Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 14

VIDEO: Climate Risk, Capital Markets and Global Governance

This Centre for Policy Development climate risk, capital markets and global governance forum saw senior leaders from Australia and the United States explore the latest climate policy developments, their impact on economic strategy and diplomacy, and how Australia’s leading institutions are responding.

Centre for Policy Development CEO Travers McLeod moderated a discussion between

Steven Kennedy, Secretary of the Commonwealth TreasuryShemara Wikramanayake, Managing Director and CEO of Macquarie Group andJohn Morton, Climate Counsellor at the United States Treasury

This was the second public event from the Climate & Recovery Initiative, a partnership between the Centre for Policy Development, ClimateWorks Australia, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), and Pollination.

A transcript of the forum will be posted to this page presently

The post VIDEO: Climate Risk, Capital Markets and Global Governance appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

CPD is hiring Policy Advisers (2 roles)

Come and join the CPD team!CPD is looking for two outstanding Policy Advisers (based in Melbourne or Sydney) to join our growing team. The successful candidates will support research projects across multiple CPD programs. Ideally, they will have some experience in wellbeing approaches to policy, government and economics, social service policy and delivery, and/or place-based approaches.

About CPD

The Centre for Policy Development is one of Australia’s leading independent policy institutes. Founded in 2007, we are a mission-driven organisation led by a dynamic CEO and distinguished Board of Directors, and we are seeking exceptional talent to join our growing team.

These roles offer the opportunity to make a substantial contribution to policy development in Australia, and represent an ideal career move for motivated individuals. You will be joining a smart, energetic, dedicated team at an organisation with a collaborative culture that will foster your skills, broaden your horizons and engage your passion for ideas.

CPD is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace.  Our capacity to deliver real impact comes from a talented, collaborative team from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.  We strongly encourage applicants from a diverse range of genders, cultures, abilities and experiences to apply.

About the Policy Adviser roles

We believe our team is our key asset and we are committed to recruiting and retaining talented and committed individuals. We support flexible work and will consider either full-time or part-time for the right candidate. The successful candidate will be based in CPD’s Sydney or Melbourne office. Remote work may be possible.  Remuneration for the position is commensurate with experience and skills.

Our team enjoys frequent interaction with policymakers in government, media, and the wider policy world. You’ll be joining a close-knit team that delivers real impact at senior levels of policymaking. This is an exciting opportunity to make a genuine contribution to policy development and innovation in Australia.

Main duties and responsibilities

Deliver rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis and policy recommendations, communicating where possible in plain and accessible language.Undertake original research, develop ideas for new avenues of exploration, including scoping policy issues, authoring research notes and publications, working independently under the direction of senior staff.Manage and deliver aspects of CPD’s programs, including research projects, roundtables and other convening events.Build relationships with stakeholders, identifying and engaging key stakeholders across our programs.Edit and arrange peer review, and liaise with our Research Committee, Fellowship and other experts and stakeholders on current and future projects within our policy programs.Work collaboratively across CPD’s team, including interns, fellows and contractors.Ability to undertake occasional travel (including overnight travel)

Essential selection criteria

experience or expertise in wellbeing approaches to policy, government and economics, social service policy and delivery, and/or place-based approaches, gained through work or studyability to write confidently and clearlyability to take the initiative in developing new projects, methodologies, and ideasstrong analytical rigour, with an ability to perform and communicate complex analysisability to work at pace on several different projects at once, coordinating multiple agendas and delivering to deadlinesunderstanding and enthusiasm for CPD’s program areas and major initiatives

Desirable selection criteria

an understanding of the wider economic and social policy context in Australiaan undergraduate degree combined with relevant work experienceexperience working with policymakers, or in another field that involved making decisions (or advising decision-makers) in a political contextexperience in applied research aimed at impacting policy and practiceexperience working in a research-intensive organisationappreciation of the benefits of mixed-methods research

 

How to Apply

Candidates can apply via email to admin@cpd.org.au by 9.00am AEST on Monday 22 November 2021.

Applications must include:

a cover letter (describing the applicant’s interest and suitability against this job description);a short CV; anda sample of writing for a general audience.

The Centre for Policy Development is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applicants of all backgrounds, cultures, genders, abilities and experiences to apply.

 

You can also download the position description as a PDF here.

 

The post CPD is hiring Policy Advisers (2 roles) appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

CPD is hiring a Climate Lead

Come and join the CPD team!CPD is recruiting for an outstanding Climate Lead (based in Melbourne or Sydney) to join our growing team, with a primary focus on the challenge of decarbonising Australia’s economy. This role will suit someone already working on climate policy – with your own established networks and ideas – but looking to work in an environment where you get to set the agenda.

About the Climate Lead role

CPD’s Sustainable Economy program is structured around three major workstreams: decarbonising the Australian economy, embedding broad measures of wellbeing into economic decision making, and developing new thinking to tackle the country’s big structural challenges.

This role will take the lead on our work on decarbonisation, but will have opportunities to work across all of CPD’s initiatives. For the last five years, CPD has been pushing the frontier of how Australia’s corporate and financial community think about climate change. From the influential Hutley legal opinion, to hosting landmark statements from the RBA governor and ASIC commissioner.

Since 2019, we have been looking at the challenge of decarbonising the economy, and are currently convening the Climate and Recovery Initiative, bringing together over 30 senior leaders from government, business, unions and civil society to chart a more proactive course on decarbonisation. We have plans to tackle big issues from local transition planning in carbon-intensive regions, to the procurement frameworks that control hundreds of billions of dollars of spending each year.  The successful candidate will become CPD’s point person on these initiatives and more – inheriting a track record of success, and a strong platform from which to build bigger things.

The salary is competitive, and both salary and position title are negotiable for the right candidate.

About CPD

The Centre for Policy Development is one of Australia’s leading independent policy institutes. Founded in 2007, we are a mission-driven organisation led by a dynamic CEO and distinguished Board of Directors, and we are seeking exceptional talent to join our growing team.

