Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 114

'Public servants are an easy target': Upcoming CPD report

Earlier this year, Senator Kim Carr observed that, "The pleasure taken in bureaucrat bashing has reached new extremes." CPD's research confirms the Senator's view. Our analysis of the Parliamentary record, in particular, reveals a highly polarised debate without consistent left-right positions. This pattern is reflected in media commentary, where public servants are sometimes depicted as "wasters", "pen pushers" and "freeloaders".

Surveys of citizens' views reveal more positive views. In fact, Australians generally support increased funding on public services and express confidence in public service agencies.

Attitudes Toward the Public Service will be released on July 19th as the second installment in CPD's upcoming State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report.

CPD Media on the Public Service

James Whelan: The Public Sector Job Rollercoaster

There's a tendency for conservative commentators to describe the public sector as bloated and ever-expanding. More public servants than we could ever want or need. Witness Joe Hockey's recent vision of a brave new world in which 12,000 public servants would be retrenched… "for starters". The reality of public service staffing is, it seems, very different. CPD's Public Service Program Research Director, James Whelan discusses the findings of the first installment of his research paper, with BNet's Phil Dobbie.

Looking at trends in 1990-2010 APS staffing and budgets, OECD data on government expenditure and the ongoing pressure of the efficiency dividend, James suggests that public-sector staffing is not the nightmare that conservatives describe.

LISTEN to James dispel a few myths as he chats with BNet's Phil Dobbie here.

James Whelan | Guidelines for an Aspiring Premier

CPD's Public Service Research Director, James Whelan unpacks election time attitudes and campaign spin surrounding public service sector. He takes a close look at Queensland's aspiring Premier, Campbell Newman whose campaign has foreshadowed cuts to public services, and offers some advice about what Australians really care about.

Read James Whelan's article in ABC's The Drum Unleashed here.

CPD's upcoming paper State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report will soon be available.

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Ben Eltham | The Calm Before the Carbon Storm

The phony war is over and the battle to price carbon is about to start. The thing is, it doesn't look like Gillard is going to announce anything too terrifying, writes Ben Eltham.

First published in New Matilda, here

So we finally have an announcement on the carbon tax. At least, we have an announcement that we will have an announcement.

According to the Prime Minister's office, details of the carbon tax will be announced this Sunday.

"After hearing a report on the discussions of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, Cabinet agreed tonight that sufficient progress had been made to allow an announcement date to be set for Sunday 10 July 2011," the Prime Ministerial press release stated.

The phony war is over, and the battle to price carbon — a defining feature of the political landscape since 2006 at least — is about to resume in earnest.

Now, finally, concrete details of the government's scheme are starting to be announced, and they are already describing a policy outcome short of the Armageddon forecast by Tony Abbott.

Yesterday's important announcement was that petrol would be largely exempted from the carbon tax, with some caveats for heavy transport users like trucking companies. (Big businesses will also lose a number of their current tax breaks on fuel excise). Assiduous negotiation on Tony Windsor's behalf has also secured a series of safeguards for farmers and other rural industries, and sole traders and small businesses that run company utes and vans will be protected. In return for their agreement, the Greens have struck a deal to get the Productivity Commission to examine the whole framework of federal fuel taxes in a rigorous and comprehensive manner.

In policy terms, there is no doubt this is a step backward from the purest version of a carbon tax, which would treat all carbon pollution the same, whether it is emitted by a low-income commuter or Andrew Forrest's corporate jet. But politically, the deal is a no brainer for a government desperate to assuage the  nerves of ordinary citizens about their household budgets. Once again, Greg Combet has shown his supple skill in the art of the deal, not only keeping Windsor, Oakeshott and the Greens on board in the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee process, but also bedding down a politically palatable petrol price announcement that Labor can now use to rebut Tony Abbott's assaults.

As a result, the path now appears clear for a full — well, reasonably detailed, at any rate — carbon tax announcement on Sunday.

For the Government this announcement will come not a moment too soon. For months, Julia Gillard and her colleagues have drifted south in the polls while trying to sell a carbon tax that is itself a broken election promise — but with no details to sell, and no firm figures to describe. As a result, Tony Abbott and the business lobby have had a field day, running a well-orchestrated fear campaign that has convinced many voters that the carbon tax will be bad for the economy.

