

One fundamental problem is that civil servants often think policy design and policy delivery are different. They may not admit it, but there is an implicit status distinction between those who give ministers policy advice and help to design new programmes, and those, often more junior, who deliver the programmes on the ground. But we know we can only judge how good a policy is by the way it is delivered.

All too often, governments look to community organisations for support, for example in delivering welfare programmes, but do not involve them in the design of these programmes. Time and again, we hear the organisations say that, had they been consulted, they would not have advised designing the programme that way.

We need to live up to the expectations we create. And the only way we can do that is by understanding that the design and delivery of public policy are two sides of the same coin.

We need to live up to the expectations we create.

Can you give an example of how you wed design and delivery to meet public expectations and engender trust?

As Coordinator General for the settlement of refugees in New South Wales, I get different government agencies to work together to integrate newcomers and displaced persons into Australian society. I realised early on that I could only do this by understanding the experiences of the refugees who come: what it is they want, and what is or is not working from their firsthand knowledge. I have established a working group bringing together community organisations that represent or work with refugees and key government agencies at the state and Commonwealth levels to focus on these issues. I call it a Joint Partnership Working Group.

The important next stage is to capture the actual lived experiences of refugees themselves, rather than going through an intermediary, who might be part of the problem as much as the solution. I have established forums to talk to people about their needs and expectations.

I see refugees as people with skills, experience, or entrepreneurial drive. But it is not easy to give people who have a limited understanding of how Australia and the government work a sense that they can contribute and are free to speak their views. People will often tell someone with authority what they think they want to hear. Let me give an example. A refugee with a university degree said he wanted help finding a job as an accountant. We later found out what he really wanted was to start an ice-cream business, but this was not something he felt was the appropriate answer to give a public official.

When you have a mandate from the top, it is not too difficult to overcome the territorial barriers of bureaucracy; you can knock heads together. It is harder to meaningfully involve community organisations, businesses, and the public themselves, to find out how to better design and deliver programmes.

People only trust in government if they feel that they are part of government, rather than government being something done to them, whether good or bad. Many people think of civic participation as going to the ballot box every few years, which we increasingly recognise is not a way that fully engages people.

The challenge is how we can remake government so that people feel they are part of it as citizens—how, on an everyday basis, they feel they can influence public decisions.

People only trust in government if they feel that they are part of government, rather than government being something done to them.

You have argued that public sector leaders need to be authentic. What does this mean in today’s governance context?

Authenticity is important, but it has different aspects. At a very personal level, authenticity is understanding that the life of work and the life of family are not distinct. I have always worried about the concept of a “work-life balance”, as if they are on different sides of the scale. One thing to consider in public service at a senior level is the authentic experience you have had yourself and what can be learnt from it.

I have served in several capacities in government on aged care. I myself have experienced ageing, and I have seen my peers going through the physical, mental, emotional, or financial difficulties associated with that process. Understanding all this, and bringing it authentically to policy discussions, does not replace all the skills, experience, analysis, and conceptual knowledge one has. In my view, it is entirely appropriate to bring emotional intelligence and empathy to bear in public policy: to understand how it is to be in others’ shoes.

There has also got to be authenticity in how you communicate: what is possible, what you are trying to do, why you have approached things the way you have.

One of my roles is to oversee schools. My organisation is often perceived as part of the problem teachers face: if only we would get out of their way and let them get on with teaching without all the red tape and paperwork. What this means is we have not been able to adequately convey the reason the regulation is there: why it is important to safeguard children in school, or to improve educational outcomes. They may come back to say the information we are collecting is pointless, and the way we are collecting it is time-consuming. But that is the authentic discussion we need to have; not whether the regulation is good or bad.

In many areas of government policy, citizens who are hostile to government and to policy will come to understand what you are trying to do when you start talking through it. At the same time, even public servants who may do wonderful work on solutions may not fully understand what problem they are actually trying to address. Unless you can focus on what government is seeking to achieve, you are very unlikely to communicate effectively to the public what you are doing.

Part of being authentic is also appreciating why some of what we do, such as taxing and regulating, are indeed things people would rather not have imposed on them—our job is to get people to understand that the rights and benefits of citizenship come with responsibilities that they may not like.

Unless you can focus on what government is seeking to achieve, you are very unlikely to communicate effectively about what you are doing.

Government agencies must work together to meet public needs. Having chaired ANZSOG, how do you think national schools of government can help foster a whole-of-government ethos?