This role offers the opportunity to make a substantial contribution to policy development in Australia, and is an ideal career move for a motivated individual. You will be joining a smart, energetic, dedicated team at an organisation with a collaborative culture that will foster your skills, broaden your horizons and engage your passion for ideas.

CPD is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace.  Our capacity to deliver real impact comes from a talented, collaborative team from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.  We strongly encourage applicants from a diverse range of genders, cultures, abilities and experiences to apply.

Role description

Independently manage projects within CPD, coordinating with external organisations, collaborators and team members to deliver major projects and initiatives.Work collaboratively, managing the input of others across the organisation; including staff, research fellows and contractors.Develop your own vision for major projects, and influence others to follow you both within and outside of CPD.Maintain a broad network of senior climate policy stakeholders in Commonwealth and state governments, peak bodies, businesses and NGOs – including identifying and engaging new stakeholders.Contribute to wider project planning, developing ideas for new projects within the scope of the program.Engage directly with funders and senior external stakeholders.Work closely with the CEO and Program Director to lead the breadth of CPD’s climate-related outputs and activities.Undertake original research and develop new avenues of exploration.Cultivate a national profile through targeted media and other external engagements.Orchestrate high-level discussions – eg. roundtables, workshops, and meetings – to crystallise policy action with top leaders in Australia (eg. department Secretaries, CEOs, NGO Chairs)Ability to undertake occasional travel (including overnight travel), COVID permitting.

Essential selection criteria

Direct experience working on Australia policy issues relating to climate change, industrial decarbonisation, or economic transitionAbility to work at pace on several different projects at once, coordinating multiple agendas and delivering to deadlinesAbility to write confidently and clearlyExperience of project management, delivering complex projects that required coordinating multiple simultaneous inputs and managing contributions from multiple people.Ability to take the initiative in developing projects, methodologies, and ideas, and then turning conceptual discussions into concrete actionsStrong analytical rigour, with an ability to perform and communicate complex analysisUnderstanding and enthusiasm for CPD’s program areas and major initiatives

Desirable selection criteria

An undergraduate or postgraduate degree, combined with relevant work experienceAn understanding of the wider economic and social policy context in AustraliaExisting networks and connection to a range of domestic climate policymakers and stakeholders, particularly across a range of jurisdictions (Commonwealth and states)Experience working with senior policymakers, or in another field that involved making decisions (or advising decision-makers) in a political contextDemonstrated experience in developing a vision and influencing others – winning and maintaining support for your ideasExperience in applied research aimed at impacting policy and practiceExperience working in a research-intensive organisationSound judgment working on sensitive topics, often with senior members of other organisations, with the ability to know when to act on your initiative and when to seek advice

How to Apply

Candidates can apply via email to admin@cpd.org.au by 9.00am AEST on Monday 29 November 2021.

Applications must include:

a cover letter (describing the applicant’s interest and suitability against this job description);a short CV; anda sample of writing for a general audience.

We aim to hold interviews in early December. Before a final list of candidates is interviewed.

The Centre for Policy Development is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applicants of all backgrounds, cultures, genders, abilities and experiences to apply.

 

You can also download the position description as a PDF here.

 

The post CPD is hiring a Climate Lead appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

CPD’s Upcoming Public Forum: Climate, Capital Markets and Global Governance

On behalf of the Climate & Recovery Initiative, the Centre for Policy Development and ClimateWorks Australia are pleased to invite you to participate in a virtual public forum on climate, transition, and global economic recovery.

Join senior leaders from Australia and the United States to explore the latest climate policy developments, their impact on economic strategy and diplomacy, and how Australia’s leading institutions are responding. 

We will be joined by:

Dr Steven Kennedy, Secretary of the Commonwealth TreasuryMs Shemara Wikramanayake, Managing Director and CEO of Macquarie Group andMr John Morton, Climate Counsellor at the United States Treasury

Taking place just days after COP26, we will focus on the challenges and opportunities of managing an economic transition while accelerating investments in adaptation and growth. This is the second public event from the Climate & Recovery Initiative, a partnership between the Centre for Policy Development, ClimateWorks Australia, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), and Pollination. The forum will feature remarks from each guest, followed by a panel discussion moderated by CPD’s CEO, Travers McLeod.

You can register for the event by filling out this Eventbrite registration form.

 

The post CPD’s Upcoming Public Forum: Climate, Capital Markets and Global Governance appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

Annabel Brown at the Regional Refugee Settlement Forum

Program Director Annabel Brown’s closing remarks at the Regional Refugee Settlement Forum on October 12 2021.

Thanks Margaret. It is a great pleasure to be here. I would like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land I am on today. I am coming to you from close to the Birrarung or the Yarra River, in Melbourne, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and to any First Nations people listening today.

I am humbled to have been asked to give some closing reflections and I will do my best to do justice to all of the thoughtful, insightful contributions I have heard throughout the day.

I will start by zooming out with some thoughts about the context we find ourselves in, and what is shaping our lives now. I will then reflect on what we have collectively learned about getting regional settlement right. And I will finish with ideas about the opportunities in front of us.

What’s our context?

The last two years have brought huge disruption to our lives, our societies and economies. The COVID-19 pandemic has been seismic in itself, but for many communities, it has come on top of, and alongside, ongoing crises related to: natural disasters; our changing climate; and civil and political unrest. In Australia, many of our communities were only just starting to recover from the Black Summer of 2019, when COVID hit.

This period of turmoil, and the health and economic shocks, have highlighted the vulnerabilities in our society and inequalities between countries and within them. In Australia we saw clearly the precarious position of people on temporary visas, and how insecure, casualised employment made it much harder to keep yourself and your family healthy and safe.

Also, depending on where we live or the industry we depend on, Australians had a very diverse range of experiences. Melbournians have the dubious honour of being the most locked down people in the world, at about 250 days and counting, while the majority of people living in Perth, my home city, have endured less than 20 days. Businesses and their employees in warehousing and distribution have never been busier, while their friends and family in tourism are struggling to stay afloat. In Queensland for example, employment for tourism and travel advisers fell by 65% in the regions of Mackay, Isaac, and Whitsunday.