In fact, the level of carbon pricing the Government is likely to adopt will have almost no long-term impact on the economy, as a series of Treasury models and the real world experience of the European emissions trading scheme suggest.

Australia already has a number of carbon taxes, by the way. You probably just don't know them by that name. Top of the list are petrol and diesel excises, which together raked in $13.2 billion in 2010-11, according to the Budget Papers.

We also have the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax, which levies a royalty on oil and gas extraction in Australian federal waters, responsible this year for $940 million.

In other words, carbon-based taxes already bring in more than the approximately $11.5 billion that Ross Garnaut has estimated a $26/tonne carbon tax will levy in its first year. Which rather puts some of the over-heated rhetoric about the destructive impact of a carbon tax into perspective, doesn't it?

Also coming into sharper perspective are the carbon policies of the Opposition — or, rather, the lack of them. As I've repeatedly argued here at New Matilda, the so-called "direct action" policies of the Coalition are at best unrealistically ambitious and at worst bald-faced lies. No one doubts that pollution abatement can be purchased at taxpayer expense, for example by bribing big energy companies to shutter the vastly polluting brown coal power plants of the Latrobe Valley. But a policy in which there is no cap on pollution and no price on carbon will surely struggle to achieve a 5 per cent reduction in carbon pollution by 2020.

The closer you look at "direct action", the sketchier it appears. Much of the policy is based on untested and scientifically dubious assertions that as much as 85 million tonnes of carbon can be locked up in Australian farmers' soil. And because direct action relies on government spending to achieve pollution reduction, it is obviously subject to other budgetary considerations each and every year.

In other words, to pay for this uncosted policy, an Abbott government would either have to cut government spending in other areas, or raise taxes. Abbott has steadfastly refused to explain which it will be. As Tim Colebatch writes today in The Age, "Few observers believe [direct action] will deliver anything like a cut of 33 per cent in per capita emissions by 2020. They say Tony Abbott would then have to choose between spending far more than planned or scrapping the target."

"If you think he would choose to honour the target, then you can make your own guess as to what he might make you pay," Colebatch continued. "But I think he would scrap the target."

Intelligent observers of federal politics like Fairfax's Laura Tingle seem to have sniffed a change in the wind. Abbott's small-target strategy has so far proved astonishingly successful against a government uncertain of both its tactics and its long-term philosophical beliefs. But his fixation on media stunts (like the ill-fated proposal to hold a carbon tax plebiscite) and his breathtakingly threadbare policy platforms have started to make even enthusiastic Abbott supporters uncomfortable.

Abbott's performance on the ABC's 7.30 last night will not have removed any of those doubts. Up against a competent interrogator in Chris Uhlmann, he struggled to articulate anything more than his usual slogans, even if there was no obvious implosion.

In contrast, the Government looked surprisingly perky yesterday in Question Time. Labor will need to claw back perhaps a dozen points in the opinion polls to regain anything like a competitive position by the time the 2013 election rolls around. But it can only take one step at a time, and the most important step of the entire year will be this Sunday's carbon tax announcement. Labor will need to lock in behind the policy and convince its remaining supporters in the union movement and broader community to get out there and explain it to doubting voters like its political survival depends upon it.

Because it does.

Jennifer Doggett | Public Health Advocates Accused of Oversimplifying the Issues Around Junk Food Advertising To Kids

The arguments by public health advocates that link food advertising and children's food choices to support a junk food ad ban misrespresent and over-simplify the influence of junk food advertising.

By ignoring the negative potential side-effects of an advertising ban, public health advocates are "detracting, rather than contributing, to the challenging task of improving the future health of Australian children."

Read Jennifer's article here.

Originally published in Crikey.

Public services in the news 04/07/2011

Liberals support removal of public service tenure > The South Australian Opposition says it will support government moves to remove permanency from the public service so redeployed public servants who can't find another job in the public sector within 12 months will be sacked. The Government plans to cut 4100 public sector jobs over four years…

Courage needed to protect whistleblowers > In 2007, the ALP made strong commitments to greater transparency in government, including the reversal of a draconian approach to whistleblowers. Almost four years since the new federal commitments, this self-imposed deadline is about to pass without the government having made any recent detectable progress…

Ben Eltham | Can A Bunch of Greens Take Canberra?

