[Peetwo]

David Donaldson.  The Mandarin.

“There needs to be a strong message from all levels of government that policymakers are expected to find and use evidence to inform policy,” he told The Mandarin. “You never go to cabinet without a legal and communications input, and you shouldn’t be going to cabinet without an evidence workout.”

Not a bad idea. 

The one page pitch; Silos/Forts & a secret squirrel Mandarin?

Very interesting "K", though like most things in the rarefied atmosphere of the Mandarins it all seems surreal, unattached from reality when compared to the methodical, Mephistophelian way in which Murky Mandarin controls the Aviation Safety portfolio & agencies  - e.g Nick Xenophon - The surrogate Minister for Aviation??

This bit pricked my interest:

The problem is not so much that the evidence isn’t there, it’s that governments don’t tend to use it systematically or transparently. Even expert review panels can end up making decisions based on their own values, rather than the latest evidence, if processes are not in place, he argues.

The solution is to give such reviews support, ensuring a synthesis of the research is included as an input to the decision-making process, that the panel includes an expert on research methods and that decisions are transparently backed up with the evidence that was used.

Think Forsyth review panel?? Which was very much evidence based with over 269 industry submissions reviewed, plus many hours of receiving oral evidence from various industry witnesses.

Ironically the industry & government, with one or two suggested variances, accepted pretty much all recommendations in principle. However it is the bureaucracy that is putting the brakes on implementing the review report. With Skidmore having the audacity to suggest that the review report was just one view on the regulatory review process and that he would continue to consult with stakeholders ('read' divide & conquer) with an implementation date of 2030. By which time the GA industry will be dead, buried & cremated and there will be no need to implement any of the Forsyth review recommendations...  

Moving on an if we accept that Murky's mob are the exception rather than the rule, then the aviation industry is being seriously disadvantaged when compared to other areas of the bureaucracy. Especially since Abbott got turfed for Turnbull.

Harley D drew attention to an excellent Oz article - see here - that Turnbull's newly appointed head Mandarin wrote:

Federal public service opens doors to let in fresh ideas  

• by: Michael Thawley
  
• From: The Australian
  
• October 30, 2015 12:00AM
  

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke Source: Supplied

Doors are important. I wasn’t expecting to find quite so many closed ones when I returned to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet after a gap of nearly 20 years. Every work group seemed hermetically sealed behind its own door. To reach any colleagues — even to get out of my own door — I had to swipe my access card.  

What signal, I wondered, are we sending about the value we place on sharing ideas in an interconnected world? If I wanted some ferment and accidental exchanges, would I be better off in the Hideout coffee shop across the road? I doubt they could cope, so we have now opened all our internal doors except in the national security areas.

The public service more widely must open its doors to the outside world. We must reach out more to the private sector, universities, think tanks, not-for-profits, state governments and other countries. We must invite into our ranks colleagues from outside who have expertise and useful experience.

Likewise, public servants can gain a lot from working in the private sector. Short secondments are useful, but even better may be a company stint of five to 10 years or even longer. We should value people with careers that span different environments and expose them to life’s complexities. We will welcome back public servants who leave to gain a first-hand understanding of how business works. We may not want a revolving door, but we do want a door that revolves more readily.

PM&C therefore is making it easier for outsiders to take on jobs. We are advertising jobs not by hard-to-understand public service classifications but by the expertise and outcomes we want.

We are abandoning stilted selection criteria and asking for a one-page pitch explaining what you can achieve. If you need more, communicating with a time-constrained prime minister will come hard to you.

Public servants are fortunate to have more doors into government decision-making than anyone else. That imposes on us an obligation to put forward good ideas — and as persuasively as possible. A government rightly will draw on many sources of advice, but the public service has the advantage of being there every day.

Most of us join the public service not because we want a job for life. We aspire to make our country more successful and make a difference in the lives of Australians. This is why I often tell my colleagues not to give up on a good idea if it is rejected the first time. Just make sure the evidence and the argument are better next time.

Especially with reform, one has to keep pushing on all available doors. You never know which door may open or exactly when. You may sense a bit of give in one and find a spray of WD-40 will be enough to ease its opening. Other times you may need to amass overwhelming force and push through like a Wallabies scrum.

There is no point in hiring capable people if they can’t even get to the doors of their ministers.