Of course, COVID-19 has stemmed the flow of newcomers to Australia. We are forecast to experience a net outflow of migration in 2020-2021, for the first time since the end of World War II. Our humanitarian visa program was halted in March 2020, and although visas have been granted since then, physical resettlement has been almost impossible.

Although net overseas migration could take four years to return to pre-pandemic levels, there has been a net increase in migration into Australia’s regional areas since March 2020, driven by an increasing number of people leaving capital cities, and regional people staying in place. Although, it is worth noting that according to Regional Australia Institute analysis, in March 2021 there were 66,200 job vacancies across regional Australia, the largest number of vacancies since records began in May 2010. This movement of people and the possibilities of work opportunities help us turn our collective attention to what resources, infrastructure and support regional communities need to thrive. I don’t want to underplay those needs in the excitement of the opportunity.

Despite the challenges of the last couple of years, we have also been afforded some gifts. In some ways, despite our different experiences, we have all got to know each other a little better. We have been into each other’s living rooms and home offices via Zoom. We have met each other’s pets, and started many of our conversations and meetings asking about each other’s mental health and discussing how our children are coping with homeschooling. We have an even greater appreciation of our health workers, our teachers and our public servants.

Communities and neighbourhoods have connected and rallied around each other in the crisis. As we heard today, while waiting for new arrivals, the Growing Regions of Welcome (GROW) initiative in the Murray and Riverina regions of New South Wales, and Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA) have focussed over the last eighteen months on building connections and understanding between people and families who were already living within the same community before the pandemic.

These greater connections, the diverse understanding and the empathy we have gained will stand us in good stead as we recover and build forward. And we will come out of this period stronger and more resilient if we confront and attend to the vulnerabilities and inequalities uncovered and exacerbated during COVID, rather than glossing over them. As Aleem Ali reminded us this morning, social cohesion is a key element of the resilience we need to face the shocks of the future.

What have we learned about settlement?

The overarching lesson is that a whole of community, whole of person approach works best for successful settlement, whether that be forever, or for a phase of our life’s journey. First and foremost, personal agency and informed choice are crucial for people to successfully find belonging, peace and hope.

There are many dimensions to successful settlement — from friendship to a livelihood and everything in between — and we are seeing greater value and understanding in the social and emotional dimensions of settlement, over and above the ‘three Es’ of Employment, Education and English.

We have also heard that ‘the right fit’ can be quite a unique mix of factors, including the natural environment, a feeling reminiscent of home, a sense of safety and employment opportunities attuned to skills and ambitions. Therefore, there is great importance in fully engaging our new Australians in a comprehensive pre-settlement decision-making process, as described by Emmaunel Musoni, and in building person-centred, strengths-based approaches to meeting the needs of new settlers, like we’ve seen in the ‘3 E’s to Freedom’ Program in Northern NSW run by Anglicare.

Secondly, a welcoming community who are ready and coordinated matters a lot when supporting refugees to settle in and thrive. Whether the energy and interest comes from a business or industry, a local council or a community organisation, working together on the welcome makes the magic happen.

Working together to assess the strengths and weaknesses in their community and what they need to do to be the most welcoming place they can be, working together on a clearly defined welcoming strategy and plan; and working together to implement that plan and give multifaceted support to the people and families coming to settle.

There are many examples of these approaches across Australia. One example that we heard from David Radford was the effective whole of community approach in Leeton which both: engaged the whole of the rural community, not just a few members; and supported humanitarian migrants in a way that did not single them out as a ‘special group’ but was inclusive of all migrants, local and indigenous groups in the rural community.

We also heard about great examples of corporate partnerships, including for instance in agricultural production in Mount Gambier, and also connections with First Nations communities, including in Armidale and Orange in NSW, for instance.

The last lesson is the importance of the facilitation and brokering of government partners. Personal agency and a strong collaborative community approach are supported significantly by infrastructure, services and good governance. As highlighted by the good work of Welcoming Cities, there is a definitive role for local councils, and there are many examples of them taking up that role, from Toowoomba Queensland, to Wagga Wagga and Leeton in New South Wales and Narracorte in South Australia. Peter Shergold and his team at Multicultural NSW continue to coordinate the State Government’s response to refugee settlement, including GROW, a place-based initiative to resettling refugees in Regional New South Wales. And as Commonwealth Coordinator General Allison Larkins shared this morning, her team has an important coordinating role, and is actively brokering connections between social enterprises, employers, philanthropists, experts, government counterparts to support refugees who, although keen to work, face the greatest barriers to economic participation.

What are the opportunities?

Despite our borders being shut, the reasons for people in our region to flee to the safety and security of Australia have only increased over the last two years – including the worsening crises in Afghanistan and Myanmar. Climate change and the COVID 19 pandemic are exacerbating an already precarious situation for many people on the move.

COVID has not made us more insular though. We are still great believers in immigration and multiculturalism, with 71% of people surveyed by the Scanlon Foundation agree that ‘accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger,’ and 84% of people agreeing that ‘multiculturalism has been good for Australia’, both up from 2019. It was fascinating and heartening to hear the results of research about community attitudes in Armidale since the settlement of the Yazidi refugees there, from the University of New England and Settlement Services Australia.

I see three top opportunities emerging from our current context and what we’ve learned.

First, we can welcome our newest newcomers from Afghanistan. At the beginning of this year, even before the Taliban seized power in August, there were already 2.8 million Afghans displaced as refugees and asylum seekers around the world. This includes people with temporary protection in Indonesia and Australia. There are fears that up to 500,000 more could flee before the end of 2021.