The greatest value of schools of government, like our Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), is not to do with what they are teaching. It is in bringing together public servants from multiple agencies—central and service, large and small, different parts of government, and different jurisdictions—so they get the chance to talk and to know one another. Everything else is almost a bonus.

The best thing you can do to lubricate the wheels of government is to get people to build relationships with those who work in other agencies. When I was Head of the Prime Minister’s Department, I made it clear that no one was going to head any department without senior experience in a service delivery organisation. I wanted people who had had a diversity of experience in three or four different agencies, not the best and brightest economist from a top university who had spent their whole career getting promoted through Treasury.

Schools of government can also assign participants real-world, tricky public policy issues that can only be resolved satisfactorily by different agencies coming together. You have to train and reward people on the basis of whole-of-government thinking. Ideally, performance pay would also be pegged to demonstrating genuine collaborative behaviour.

One difficulty is that once a government policy is decided, even collectively, people may go back to their individual agencies and start to administer their responsibilities in a siloed way again. I worked on Indigenous issues, which are among the most challenging in Australia. You come to realise that the bureaucratic demarcations do not work, and unless you can bring a range of services together in response to what a particular community needs in a particular place, you are not going to solve problems.

So whole-of-government approaches should also be flexible enough to be delivered in different ways to different communities in the real world. In my experience, governments struggle with this, because they tend to look for one-size-fits-all templates that are easier for civil servants to administer.

How can civil servants work with the political leadership to realise whole-of-government approaches and outcomes?

Ministers can be part of the problem in trying to realise whole-of-government policies. A good prime minister will make Cabinet work effectively to consider policy, explore risks, and make decisions. Some prime ministers prefer to make decisions with just two or three of their closest advisors. I would always remind my prime minister, who wanted to see whole-of-government approaches, that they may be the only senior leader to fully hold this view. Other political office holders are looking to prove themselves and move up the ladder, by succeeding in the part of government for which they have been given prime responsibilities. Political career progress may be even more demarcated by bureaucratic boundaries than with public service careers.

That said, the efficacy of government depends on both the political and the administrative wing working together, to overcome the natural inclination for people to work within their own fields, and in some cases, to protect their own territory from “intrusion” by outsiders.

This problem is not unique to government. Having worked in the private sector, I have seen large, established organisations experiencing the same problem: business units that do not operate effectively together. The same happens in the community sector as well. These bureaucratic structures and demarcations are writ large across all sectors of society.

What advice from your long career would you give to someone starting out in government today?

I have learnt a great deal from watching people who are good. I came into government from 20 years as an academic, joining at a senior level. It would have been easy to have done three years and left. I did not, because of the extraordinary leadership of a person I was able to learn from, without him ever saying to me “learn from this”. You can also learn from failure, and from people who are bad role models: seeing what they have been doing wrong and thinking how you could do better.

I saw qualities I wanted to emulate. Being respectful. Being as non-hierarchical as possible, knowing that junior positions are more likely to be filled by younger people, whose views you want to include in policy considerations. Working hard. Keeping a sense of humour: because crisis is inevitable in public service life and you need a sense of perspective.

One quote I have lived by does not come from a public servant, but from the 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope. His character, a poor bricklayer, advises: “It’s dogged as does it. It ain’t thinking about it.” Here, “dogged” means being persistent and resilient.

As a civil servant, you will hopefully arrive in a position where you can give frank, fearless, and robust policy advice to the minister you serve. But sometimes it will not be taken. People ask how many times I went back to a minister when I disagreed with their judgement. I never went by numbers; I would go back until I was certain in my mind that the minister, Cabinet, and the government were making a decision with their eyes wide open, having been told of all the risks and alternatives. At that stage, the elected officials make the decision and it is up to civil servants to implement it as well as they can. I used to take pride in the public not knowing whether I privately agreed with the policy I was promoting and delivering.

You need to be resilient and realise that not all is lost when advice is rejected. Situations change. The environment changes. You may get other chances to think of how to articulate the policy issue in a different way.

You need to be resilient and realise that not all is lost when advice is rejected.

There is also the doggedness of delivering: sometimes you have to learn by doing rather than overthinking. Every meeting in public administration should be one conducted with a purpose, about issues that are not just interesting intellectual exercises, but where we can look to turn ideas into action that have a beneficial impact.

It’s dogged that does it. It ain’t thinking about it.