Twelve new senators take their place in parliament this month and four of them are Bob's. Are the alarmists right? Is Canberra about to go green? Ben Eltham on what we should expect.

First published in New Matilda here.

It is one of the stranger quirks of Australian democracy that the Senate and the House of Representatives run on different timetables. While members of the lower house take their place straight after an election, incoming senators must wait — sometimes for months — before they can enter their chamber as elected representatives. Add to this the fact that senators serve a six-year term, staggered over two elections, and the result can be two quite different versions of the popular will in conflict over crucial legislation.

This time around, it has been nearly a full year since last August's poll — an election that saw an unprecedented vote for the Greens. The incoming senate includes six Greens senators — one in each state — taking their total to nine and comfortably delivering the environmental party the balance of power.

The peculiar composition of the current parliament gives the Greens more power than any minor party has enjoyed since the heyday of the Australian Democrats. With Adam Bandt in the lower house and the balance of power in the Senate, Bob Brown now has an effective veto on every single piece of legislation Julia Gillard might wish to pass.

And it just so happens that Gillard has quite a lot of important legislation in the pipeline. There's the mining tax, for instance, in its new guise as the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, the draft legislation of which has now been released. There are a number of bills relating to Labor election promises — such as shifting the threshold for the private health insurance rebate and establishing a student amenities charge for university students — that the government would like to pass, as well as some that it simply needs to pass, like the budget.

And then there's the carbon tax, the millstone around the Government's neck. Currently being nutted out in a committee process involving the Greens, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, the carbon tax — and its transition to a fully fledged emissions trading scheme — will require careful drafting and thickets of accompanying regulations to pin down crucial details (like the definition of who has to pay it, for instance).

Gillard will need every ounce of her lauded negotiation skills to shepherd it through parliament, and the Coalition can be relied upon to continue their campaign of tactical destabilisation via constant censure motions and Question Time antics.

Given the trouble Kevin Rudd encountered with the CPRS, which was voted down repeatedly after he failed to win support for it from either the Greens or the Coalition, Gillard has this time decided to bring the crossbenchers inside the tent. As a result, the final shape of the carbon tax will not just be a Labor proposition; the Greens and the independents have been intimately involved and will not easily be able to walk away from it. Because the Greens voted against the CPRS last time around, they are also under considerable pressure from sections of their own party base on carbon policy. Voting down a price on carbon a second time will be damaging.

Gillard reportedly has a constructive relationship with Brown, in contrast to her predecessor (Kevin Rudd famously refused to meet the Greens leader for many months). The political imperatives for both Labor and the Greens suggest they will cut deals and get legislation passed.

The Greens want to be seen as responsible brokers in what is effectively a coalition government, and also sense an opportunity to pull Labor to the left to achieve greener outcomes on carbon and energy policy, and perhaps social issues like asylum seekers and gay marriage as well. For her part, the Prime Minister desperately needs to get on with the job of governing, and she can't do that without those critical Greens votes in the Senate.

Given the dire state of current polling, the Government's only chance of re-election surely lies in passing the carbon tax quickly and then hoping that voters realise that the doomsday scenarios propagated by Tony Abbott and the corporate lobbyists did not eventuate.

As a result, Gillard and Brown will be seeing a lot more of each other for the next two years, much to the chagrin of conservatives, many of whom harbour a special disdain for the Greens as the most left-leaning party in the parliament. Tony Abbott will no doubt continue to argue that Bob Brown is really in charge and that the Greens represent dangerous, extreme and radical policy perspectives, an argument which is sure to find support in many sections of the Murdoch press.

Of course, given the polls and given the six-year term of the incoming Greens senators, there has already been much speculation about the role the party might play in a future conservative government. Bob Brown stoked the fires of that particular controversy with this week's address to the National Press Club, where he confirmed that he would block any attempts by an Abbott government to repeal the carbon tax.