Australia, with our long and deep links to Afghanistan, and our historical success in settlement, can respond generously. We can ensure pathways to safety for as many Afghan people as possible by: making places available in addition to our humanitarian program; giving people who are already here, and in our close neighbours like Indonesia, a permanent home; opening more complementary pathways through family reunification, education, employment and community sponsorship; and by supporting Afghanistan’s neighbours — Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan — to continue to assist people fleeing.

Australia can also ramp up its leadership in the region by actively pursuing responses to the conflict and displacement crisis in Myanmar and Afghanistan, and steering the intergovernmental forum, the Bali Process, to respond effectively to the forced migration challenges of our region. As a community, we can build on everything we’ve learnt, to do a great job at welcoming and successfully settling our newest Australians.

Second, we can capitalise on the growing value and prevalence of people and place-focussed policy and programming. Our collective experience of crisis during the pandemic has also brought with it a realisation that we can move pretty quickly on policy and programming when we need to. And we’ve also flexed our collaboration muscles across government, business and civil society.

As many of our speakers have reminded us, there is a tremendous diversity amongst refugees coming to Australia and the places they will eventually settle and that is now understood more than ever before. Thankfully, we are seeing a newfound appreciation of people- and place-focussed approaches, whereby services and supports are tailored to and wrapped around people and places, according to their needs.

We have seen these developments in our settlement and migration service system, including at all three levels of government.

As we heard from Coordinator General Allison Larkins, her team is looking closely and carefully at the diversity of the people that are settling as well as the diversity of the places they are settling in. They are trying to tailor, for instance, language services so they are more responsive to the needs of new Australians at different stages of their settlement journey. Also, the Community Sponsorship model being trialed by many groups across Australia like Alison’s group in the Huon Valley, is inherently place-based and can be the beginning of tailoring settlement to place, and as Alison pointed out it gives opportunity to tailor to the needs of the individual too.

We have also seen a similar reorientation of employment services with the Commonwealth New Employment Services Model aiming to be more responsive to jobseekers and employers, and the advent, expansion and extension of the Local Jobs Program. State Governments, such as Victoria, are designing and investing in employment services that are more attuned to the needs of different people and places.

There is a significant opportunity to capitalise on this direction in policy and programming and work together on the governance, partnership and coordination approaches and tools needed to make it sing, many of which we’ve heard about today.

Reorientation of large service systems is hard work and there is a fair amount of trial, error and course correction involved. But, it’s also vitally important. That’s where all of us can help, as community groups and organisations, service providers, academics… learning about what’s working and what’s not, feeding up the lessons and experiences from the ground, asking for the flexibility we need. And of course, opportunities like this Forum, to share experiences and learn from each other are incredibly important.

And finally, we can embrace the voice of lived experience.

The greatest opportunity, the greatest hope, lies with the newcomers that come to call Australia home. The people bringing their talents, ideas, skills and resilience to our communities and towns, who, with the right support, can contribute so much. It has been wonderful to hear from Emmanuel, Kwame, Sorgul, Zia and others with lived experience of being refugees today and I am glad to say there now are more and more refugee led organisations and networks to engage.

Embracing the ideas of our newcomers about our collective future, involving them centrally in the decisions that impact their lives, and giving them the space and support to help shape our society, is no doubt the greatest opportunity ahead.

Thank you.

The post Annabel Brown at the Regional Refugee Settlement Forum appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

Australia’s access to capital may be strangled over climate stance

Article by Lucas Baird featuring CPD’s Climate & Recovery Initiative, published in the Australian Financial Review on 22 September 2021.

Australia risks punishment from global markets that will blow out the cost of, and strangle access to, capital for the corporate and government sectors if it keeps failing to develop a viable pathway to mitigate climate risk.

As warnings grow that Australia must accelerate efforts to decarbonise the economy ahead of the UN’s November Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), AustralianSuper chairman Don Russell said the nation was sufficiently well-known but small enough for global players to single out.

“I’ve always said – certainly with my experience working for large American and German financial services companies – that Australia, unfortunately, is a 2 per cent country in the sense of key management time,” Dr Russell said.

“If they’re devoting just 2 per cent of management time to those judgements, we’ve got to be careful people are not getting signals about the country which lead them to make unfortunate and possibly misguided judgements.”

Dr Russell said this was a live risk for Australia, which must “pay careful attention to [its] international reputation, ahead of the summit in Glasgow.

If major international fund managers and sovereign wealth funds are keen to show their green credentials, they could shun government bonds, as the Swedish central bank has done with those issued by Queensland and WA.

On the corporate side, global investors may increasingly shun debt raisings that fund Australian mergers and acquisitions if they reckon it is in a sector that will struggle to transition in a decarbonised economy.

“Australia is sufficiently well-known that people will notice if you want to grandstand on the issue, but we’re not that big that a decision to exclude us from a portfolio has that much impact,” Dr Russell said.

This risk has increasingly garnered attention from the independent think tank Centre for Policy Development and its regular Climate & Recovery Initiative roundtables. In its last meeting in early September, concern emerged that Australia could become the favoured whipping boy of global funds and was largely missing out on the rush for green bonds despite their higher pricing.

A slide deck presented to the meeting says: “There is high demand for green government debt; Germany’s green bonds have a 3-5 basis point premium over matched non-green bonds.”

Dr Russell attended that meeting with other business leaders including Business Council of Australia president Tim Reed.

“Climate change is an economic risk and requires a whole-of-economy response. To keep pace globally and attract the investment we need to recover, Australia needs business, communities and all levels of government to drive this agenda and ambition together,” Mr Reed said.

Senior public servants from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, as well as CSIRO boss David Thodey and Australian Renewable Energy Agency chief Darren Miller also attended.

Regulatory officials from the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority and Australian Securities and Investments Commission were present, as well as the Australian Council of Trade Union president Michele O’Neil.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg acknowledged the rising influence of climate on global capital markets in a podcast with Guardian Australia last month, and said it was now a “material risk” to local businesses.

The Reserve Bank has also been vocal on the risk, with the board noting in its June meeting minutes that climate-related risk had become a big factor in the asset allocation decisions of offshore investors.

