Political Economy of Australia
#auspol
2024-04-08 — 2025-07-01
Wherein the workings of Australia’s public sphere are surveyed from a mining‑camp parliament, and the long‑running efficiency dividend that has ratcheted departmental budgets since 1987 is noted.
Notes on the public sphere, governance, and civil service from this mining camp that has a parliament we call Australia.
1 New Public Management
In New Public Management: the practical challenges, remedies and alternatives, Pia Andrews writes:
When I started working in the public sector, I found a few strange patterns of operations and behaviour that I struggled to understand. I couldn’t understand how we could get such a gap between implementation and the original intent. Why were people choosing to not share or work together? Why were teams just handing off unfinished projects to each other, or choosing short wins that created predictable (and demonstrable) long losses, thereby adding to the technical, administrative and cultural debt of the agency and the government?
I went looking for answers and, after 10 years of testing different hypotheses, I believe that many of the current challenges in public sectors link back to two causal factors:
- The impact of increasing reactivism to politics and 24-hour media scrutiny, in public sectors (which varies across jurisdictions); and
- The unintended consequences of New Public Management and trying to make public sectors act like the private sector.
I hadn’t heard this term before. Dickinson (2016), Goldfinch and and Halligan (2024), Shaw (2012)
2 Perpetual downsizing
The Australian public service has been subject, since 1987, to a perpetually ratcheting budget cut regime called the Efficiency dividend, which is an attempt to address bureaucratic inefficiency.
Incentives to reduce expenses don’t sound like a bad idea. There are many critiques of the details of this particular one:
- Not Neglecting, Strangling: A Short History of a Most Inefficient Policy
- Is the Commonwealth ‘efficiency dividend’ really that efficient?
- ‘A lazy cost-saving measure’: the Coalition’s efficiency dividend hike may mean longer wait times and reduced services
For some agencies for example research entities which are supposed to expand, this situation might be a particular problem for those agencies.
From my systems-thinking perspective, there is at least one clearly missing feedback loop here: while the system incentivizes (requires, even) reducing public costs, it does not incentivize increasing public benefit. What if my agency works out a way to spend 10% more money and deliver 20% more public benefit? Or 100%? What if spending a lot right now will save money in the future?
3 Public service conditions
Employment and workplace conditions at public institutions are governed by the Australian Public Service Commission, a meta-bureaucracy which manages Australian government bureaucracies.
For some, this is a deeply unpopular entity; some argue it was set up to discredit socialism by imposing all of socialism’s mistakes and none of its wisdom on the organizations it manages. Others like it because it often provides reliable job security and good employment conditions.
APS-constrained organizations are not permitted to price wages to market, so for the most in-demand skills or for staff in high cost-of-living areas, agencies must recruit from the pool of people who will accept a lower salary than their market potential.
This bites hard for specialist roles such as legal advice, engineering, IT, and trades, where market rates are high. There are such people: they may be patriotic, need visa sponsorship, be idealistic about public goods, be outcomes-focused and want access to the facilities, or be independently wealthy and treat Australian government work as a charity project. When no such people can be found, agencies make do, falling back to
- people who are not very good at their job, or
- making do without crucial skills.
These options lead agencies to do a poor job.
This system breaks in many entertaining ways:
Tech skills, recognition, finally hit APS pay bargaining table
Poor pay for in-house tech staff bites APS chiefs in real-time
Parliamentary Services sparkies pull plug on short APS pay deal
“The Department of Parliamentary Services’ refusal to lift wages for its full-time trades staff is senseless. Because permanent trades staff’s wages are so low, positions are left vacant, yet the department is willing to outsource the roles at a much higher rate of pay.”
Government spent at least $1.9bn in a year sourcing IT and digital skills
Professionals Australia (2021)
4 Public servants are semi-gagged
Public political speech by public servants may be punished by dismissal, which might sound reasonable, but the extent is remarkable.
Social media still counts as public speech. Anonymous speech is still public speech. The precise criteria for dismissal are opaque and arbitrary (Gray 2021; Morris and Sorial 2023).
An apparently innocuous blog post by Josh Krook, if his testimony is correct, resulted in dismissal.
Better documented, the High Court decision about Michaela Banerji
APSC guidance:
6 Punditry and commentariat
I miss the rich political blogosphere of the USA. There aren’t as many pundits in Australia. When I complain about this, people tell me I should watch all the hot takes on TikTok. Hot takes don’t address my need for long-form stuff. Maybe we’re in a post-truth, vibes-driven world and I have to live with it?
There are commentators in Australia who are worth reading.
Australian Policy and History Network
Australian Policy and History is a network of historians that provides politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and the public with historical knowledge in the pursuit of better public policy outcomes. We publish a range of material that connects historical research to current-day policy issues, and we run conferences and workshops. Australian Policy and History is run chiefly by historians at Deakin University, with support from the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University.
Raising Hell, by Royce Kurmelovs
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The public sector plays a critical and sometimes underappreciated role in this country. It needs strong and independent news coverage, and a place where its leaders can discuss the issues they face at the coalface of modern bureaucracy.
That’s where we come in. The Mandarin is made for public sector leaders and executives and reaches 1.5 million public sector readers and the many stakeholders interested in their work each year.
Australians for Science and Freedom is a local ❄️🍑 mob, affable enough. They’re heavy on fringe science (e.g. “Are viruses even a thing?”). The adverse-selection problem is clear. If you run a heterodox media site, you’ll soon find that your reasonable but under-represented opinions get joined by fruity, nut-job, cray-cray opinions that have nowhere else to go.
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…commentary and analysis from a young Australian on global and Australian politics, history, and the raging social and cultural questions of our time.
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[…]we need to build economic democracy.
As our industrial profile changes, we need new ways of approaching economic management that maximize the benefits to all stakeholders in the economy, not just private shareholders. The ongoing crisis associated with our once proud national air carrier is symptomatic of the disease at root in our economy.
For too long, we have allowed corporate Australia to do as they please, relying on revenue and profit to be the only yardstick against which their operations are judged. However, if the pandemic and its associated economic crisis has taught us anything, it is that we need to build a new economy that is more resilient and self-sufficient, one that is better managed and able to deliver better social outcomes for Australians.
Traditional approaches to economic development, which treat all investment agnostically, do little to keep key production and essential services grounded in communities. Instead, there should be a focus on investment that has a long-term interest in the development of the community.
Wil Anderson is a comedian, but his Wilosophy Podcast interviews pundits.