As Charles Richardson pointed out yesterday in Crikey, all this talk of what Bob Brown would do should Tony Abbott win the next election is just a little bit premature. Quite apart from the hypothetical nature of the discussion, it's not even guaranteed that the Greens would retain the balance of power in the next Senate. The Coalition controlled it as recently as 2004-07 and could quite conceivably pick up a senator in Western Australia and Queensland to win back the Senate in 2013.

For this term at least, though, the Greens will have balance of power, and that will mean much greater scrutiny of their policies and parliamentary tactics. This certainly poses risks for the party, but it may also prove an unexpected advantage. Many of the Greens' policies are far more popular than conservatives like to believe, and the party has shown a surprising instinct for the populist on certain issues — such as Brown's argument that Australian mining companies are 83 per cent foreign-owned — that shows a potential to prise votes off both the Liberal and Labor parties at the next election.

In the shorter term, however, carbon is the main game. Don't believe the pundits claiming a deal is ready to be struck. I expect the negotiations to drag on for some time. But there is no doubt that the sooner Brown and Gillard can strike a deal, the better for the Government's chances. There is nothing Tony Abbott would enjoy more than the collapse of the carbon tax policy.

John Menadue | Malaysia Swap Offers Hope on 'Toxic' Debate

CPD Director and former head of the Fraser government's Department of Immigration, John Menadue, says the Malaysia refugee swap is needed to break a deadlock in a "toxic" asylum seeker debate and represents a way out of the "dreadfully dark" debate on asylum seekers.

Read Kirsty Needham's article in The Sydney Morning Herald here.

Kirsty Needham: Malaysia Swap Offers Hope on 'Toxic' Debate

CPD Director and former head of the Fraser government's Department of Immigration, John Menadue, says the Malaysia refugee swap is needed to break a deadlock in a "toxic" asylum seeker debate and represents a way out of the "dreadfully dark" debate on asylum seekers.

Read Kirsty Needham's article in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), and syndicated to Fairfax, here.

Ian Dunlop | Corporate Heads in the Sand: Global Warming, Risk & Governance

Global warming is about risk and uncertainty.  Many factors probably contribute to it, including natural variability. However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the world is warming and that human carbon emissions are a major contributor.   The risks of destabilizing the climatic equilibrium under which humanity as we know it has developed through the 11,000 years of the Holocene period are now escalating rapidly.

The glaring omission in current national discourse is any mention of these risks.  The credible climate scientists have been sounding urgent warnings for some time.  Politicians interpret these warnings in terms of  "political reality", proposing action which is far from that required.  No-one is addressing the real risks.  The science on an issue this complex will not be settled for a long time, but that requires even greater prudence in managing risk and uncertainty, particularly where climatic changes may be sudden and irreversible.

Sound corporate governance requires boards of directors to act honestly, in good faith and to the best of their ability in the interests of the company in perpetuity. They must also ensure risks are identified and suitable systems put in place to manage those risks. Global and national institutions are now indicating that global warming is one of the greatest risks we face, in both the short and long term. Thus its risk management should be a major concern and responsibility of the corporate sector, a responsibility the sector in Australia has steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

Which makes recent public pronouncements by some corporate luminaries of particular concern; David Murray, Chair of the Future Fund, opined that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant, there was no correlation between carbon dioxide and global warming, and that the amount of ice in the world was slightly increasing, not decreasing (AFR "Lunch with David Murray" 10th June 2010)

Belinda Hutchison, Chair of QBE Insurance, insisted that the recent natural disasters in Queensland had nothing to do with climate change, as demonstrated by "research received" (SMH "QBE blames La Nina for Disasters" 20th April 2011).

Dick Warburton, Chair of the Board of Taxation, Citigroup and other public companies, Peter Farrell, Chair of Resmed, and Geoff Lehmann, former Chair of the Australian Tax Research Foundation, re-iterated at length minority scientific opinion, accepting that carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on global temperature, but implying that the sensitivity of temperature to increasing carbon dioxide concentration was far less than claimed by majority scientific opinion, to the point that the effect was unimportant. The bottom line being that "Adaptation to adverse climate change, if and when it does occur, may be the best and only viable strategy." (Quadrant "The Intelligent Voters Guide to Global Warming", March/April 2011)

These categoric statements stand in stark contrast to the opinion of major Academies of Science around the world and key scientific organisations such as the CSIRO, WMO, BOM, NOAA etc. that most of the global warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities and that urgent action is required to reduce emissions if potentially catastrophic outcomes are to be avoided.