“This development could affect the cost and availability of finance for corporations and governments,” the minutes said.

The post Australia’s access to capital may be strangled over climate stance appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

How private management consultants took over the public service

Published in The Saturday Paper on October 9 2021.

By Rick Morton, with comments from CEO Travers McLeod and Board Chair Terry Moran.

On June 7, global management consulting firm McKinsey and Company was awarded a $1.4 million contract by the Department of Employment for work on a cross-government initiative examining labour force gaps in the Australian economy in the wake of Covid-19.

The tender, subject to confidentiality caveats due to the “sensitive nature of the material that will be accessed”, included a research program to examine how different countries are navigating serious skills shortages related to closed borders, vaccination requirements and other pandemic phenomena.

McKinsey was hired to do the skills-gap analysis for the “inter-departmental workforce taskforce” because the public service does not have the people or the skills required to do the job. The need they were assessing was also the hole they were filling.

It is a neat example of a problem that has beleaguered the Australian Public Service during the past decade. The longstanding imposition of a staffing cap and the changing nature of the relationship between ministerial offices and senior public servants has caused a hollowing out of skills and a huge expansion in the number and value of consulting or management advisory contracts used to plug these gaps.

In March last year, the Australian National Audit Office reported that the work outsourced to consultancies reduced in value over the years from 2009 until 2013-14, when the Coalition came to power. From there, it almost doubled to an annual $647 million five years later. When the auditor included all contracts – not just consultancies flagged within government systems – eight private firms alone received more than $1.1 billion in work agreements in 2018-19.

“Australia’s consulting industry (public and private) is the fourth largest in the world,” a new discussion paper released by The Australia Institute’s Bill Browne this week says.

“By population, Australia’s spending on consulting is greater than that of any other country, and about double that of comparable countries like Canada or Sweden.”

It is an opaque and poorly governed space, despite recent attempts to clarify precisely how these external agreements are signed, categorised and reported.

When asked for more detail about the McKinsey contract, the Department of Employment simply said: “Information on the contract awarded to McKinsey is available on AusTender.”

As capability declines, the use of external consultants and contractors increases.

There is, of course, no more detail on AusTender because there is no requirement for it. This is a pattern seen over and over.

The former secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Terry Moran, tells The Saturday Paper outsourcing is just a symptom of the larger problem.

“The reality is that the cause of that outsourcing occurring is, in my view, tied to reductions in departmental staff, contractions to Canberra and a lot of pressure – not just from politicians but from the central agencies – to use microeconomics as the Swiss Army knife of policy.”

“And it is showing. It is showing. I feel sorry for the public servants concerned – and they have got to this point largely because of a lot of change over a decade or more that has been designed to residualise the public service.”

By some counts, between 13,000 and 18,000 bureaucrat jobs have been cut from the civil service since the Coalition came to power in late 2013. As Moran notes, however, the war of attrition has not been uniform across the sector. The Reserve Bank of Australia, for example, now purportedly has the best macro-economists the government has been able to recruit in the past decade. The central agencies – PM&C, Treasury and Finance – also tend to get what they need regarding funding, but the introduction of the average staffing level cap under then minister Mathias Cormann has had a shocking effect on capability.

A former senior public servant in the Finance department told The Saturday Paper the cap was in part inspired by a fear of the impending size of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

“I used to have to tell other departments, ‘Do not even ask for one extra FTE [full-time equivalent] because you will not get it. You are wasting your time,’ ” the former employee says. “But with that, the scope and scale of advice that government wanted year-on-year continued to increase and the complexity of what they wanted continued to increase and particularly at the middle level where you would get that special advice, that was being squeezed and squeezed continually.

“So, where do you get the advice? Literally, which warm body are you going to point to?”

An analysis by The Saturday Paper of contracts published on AusTender between January and October 6 this year – a period covering just over nine months – reveals that $654 million worth of management advisory services, labour hire and consulting work was granted to just six companies: Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, EY, KPMG and PwC. Deloitte alone took $212.3 million. EY won $190.7 million in contracts and KPMG $170.6 million.

None of these calculations include routine auditing or agreements for the preparation of financial statements, often completed by the big accounting firms.

As with the public service itself, the work required of these management giants is wildly variable. Deloitte, for example, was asked to complete a half-million-dollar piece of “strategic planning” regarding proposed reform of the aged-care system. About the same time, it was also signed on a $990,000 deal to “design and implement a warfare workforce” for the Navy Strategic Command. It had six months in which to do it. Later, Deloitte was paid $3.2 million to create a tool that could be used by the Future Fund to self-assess the drought resilience of potential assets in which it might wish to invest.

It has also been briefed to deliver a scoping study on possible locations for a “future regional university centre”, an integrity and governance framework for the spymasters at the Australian Signals Directorate, and work to let the navy know how it might get involved with artificial intelligence.

As a source in another Australian government told The Saturday Paper, there is a lot to be learnt just from piecing together the thousands of contracts won by firms. Take McKinsey’s work on the vaccination rollout – for better or worse – and its input into the secretive whole-of-government taskforce designed to plug yawning gaps in the Covid-normal world.

“We had Nev Power’s gas-led recovery, maybe we’ll also have McKinsey’s economic- and health-led recovery,” the bureaucrat says.

Apart from its role in supporting the maligned vaccine rollout – for a fee of $6.6 million, which quadrupled in value in six months – McKinsey was paid $2.2 million for a three-month project to advise on the business case for onshore manufacturing of mRNA vaccines, the technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna shots. A couple of months later, “The Firm”, as it is known to its staff, took another $2.1 million to provide advice on the “Request for Quotation” process for the same potential vaccine plant.

There is a circular logic about the sheer volume of contracts and procurement processes. Tenders are put out to manage tenders. The outsourcing is itself outsourced. In February, for example, the Department of Defence paid Deloitte $1.8 million for “contract management and procurement support”.