Many would not expect, on joining the public service, to find so many barriers in their way — notably layers of hierarchy and unnecessarily complicated promotion systems.
No prime minister I’ve served has asked about the level of his briefer; prime ministers just want to hear from the person who knows the answer.

And what about the next generation of public servants? PM&C’s 2016 graduate intake comes from a wide range of backgrounds. We have purposefully looked for people who are open to new ventures.

As part of their first two years working with us, graduate recruits agree to two three-month rotations. One will be in a regional PM&C office working on programs with indigenous Australians and the other will be in the private sector — it could be a bank or a mining company, a pharmaceutical or insurance business, or a not-for-profit.

By the way, we would be interested to hear from philosophers, mathematicians, engineers or physicists with an interest in ­policy.

We want to work with people who have ideas, bring the broadest range of experience and are open to expanding their horizons and ours. That is how we will get the best results for Australia.

Our door is open!
Michael Thawley is secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

{Hmm..."K" (the bits in bold) I reckon we could get it down to a one page pitch for Boyd, that Malcolm could understand - what say you??  }

There is a common theme here , just can't relate it to our 'three stooges' & the supporting bunch of trough feeding bureaucrats  

Next was this excellent contribution from Stevie E last week

Collaboration is king, but ‘healthy silos’ may still have their place

---

by
Stephen Easton
26.10.2015



Employment secretary Renee Leon is embracing collaboration within and beyond government with “a bold new experiment” in collaborative, outcomes-focused outsourcing.

There is a keen awareness in the public sector that agencies can no longer exist as islands, but significant groundwork must be laid down before bridges of collaboration can be built. And it must be remembered that while silos get a bad rap, there remains value in demarcation.

Building the bridges of collaboration stronger and wider means building trust and sharing power through inclusive governance structures, as well as developing mutual commitment to shared purposes. But mandarins find it hard to share power and it takes time and effort to build trust and a shared language with other tribes. It’s much easier to just pull your own exclusive levers.

Mark Evans

Mark Evans, head of the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, summarised for the IPAA ACT Division’s recent conference what senior public service executives said when asked why silos are still prominent:

“Because we are successful and powerful, and we have the capacity to act. Because it’s easier than working across boundaries. Because we all speak the same language and they don’t speak like us. Because we don’t trust the others.”

Collaborative governance means partnerships between public, private and civic organisations that achieve otherwise-impossible outcomes for the public, Evans says, quoting one of the top experts on the subject, Kirk Emerson. Contrary to the zealous pursuit of silo-breaking reforms, Evans says the research indicates collaborative governance is as much about “how you build healthy silos” as building trust and increasing opportunities for collaboration.

“The key is how we can get them to share that expertise and resources with other parties and governments,” Evans says.

The ACT’s top public servant, Kathy Leigh, has made the point that inter-agency teams are only valuable because their members bring different skills and experience together from different organisations. Too much time spent in an amorphous cross-agency space can mean those specialist skills atrophy.

“Whether you’re collaborating within government or outside it, we all have to remember to leave our egos outside the room.”

“Whether you’re collaborating within government or outside it, we all have to remember to leave our egos outside the room.”

At federal level, the increasing frequency of machinery-of-government (MoG) changes means seasoned public servants have a better understanding of the tribal cultures on their neighbouring islands than in the past, says Department of Employment secretary Renee Leon.

While MoGs can be stressful, Leon allows herself to joke about their upside: “I think we’re actually quite well placed these days for that kind of cross-departmental work, because we’ve all been MoG’d in and out of each other so many times that the people in the other department used to be our colleagues a month ago or a year ago, and we all do understand the pieces that we’re jointly working on.”

Leon shares the view that mutual trust and shared objectives are the foundations of collaboration. Her department is trying to break out of the old public service paradigm, she says:

“Whether you’re collaborating within government or outside it, we all have to remember to leave our egos outside the room. Recognise that those other people, whether we call them stakeholders or partners or competitors, they actually probably know a lot of stuff that we don’t.”

Jobactive: case-study in public-private collaboration

The outsourced employment services model established in the Howard government — which resulted in the department “micro-managing” providers — has recently undergone a renovation. Through its new jobactive contracts, the department is now less focused on making providers jump through hoops and follow specific processes, says Leon. It now takes more of a partnership approach and pays for results, rewarding the best performers by sending more business their way.

