The report’s key findings include:

a widening gap between the anti-public servant rhetoric of some politicians and commentators and the positive attitudes held by Australian citizens about public servants and the services they deliver and
a decline in the ratio of public servants per capita in contrast to claims of public service ‘bloating’.

There’s a lot in the report to stimulate debate. That’s probably particularly the case as Barry O’Farrell’s first months in power have been characterised by attempts to restrict access by public servants to fair collective bargaining rights, and Joe Hockey has apparently been applying his mind to finding $70 billion worth of ‘efficiencies’ in public spending.

The report’s principal author, Dr James Whelan, points to an inconsistency between some of the objectives contained in the Public Service Act which link security of tenure to organisational capacity and cohesion and a reality of constant and ceaseless restructuring, downsizing and upsizing. The presence of such an objective, however dishonoured in practice, is in itself a reflection of earlier concerns about the need for a ‘career service’ to ensure institutional distance from politics: “frank and fearless advice” and all that.

One of the ironies of the move away from a ‘career service’ (though it’s not without reason) is that the first departures from relative institutional independence came with the Whitlam and Hawke governments, concerned ostensibly with political bias and a sclerotic policy conservatism. Something similar happened, belatedly, with the advent of the Goss government in Queensland.

The rise of the ‘Contracting State’, discussed in the report, is a parallel phenomenon.

The public sector reform debates of the 1980s and 1990s seem to have lost their momentum. This report may provide the opportunity for returning to some of the founding principles of such debates, articulated by thinkers like Peter Wilenski, who wanted to ensure that the public purpose of the public sector was well examined. We need a debate about that again today, and it would be very valuable to take some of the propositions and findings in this report about public opinion as a jumping off point.

Similarly, one of the other answers to the question which is implicit in the territory the report traverses – “what are public servants for?” (policy?, ‘front line service delivery’?, ensuring equity and access to public goods?) – might also prompt some reflection. The report discusses the degree to which APS employment reaches equity and diversity objectives.

This facet of public sector employment, again, derives from attempts under Whitlam and Hawke to enshrine the public sector as a ‘model employer’. Security of tenure, a long term approach to skills formation and an ethos of service, might be very worthwhile things to promote in a society too characterised by short term gain and by precarious and insecure employment.

We’ve heard much of the way attachment to the labour market promotes individual aims. We need to hear more about how stable and strong ties, mediated through work with a social purpose, promote societal cohesion and resilience.

So, much to think about. There are links to the debate stimulated by the report at the CPD’s page here.

The state election campaign was a shambolic affair, and it was almost lost. Despite an inept performance, Labor was re-elected primarily because the “jobs” theme and the promise to continue to invest in public infrastructure despite the economic crisis touched a chord with voters. Anna Bligh made much of standing up to credit rating agencies.

So why the turnaround? A couple of factors are at work. The first is Bligh’s inability to set her own direction, adopting rather the path of least resistance recommended by right wing apparatchiks in her office. Let one grumpy voter in a focus group whine about debt, and, well, forget the election promises. Secondly, there’s the misplaced obsession with “strength”, driven by the same advisers. This apparently means tossing Labor policy out the window and pursuing supposedly popular brawls with unions.

This mob have an inability to understand that Labor governments always need to pursue a direction contrary to that favoured by the big end of town to be a success. Talk of ‘reforms’ in the context of short-sighted privatisations is quite risible in this context.

Nor is Bligh apparently capable of learning from the past. Wayne Goss’ government was defeated not by the ‘Koala road’, but in large part because years of managerialist lunacy alienated the public sector vote. Similarly, the slashing of services in outer suburban and regional areas and decisions such as the one to close down the QR workshops in Ipswich in the midst of a recession and deep structural economic change had a lot more to do with the rise of One Nation than some innate Queensland redneckism.

Peter Beattie knew all this.

The irony – or rather, one of the many ironies – is that the government and top bureaucrats have recently been pontificating about the need for public sector spending to create demand in a sluggish economy. That seems – insofar as it means anything – only to apply to bricks and mortar and roads and bridges and to completely eschew people’s livelihoods. All ‘Bligh the Builder’ is paving the way for at the moment is her own defeat.

It was the idea of making money from looking after children that so many people found objectionable, and the fact that they had no choice but to participate due to the lack of child care choice in their area. It was almost like WorkChoices for the under-fives. And there was the suspicion that ABC Learning cut corners and offered lower quality care — a view reinforced when it tried to stop the Victorian Government from inspecting its centres and argued its directors weren’t legally responsible for the children in the company’s care, when figures emerged of the company driving down the wages and working conditions of its staff, and when stories emerged of poor quality care.

That’s all now linked to the Coalition. Not just because of the subsidies model that massively expanded under John Howard, but because of the company’s willingness to embrace the Coalition, with Sallyanne Atkinson as chair and Larry Anthony on the board. ABC Learning has now become emblematic of the Howard Government’s approach to childcare, and Eddie Groves will come to be identified with the era just as surely as Alan Bond and Christopher Skase represented the Hawke years.

For those of us in Brisbane who remember Sallyanne Atkinson as both Liberal Lord Mayor and perenially unsuccessful federal candidate, her protestations about her own financial position and avoidance of responsibility repeatedly made in the Courier-Mail have been an all too familiar, and quite predictable tale. Particularly damaging, and revealing, are her comments expressing puzzlement about how ABC could lose money – being a “government supported business”. Keane is quite correct to say that the sorry tale of ABC Learning will redound on the Coalition. But I also think he doesn’t quite understand the paradigm shift in public thinking he himself describes – and I note that bloggers and commenters here at LP were questioning the validity of the market childcare model a long time ago – when he writes:

Whenever the Coalition now talks about private-sector child care — an eminently reasonable concept, given sufficiently rigorous accreditation requirements — people will recall ABC Learning and a profit-obsessed approach to looking after their kids. This is slow-burn stuff, the type of political background radiation that doesn’t show up in polls but slowly accretes over time, shaping voters’ perceptions of parties, making them resistant to their messages, or in their opponents’ case, more receptive. But it’s not yet clear that the Coalition realises how much baggage it is carrying in the debate.

I’m not sure that private-sector child care is an “eminently reasonable concept” at all. Not only – as Atkinson admits – was its business model based on what is basically rent seeking – a transfer of public funds to private profit, but whatever accounting and managerial errors were made, ABC demonstrated that the only way you could make a profit was through aggressive acquisitions in search of market dominance and local monopolies and cutting costs. It seems very clear to me that the market logic is precisely the problem, and Keane is right to point to the fact that people are questioning it, without accepting that the question about the desirability of profiting from child care is absolutely valid.

I think we’re going to see a return to child care as a matter of non-profit and voluntary association provision, with more of an educational and development focus, which I think is fantastic. But I also think we’re going to see a return to the legitimacy of state and community sector provision more broadly, as the lessons of “letting the market rip” are drawn. It would appear that some commentators can’t see those lessons even when they’re staring them in the face.