Two months later, as the Department of Defence continued discussions about the replacement or otherwise of the Hawk jet-fighter training system, it commissioned McKinsey to do an “affordability analysis” of the platform, which itself is owned by BAE Systems. For its efforts, McKinsey was paid $700,000 a week. BAE intends to bid for the training project to keep its Hawk system in play. Presumably that proposal will attract another round of due diligence and a further tender for consultants.

As 2017 drew to a close, the parliamentary joint committee of public accounts and audit began an inquiry into the curious world of Australian government contract reporting.

It received bipartisan support at the time, and was chaired by the Liberal senator Dean Smith. Public hearings were held on three occasions in early 2018 and more than 50 submissions were received and published by the committee.

And then it just stopped. The inquiry is officially recorded as “lapsed” and was never resumed. In a statement from the committee in April 2019, Smith simply declared: “The committee has decided not to issue a report.”

Centre for Policy Development chief executive Travers McLeod said the circumstances surrounding the buried report have not been explained.

“I think there is a mystery as to why that report was never released. I presume it was drafted,” he tells The Saturday Paper.

“At that point, both sides [of politics] said that it was a problem … and yet we have now almost had another full parliamentary term and nothing has been done. It’s not like the use of consultants has declined.”

In fact, the situation has worsened.

The late Paul Barratt, former secretary of the Department of Defence, told the parliamentary inquiry that one of the effects of increased privatisation of typical public service functions is monopolisation of advice or expertise.

“Many services are characterised by economies of scale in a way that means there will be very few capable suppliers, and one of these might over time win so much of the business that the Commonwealth agency in practice is left with little choice,” he wrote in a submission.

Barratt said a fundamental issue driving the decline of capability and core functions in the bureaucracy is the evolution of the status of departmental heads, or secretaries. This status changed materially in 1984 and again in 1999, with only minor revisions since.

“The point of all this is that over the period 1984 to 1999 we moved from a situation where there was a single point of accountability, with the requisite standing and powers, for everything that happened under the minister’s purview, to a situation in which policy formulation, implementation, service delivery, and even organisational design and organisational effectiveness, are a highly contested space,” he wrote in February 2018.

“The contemporary APS Department Secretary is a person with ambiguously defined ‘roles’ and ‘responsibilities’ under the Public Service Act, who, notwithstanding being defined as the ‘accountable authority’ under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act, is obliged to compete with a shifting population of advisers and consultancy marketers peddling their wares.”

Frank and fearless advice, as was expected from the civil servants, has been diminished ever since. The former Finance employee says watching this slide in quality was demoralising.

“When I saw the way the SES [senior executive service] level behaved, I was like, ‘Wow, you think you’re on their [the government] team,’ ” the former employee said. “And that completely skews the advice because you won’t tell them [ministers] things that they do not want to hear and you will actively try and shoehorn whatever thing that they want into whatever solution you are trying to deliver.”

Moran, who as secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet wrote a review on this particular problem, titled “Ahead of the Game”, tells The Saturday Paper that his document “tried to crystallise the role of the secretary”.

“And that was then translated into changes in the act. But it hasn’t had the effects that I had hoped it would.”

The result of this, according to others involved in the review, is that repairing the capabilities of the public service would be a decade-long effort. Now, of course, Australia is witnessing the self-reinforcing nature of the challenge. As capability declines, the use of external consultants and contractors increases. Typically, little of this outside knowledge is retained by the public service, which contributes to the cycle of depletion. Unless this changes, the public services will become more reliant on external advice over time.

Boston Consulting Group, which has been awarded $28 million worth of management or service contracts since January, happened to agree with this diagnosis in its submission to the now defunct parliamentary inquiry.

“Our view is the government should invest in growing the capability of the APS, and it should do so by ensuring that consultants are held accountable for skills and knowledge transfer to build APS capability,” it said in the submission.

“Consulting buyers should be looking to engage consultants who bring unique skills, experience and expertise that complement or enhance those available internally, not as a substitute for core functions that should be done by APS staff.”

The art of business advice – which some tried to turn into a pop science – really took off in the United States following World War II. In the 1980s, firms such as Boston Consulting and McKinsey adopted the prominent “value-based management” approach, which defined almost all organisational solutions through a single lens: maximising shareholder value. The major accounting firms, now known as the Big Four, broadened their own business base about the same time, as the market for accounting and auditing services levelled out.

Today, there is still a distinct flavour between different firms. Political masters or senior public servants often have their preferences. Sometimes it is as simple as choosing a company that they know the minister likes.

“If you had the right name on the report, the exact same thing that you would put up time and time again that would get knocked back would suddenly find more oxygen,” the former Finance Department public servant said.

“So that independent advice, in inverted commas, is the really strong rationale because the relationship with the public service in this government is completely different.”

Others who have worked directly with the top-tier consulting firms say some are better than others. By at least one informed account, Boston Consulting Group did a particularly good job of making sure stakeholder views are included in the work it does for government.

“McKinsey didn’t. And that is the main difference between the two,” the former high-level public servant tells The Saturday Paper.

Within months of the abandoned parliamentary inquiry, the David Thodey review of the Australian Public Service, commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull, was released. It sounded a dire warning about the consequences of the current advice ecosystem.

“The greatest concern has focused on the hollowing out of strategic policy skills – the ability to understand the forces at play in the world, what is needed to position the nation to meet challenges and opportunities, and to develop, analyse and provide incisive advice to the government,” it says. “This has come through in consultations, submissions and past reviews. Research undertaken for this review also states: ’Ministers are not alone in expressing concern about the public service’s policymaking capacity … scholars and practitioners alike have raised serious questions (and doubts) about the APS’s capacity to support policy decision-making.”

An illuminating example of this crisis is the sheer preponderance of contracts awarded in the past nine months to firms for advice, planning and implementation work regarding aged care.

This wealth of contracting happened after the release of an eight-volume final report by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Some of the recommendations will require detailed work, no doubt, but it is curious that after such a major report the Department of Health would require a $451,000 piece of work from Boston Consulting Group to “provide options and findings to enhance aged-care governance”.