Renee Leon

Leon says the laissez-faire approach is “a bold new experiment” in service delivery which leaves providers to get on with it “pretty well in any way they like” within “broad parameters about integrity and accountability”.

“There’s a joint charter that’s about maintaining reputation and integrity, and making sure that we’re working together, so that their industry’s viable and that taxpayers’ money is well spent.”

It’s early days in this attempt to put the focus on outcomes, take a market stewardship approach and encourage innovative, collaborative service delivery.

“We encourage the providers to innovate, because that is how they’ll be able to do better in terms of producing outcomes,” says Leon. “We encourage them to collaborate with each other; this is a more tricky thing to do because obviously they’re competitors in their own region.”

The department rates providers against each other using a points system with incentives for collaboration built into it, she says. Providers might work together to funnel unemployed people towards big job generators like major construction projects.
Leon says they’re trying to overcome the lack of commercial instinct for collaboration partly by being the neutral party, “auspicing the conversations between them and potential employers through our own state network.”

In the youth employment space, the department is offering more money but also expecting 25% better results, and pushing providers to innovate and collaborate on “innovative youth trials” — a new grants program that encourages organisations to team up with other local youth support services and help young people overcome barriers to work, focused on disadvantaged students.

“We’re collaborating with the sector by giving them access to our data, letting them know how they’re performing, giving them access to the labour market analysis that we do as a department, and giving them the freedom to go and get the outcomes that we want,” says Leon.

She is confident the incentives are now aligned to discourage providers from abusing of the system, as a Four Corners report in February found happening to Job Services Australia. If something similar came out about the new system, she commented, ministers would be likely to clamp down on the freewheeling approach and demand a return to strict micro-management.

Technology and data sharing also helps reduce the risk of providers rorting the system.
“We share data with Centrelink, and we’re working on sharing it with the [Australian Taxation Office], so that in the background we can tell whether someone’s got a job or not without having to go through a whole lot of prescriptive checking via the providers,” the Employment secretary explains.

Permission to fail, Minister?
In a sign that risk appetite discussions within the public administration profession are having an impact, Leon admitted it might not all go according to plan. She hopes the current push in public administration circles towards a greater acceptance of risk will keep her bold experiment bubbling away:

“It’s kind of implicit in what I’ve said that we’re taking some risks around this, and often risk is what gets in the way of these types of freer collaboration being permitted to continue.

“I think the public service is often criticised as being risk averse and I’m sure you all know where a lot of the risk aversion comes from in the system, and that is how bad it looks for the minister when there’s some critical story on the front page.”

“We’re giving it a go, and we’ll learn from it and report on it in a transparent way, and put the learnings to use in what we do deliver.”

“We’re giving it a go, and we’ll learn from it and report on it in a transparent way, and put the learnings to use in what we do deliver.”

She also took a gentle swing at ministers who “overpromise” and then scramble to keep everything looking good, even when it isn’t. Public servants should remind ministers that sometimes things will go wrong and “you only get success by being prepared to take risks” to get less cumbersome, restrictive programs off the ground.

Departments could also help their political masters craft speeches that will “lay the groundwork” for them to explain later that some experiments have negative results, she suggested.

The Employment secretary explains the innovative youth trials are just that — trials — with the freedom for grant recipients to try new things and even if 50% don’t work, the learnings will have value.

“And that’s one of the features of government decision-making that would enable us to collaborate outside of government much more … if we were prepared, and if ministers were prepared, to say: ‘We don’t know how many jobs this will create; we’re giving it a go, and we’ll learn from it and report on it in a transparent way, and put the learnings to use in what we do deliver.”

“New Zealand is ahead of us in this space,” said Leon, explaining that the NZ social services department has a block of money it can spend with no policy proposal or special budgetary fiddling, just to trial new initiatives that aim to cut the nation’s welfare liability.

Having also embarked on a new round of stakeholder consultation — communication being the bedrock of any productive relationship — she says the challenge is not in asking the questions but listening to the answers.