The risk equation is simple.  If we take serious action to reduce emissions, the cost is likely to be a manageable 3-5% of GDP, increasing the longer action is delayed.  If global warming turns out to be as the scientific majority believe, with major adverse implications, we are as prepared as we can be to minimise the effects, and to adapt to those we cannot avoid.  If the minority view proves correct, with minimal climate impact, we end up with a cleaner, less polluted and healthier environment, which we need for a multitude of other reasons.

If we take no action and the minority view proves correct, then it is "business-as-usual". On the other hand, if the majority view proves correct, the world faces catastrophic outcomes totally unprepared, with an impact potentially worse than the Great Depression, WW1 & WW2 combined and a global carrying capacity of less than 1 billion people compared with 7 billion today. The impact on Australia would be particularly severe.

The empirical evidence of what might be termed the key performance indicators of global warming – melting of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and ice sheets, mountain glaciers and permafrost, ocean acidification, declining natural carbon sinks – all suggests that the warming impact is accelerating ahead of the scientist's previous expectations.  This is reinforced by the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, particularly over the last decade.

Most importantly, the inertia of the climate system, particularly the slow warming of the oceans, means that the full impact of our emissions today only become evident decades hence.  Thus unless we take rapid action now, we may well be locking in irreversible climate change of catastrophic proportions for future generations; indeed we may have already done so.  Adaptation will be too late.

The need for urgent precautionary action should be obvious.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this issue and it is reasonable to assume that the public statements above are reflected in the corporate approach to global warming being taken by organisations with which those individuals are involved.  That would not be of great moment, except that those organisations exercise substantial influence and corporate power, with a major impact on Australian society.

Sound governance requires that directors take a balanced view of risk and uncertainty.  To propose a strategy of either denial, or wait, see and adapt, in the light of current empirical evidence and the balance of expert advice, is a serious breach of fiduciary responsibility, both corporately and nationally – a breach which is only too evident in the current business approach to carbon pricing, where long term implications are dismissed in the interests of short term expediency.

It is high time major Australian corporations acknowledged the real risks we confront, took leadership in implementing genuine precautionary measures urgently, and in particular woke up to the opportunities these present.

An edited version of this article was published as an Opinion Piece in the Australian Financial Review on 23rd June 2011.

James Whelan | The Public Sector Job Rollercoaster

Does the conservative rhetoric of a bloated, ever-expanding bureaucratic public service bear any relation to the reality on the ground? CPD Research Director for the Public Service Research Program James Whelan discusses the findings of his research paper, with BNet's Phil Dobbie.

Looking at OECD data on government expenditure, the APS's budget cutbacks in the 1990s, and the ongoing pressure of efficiency dividends, James suggests that public-sector bloating is not the nightmare conservatives paint it as.

LISTEN to James interview with BNet, here.

If you want to stay tuned for more on this, be sure that you are signed up for our email updates, 'like' us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

At CPD we want to make good ideas matter. Like what you've read?

DONATE and support deeper thinking. Become an Ideas Sustainer now.

IPAA NSW 2011 State Conference 19 July

The Institute of Public Administration Australia (NSW) will host its 2011 State Conference 'The Future Course of Modern Government'  in Sydney on Tuesday 19 July 2011.

The Conference will address some fundamental questions about the issues and challenges facing governments in Australia (with a spotlight on NSW) and will explore principles and recommendations to guide their response around four themes:

The role of technology
Innovation
Services reform
Collaboration.

Hear first-hand from international and national perspectives including:

The Hon Barry O'Farrell, Premier of New South Wales – The future course of modern government
Professor Peter Shergold AC, Chairman, NSW Public Service Commission – A world class NSW public sector: What would it look like?
Christian Bason, Director of MindLab (Copenhagen, Denmark) – Public Design: Leading Innovation in Government
Ross Dawson, Chairman, Advanced Human Technologies – The Transformation of Government

To register for the conference and view the program, click here >