After all, aged-care governance is core business for the Commonwealth.

Thodey noted in his review that caps on staffing levels in the APS have made it “difficult for agency heads to retain some functions or to maintain them at the same size and strength as previous years”.

The review says: “Some agencies reported that the caps have made it difficult to maintain long-term strategic policy functions, which has led to a divestment in analytical capability.

“While the caps have undoubtedly achieved efficiencies across the service as intended, they now risk the unintended consequence of reducing capability across the service.”

The NDIS, which was designed with about 10,000 permanent employees in mind, has less than half of that number, after a decision by then minister Mitch Fifield to devolve core functions of the scheme to a medley of non-profits and other providers.

An outcome of this has been the wildly inconsistent planning and delivery decisions touted as the reason to introduce the now abandoned independent assessments.

Nevertheless, new contact information reported by the scheme agency shows it still paid almost $3 million to two companies running the doomed pilots in the past financial year.

The National Disability Insurance Agency also spent $190 million on labour hire, temporary personnel or “recruitment support”; a further $97 million to its outsourced delivery partners; and $30 million on the privatised call centre run by Serco.

According to The Australia Institute, that kind of cash could hire about 3000 public servants. The $1.1 billion spent on the top-tier contracts in 2018-19 “could instead employ an additional 12,000 public servants, which would allow the skills and knowledge to be brought within the public service”.

In the case of the NDIS, the festival of outsourcing has created a bolt-on system of employees, planners, early intervention providers and co-ordinators operating completely out-of-synch with the central agency. Even the second most powerful person at the NDIA, scheme actuary Sarah Johnson, a PwC alumna, is and has always been a contractor.

Sometimes, however, the clearest way of communicating the gutting of the public service in Australia is to use its own words.

In May, the Department of Defence awarded a $178,000 contract to KPMG for a fairly straightforward mission: to develop a strategic narrative for the armed forces.

The reason this consultancy was awarded in the first place? “Skills currently unavailable within the agency.”

The post How private management consultants took over the public service appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

Virtual Workshop on Access to Education for Refugee and Migrant Children | 9 September 2021

In September 2021 the Secretariat of the Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration (ADFM) was pleased to co-convene a virtual workshop with the International Detention Coalition (IDC), focused on access to education for refugee and migrant. This is the latest event as part of the ongoing Regional Peer-Learning Platform and Program of Learning and Action on Alternatives to Detention of Children.

Materials

 

The focus of the workshop was on the benefits to both society and the individual of allowing access to education for refugee and migrant children as part of community based alternatives to child detention. Although participating countries all have unique national contexts, the discussions found there remain many opportunities to learn from each other.

At the virtual workshop, around 50 participants came from operational and policy agencies in governments in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Thailand, as well as national and international civil society groups.

During open discussion, some of the benefits of education access exchanged included lifting socially excluded children out of poverty and into society, narrowing the gender gap for girls and women. For displaced children, education is not only vital for their own futures, but also the communities in which they live, bringing greater cohesion and inter-cultural understanding. If children are accessing education they and their family are more likely to learn the local language, contribute to productive society, and it also reduces their vulnerability to human trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

The Peer-Learning Platform aims to provide space for practical discussion about what approaches have been effective, where challenges have been overcome and what more support could be required. This workshop follows on from a successful in person roundtable in November 2019 in Thailand, and a subsequent virtual roundtable on mainstreaming child protection, held in December 2020, and on case management approaches, in May 2021.

Organisers welcomed participants from a number of Education Ministries to the session, all of whom were attending for the first time, and brought a great deal of knowledge and relevant perspectives to the discussion. We look forward to continuing to build the Regional Peer-Learning Platform over the coming months.

 

Key documents and related reading

Agenda and Participant List

Event Summary

Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration

Regional Roundtable on Alternatives to Child Detention | 21-22 Nov 2019 | Bangkok

 

The post Virtual Workshop on Access to Education for Refugee and Migrant Children | 9 September 2021 appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

Travers McLeod and Toby Phillips: Time to respond to the climate for investment

A shorter version of this op-ed was published in The Australian on 29 September 2021.

While Scott Morrison met with Quad leaders at the White House last week in the wake of the AUKUS submarine announcement, his Treasurer spoke to industry leaders in Australia about another “structural and systemic shift” – climate change.

In his speech to the Australian Industry Group, Josh Frydenberg belatedly but importantly echoed the message over several years from Treasury’s partners in Australia’s Council of Financial Regulators – APRA in 2017, ASIC in 2018 and the Reserve Bank in 2019.

Frydenberg’s acknowledgment of “structural” shifts reflects an understanding that Australia must adapt to systemic forces reshaping security, economics and trade that Australia cannot control. The Prime Minister gets this too. In August, he said he was “very aware of the significant changes that are happening in the global economy” due to climate change and that “financiers are already making decisions regardless of governments”.

Yet government actions have belied the logic of the Prime Minister’s words.

Earlier this month, for example, we learned Australia forced Britain to remove climate clauses from the draft UK-Australia trade agreement, embarrassing Boris Johnson as he tries to rally the world around the Glasgow climate summit in November. How much political capital did that cost? And what other goals – such as better deals for Australian exporters – did our negotiators leave on the table to secure a “win” by downplaying climate?

Climate change is the most potent force re-shaping the nation’s future. Beyond huge environmental threats in a land of droughts and flooding rains, Australia has an export-oriented economy heavily reliant on foreign investment. If we fail to join with the rest of the world in committing to rapid cuts in emissions, we will be starved of markets and capital.

Most of Australia’s top trading partners (over 80 per cent by export volume) have already committed to net zero by the middle of the century. Over half of the ASX100 companies have made net zero emissions pledges.