“They may well tell us things that we find uncomfortable, that don’t mesh with our paradigm, that are going to cost more money, and I think that willingness of the public service to hear what really happens on the ground from private sector and community sector providers is one of the barriers that we can all overcome in order to get better at this, at the same time as convincing our political masters that it’s worth trying things and failing fast if you need to, in order to learn and improve.”

Finally from political 'commentariat' veteran Michelle Grattan, who also references the Michael Thawley Oz article:

Michelle Grattan: why won’t you talk to the media, mandarins?

---

by
Michelle Grattan
02.11.2015



Allowing the media into the policy process is not as scary as some mandarins think, the veteran political correspondent writes. When journalists had access to bureaucrats the public had more understanding.

Michael Thawley, surprised at finding so many closed doors — requiring swipe cards — when he became secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has now opened most of the internal ones, so people can better communicate with each other.
That’s the physical doors. Now Thawley wants to see the public service “more widely … open its doors to the outside world”. He writes in The Australian:

“We must reach out more to the private sector, universities, think tanks, not-for-profits, state governments and other countries. We must invite into our ranks colleagues from outside who have expertise and useful experience.”

Anything missing here? Ah, the media. Either they are not worth reaching out to or, more likely, it is thought too dangerous to do so.

Indeed what does “reaching out” mean? It needs to go beyond cross-recruitment and even the importation of more ideas to also include greater transparency and accountability and the wider understanding of policy.

If we are talking about improving and enhancing public policy and the debate around that, the media has a significant role to play. They provide prime routes by which information about policy is disseminated; they are also conduits for the ideas being thrown up from these other players.

Yet the public service is much more closed these days to the media than it used to be.

When I came to Canberra in the 1970s, there was a readily available government directory with the names, positions and numbers of senior public servants. It was updated regularly and everyone in our newspaper office had a copy. Even a junior reporter could easily contact officials. Once they got to know and trust you, they would provide background about policy.

These days you can find the Australian government directory online but most calls by reporters to officials will be referred to the department’s media section. Once upon a time a newish reporter could contact John Stone, then a senior Treasury officer, about the meaning of economic figures; nowadays that reporter would be re-routed.

“We are talking context and detail on which officials have expertise that their political masters often lack.”

“We are talking context and detail on which officials have expertise that their political masters often lack.”

Let me be clear: we are not talking “leaking” here — that is a different matter. We are talking context and detail on which officials have expertise that their political masters often lack.

A few decades ago, most departments did not have substantial media sections. One exception was Foreign Affairs. Its public information group was staffed by officials who were not trained in journalism but in policy. Many of these people went on to have very senior careers (Dick Woolcott, John McCarthy, Kim Jones). They were knowledgeable, savvy and confident, and always worth talking with.

These days quantity has replaced quality, and fear has supplanted frankness.
Often a department’s media people will send the journalist to the minister’s media people. Ministers typically have two media advisers, many of whom have little knowledge of the ins and outs of complicated policy.

They can and do call on department officials to help them out but this can end up with the semi-blind leading the nearly blind — an ex-journalist trying to absorb and explain a complex matter to a current journalist who is on a deadline. There’s a lot to be said for cutting out the middle man (or woman) and letting the bureaucrat do the briefing.

There are exceptions to these generalisations. There is the odd formal briefing by bureaucrats, arranged by the government. Some senior public servants do choose to engage with some journalists and in doing so they usually serve the policy process well. News reports, features and analysis pieces are more informed and accurate as a result.
But this is not the norm across the public service and certainly not the practice routinely expected and followed in the bureaucracy.

The lockdown has come from governments (and not just this Coalition one) who want to control the messaging and also do not particularly trust the bureaucracy. But the public servants feel protected by the approach. To be able to shunt off the potentially tricky business of dealing with the media to someone who is supposed to understand that particular jungle reduces risks for them.

The faster media cycle and the diminished specialisation in media outlets, due to cost factors and a preoccupation with maximising digital “hits” which are not attracted by heavy policy articles, are also relevant. There are relatively fewer policy experts in the media to match the experts in the public service.

Bureaucrats these days are less confident than they used to be and the dangers of navigating a tough media world are greater than they once were.

But, to channel Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, it should not be that hard for agile public servants to cope, if a government were brave and public-spirited enough to encourage that particular door to be opened.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

Again well done the Mandarin - CF x 3  -  & one for Michael Thawley  


MTF...P2