As the international focus on climate intensifies ahead of the G20 meeting next month and then Glasgow, the major players on the world stage will want clearer national targets and timelines. Currently, Australia’s national target is “net zero as soon as possible, and preferably by 2050”. This wouldn’t pass the pub test in Parramatta or the Pilbara. There are signs – including in the Joint Statement from Quad leaders — that Australia will shift to a net zero by 2050 target before going to Glasgow, and lift our 2030 ambition, despite deep resistance from some quarters of his government. Let’s hope so, because otherwise Australia will be at a grave disadvantage.

Global investors expect Australia to act on climate change. Sweden’s central bank has already divested from some Australian state government bonds, and other commercial investors are putting our sovereign debt on notice. Australia is a small enough player for investment managers to drop us, without significant impact on their portfolios.

Some of this may be performative, but even if investors are using Australia to grandstand, substantive concerns sit just below the surface. Any serious analysis of future trends predicts a massive drop in demand for key Australian exports – investors know this, and without credible transition planning, Australian firms will find it harder to attract global capital.

The Reserve Bank Board minutes in June said “developments globally relating to the management and regulation of climate-related risk had become increasingly prominent in the asset allocation decisions of international investors”. The RBA said this could impact “the cost and availability of finance for corporations and governments”. They also said the growing influence of sustainable finance frameworks could “have an important bearing on the cost and availability of financing the transition to low carbon emissions for Australia”.

With AUKUS, the Prime Minister was able to say the strategic reality demanded a change in action — even at significant cost to our relationship with France, and the rest of the EU. Agree with it or not, the submarine decision is a response to structural forces re-shaping the world over the long term. While the diplomacy and narrative could have been much better managed — not just in relation to France but also with close neighbours in the Indo Pacific — it’s clear that Morrison is seeking to shore up Australia’s position relative to a rising China.

The challenge of decarbonising the economy is of equal magnitude and requires an equivalent bold response. We need to be fleet footed.

Unless we ratchet up our ambition, the negative impacts will multiply, increasing the cost of capital, reducing access to finance, and diminishing Australia’s economic competitiveness.

Tackling climate change is about creating a new economy for all Australians, protecting the planet and making our communities safer from catastrophic weather events.

Boris Johnson said last week that in the future, “the only great powers will be green powers”. That same logic applies to successful middle powers. The sooner Australia becomes one, the better.

Travers McLeod is CEO and Toby Phillips is a Program Director at the Centre for Policy Development, which co-convenes the Climate & Recovery Initiative

The post Travers McLeod and Toby Phillips: Time to respond to the climate for investment appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

Sixth Climate & Recovery Initiative stakeholder roundtable

The Climate and Recovery Initiative’s sixth roundtable, held on Thursday 9 September 2021, captured a sense of urgency and momentum towards coordinated and ambitious action on climate change. Prominent leaders from government, business, and civil society alike agreed that things are moving fast toward COP26, and will continue accelerating beyond. Global climate action has reached a tipping point, and Australia will need coordinated policies and action to thrive during this transition.

Established in May 2020, the Climate and Recovery Initiative aims to work collaboratively to identify the best ideas for aligning Australia’s economic recovery from the pandemic with a transition towards a net zero emissions economy. Today, eighteen months later, the initiative continues to focus on connecting important discussions on economic reform and global climate transition, as well as making this a reality in Australia. 

Over the first five roundtables, the group scoped key priorities and opportunities for action in the leadup to COP26. In this sixth roundtable, in September 2021, participants turned their attention to recent global developments over 2021, as well as important issues where Australia can make progress domestically, including Renewable Energy Industrial Precincts (REIPs) and using procurement as a lever to drive low-carbon business models. 

The group considered the impact of international climate action on Australia, with Dr Olivia Gippner from the European Commission vice presidency speaking about recent developments in the EU, including the European Commission’s proposal of a tariff on high-carbon imports: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Such proposals, as part of wide-sweeping decarbonisation plans, will change the global economics of trade. This is one of several ways that climate policy is becoming intertwined with global finance. The group discussed how Australia’s status as a global outlier is putting pressure on the cost of capital. 

The roundtable then turned its attention to REIPs and procurement as key opportunities for decarbonisation, with the group breaking into two parallel discussions. In the procurement session, we heard from members of the business community at the frontier of thinking and adapting procurement policies – using their buying power as a leverage point to drive decarbonisation across the supply chain. There was significant enthusiasm from a range of participants to collaborate further on this issue. 

 

The other parallel discussion focussed on the opportunity of connecting energy-intensive industrial businesses to new renewable energy generation – this was framed by recent analysis from Beyond Zero Emissions and CPD. The discussion identified the barriers to this kind of regional transition – from infrastructure regulation to coalition building – pinpointing exactly where governments could intervene. There was optimism that coordinated action could see some of the locations that Beyond Zero Emissions have identified as ideal precincts thrive.

 

At the conclusion of the discussion, the group looked at COP26 and beyond. COP26 should be viewed as an accelerant of climate action rather than an endpoint. This year’s COP meeting is the 5-year review of the Paris agreement (although it is being held a year late due to Covid-19), and attention will likely turn from long-term commitments to short-term action as the global economy transforms over the next 5 years. The pace of international action is picking up.

Further information on the roundtable, including an agenda, participants and discussion points is available in the meeting pack below.

Key Documents   Roundtable Six Meeting Pack                Beyond Zero Emissions REIPs Slides 

 

 

Related ReadingBackground on the Climate & Recovery InitiativeCPD’s materials on directors’ duties, climate risk and net zeroOp-ed by Patrick Suckling, Senior Partner at Pollination, “Why not aim for gold in beating climate change, too?” in the Canberra Times. Swings and Roundabouts (report from Australian Industry Group on carbon border adjustments)Renewable Energy Industrial Precincts: Economic Analysis (report from Beyond Zero Emissions)Business, unions unveil green nation-building plan, Australian Financial Review, 28 September 2020Global climate action will reshape Australia’s trade, The Australian Financial Review, Toby Phillips, February 2021 2021 NSW Intergenerational Report and climate risk background paper

 

The post Sixth Climate & Recovery Initiative stakeholder roundtable appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.