Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 94

Staying Ahead of the Game: The World's Best Public Service

Just over a year ago, the Australian Government concluded a major review of the Australian Public Service. Ahead of the Game, the review's final report, contained 28 actions to help create 'the World's best public service'.

One year on, what has changed?

Later this year, CPD hopes to run public workshops to hear how various government agencies are implementing these actions.

CPD intern Rob Harding-Smith has analysed over half of the 182 submissions made to the Moran Review, examining the relationship between concerns and issues raised by public service stakeholders and the 28 recommended actions.

.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

Staying Ahead of the Game: An analysis of submissions to the Moran Review of Australia's Public Service and actions emerging on Prezi

View an online summary of Rob's analysis here.

Our Public Service Research Program

The CPD Public Service Program aims to develop a robust knowledge base about the state of the public service: its funding and capacity; performance in delivering community services; and attitudes toward and expectations of the Australian Public Service. Click here to read more.

Find more ideas and publications on the Australian Public Service in one of our major research programs here.

 

[image error] Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

Ben Eltham | The National Riot Mismanagement Squad

As the media continues to distort the tent embassy protest, the behaviour of Gillard's office is under scrutiny. It's another media debacle for the embattled PM, writes Ben Eltham.

"And that's the real tragedy of the events outside The Lobby on Australia Day. Instead of focussing public debate on the substantive issues of Indigenous disadvantage and the dismal history of dispossession that has marked Australian history — events which began with the arrival of the British on 26 January 1788, but which continued well into recent living memory — the debate has descended into an maze of meaningless tactical tit-for-tat.

It's an indication of how our political system, and the media that covers it, continually fail to grasp the bigger picture when it comes to the issues that confront our nation."

 

Read the full article in New Matilda here.

[image error] Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

Melissa Sweet | Federal govt urged to withdraw all support for private health insurance

In this article, Melissa Sweet promotes John Menadue and Ian McAuley's discussion paper on private health insurance subsidies in Australia. With the government debating whether to introduce means testing on private health insurance, the new report urges the Government to withdraw all support for private health insurance, on equity and efficiency grounds. Given that the government has a stated policy of 'social inclusion', it seems strange that the well-off are able to opt out of sharing their hospital costs with other Australians.

"While 64 percent of Australians live in state and territory capital cities, 74 percent of private hospital beds are in those capital cities. By contrast, the supply of public hospital beds is skewed away from capital cities. Because people in country and remote regions are generally not as well-off as city dwellers, this regional imbalance amplifies inequities already in PHI subsidies. Prosperous urban dwellers are being subsidized by less well-off people in rural and outback Australia."

Read the full article in the Crikey's health blog, Croakey here 

John Menadue and Ian McAuley | Govt proposals on private health insurance don't go far enough

Writing in The Crikey, CPD founder and board member John Menadue and CPD fellow Ian McAuley give their opinion on government proposals to apply a means test to private health insurance subsidies. Menadue and McAuley call for even more action than simply means testing, suggesting that a single national insurer would provide the most efficient and equitable means of sharing our health costs.

"We are not advocating what some may call "socialised medicine". Private hospitals serve an important function: they should be funded by means other than through private Insurance.

Nor are we calling for universal "free" health care — there are many sound arguments in favour of those with means paying more from their own resources, without private or public insurance.

Our main message is that to the extent we choose to share our health care costs, a single national insurer provides the most efficient and equitable means of doing so."

Read the full article on The Crikey here

Follow the link to read Menadue and McAuley's full 18-page discussion paper Private health insurance: High in cost and low in equity

 

Private Health Insurance: High in cost and low in equity

Government proposals to apply a means test to private health insurance subsidies have re-ignited the debate about the role of private insurance.

Download the new CPD discussion paper 'Private Health Insurance: High in cost and low in equity'

In our present system the vast majority of subsidies disproportionately benefit the well-off. Country people with poor access to private hospitals subsidize high-income city dwellers with private hospitals around the corner. Richer people who can afford private health insurance are more likely to purchase it, and they get a disproportionately high subsidy as a result. Meanwhile basic services like dental care are subsidised for Private Health Insurance policy-holders, but barely accessible to people on low incomes.

The proposals have shortcomings, however, because they don't go far enough. They would have hardly any impact on membership of private insurance, they would sustain a separation of private and public hospitals, and they would sustain a social division with one hospital network for the well-off, and another for the other 45 percent of Australians. This division is at odds with the Government's social inclusion policy.

Private health insurance is an expensive and clumsy way to do what the tax system and Medicare do so much better – that is to distribute funds to those who need health care. In itself it is an expensive financial overhead – a $3 billion annual burden on the health care system. Its even greater economic impost is its general impact on the cost of health care. International experience shows that private health insurance buys more expensive health care than tax-funded health insurance, but it doesn't buy better health care.

Nor has the increased uptake of private insurance succeeded in its claimed purpose of easing pressure on private hospitals. That was an impossible task, because while demand has indeed shifted to private hospitals, so too have health care staff. The main result has simply been a re-shuffling of the queues for limited resources, and that re-shuffling has put private insurance membership ahead of clinical needs.

In this discussion paper John Menadue and Ian McAuley explain, in simple terms, why a single national insurer provides the most efficient and equitable way for Australians to share our health care costs.

Download 'Private Health Insurance: High in cost and low in equity'

Ben Eltham | How Gillard Squibbed On Gambling Reform

The public might support pokies reform but powerful vested interests do not. And if folding on the Wilkie deal didn't look bad enough, Craig Thomson threw in some extra sleaze, writes Ben Eltham in New Matilda here.

Ben takes a look at whether poker reform is dead and how our PM got here:

It's a win for the factions and a loss for the Australian community.

The excuse given by the Prime Minister, and gamely trotted out by a series off frontbenchers in her support, is that mandatory pre-commitment for poker machines did not have the support of the House of Representatives, including of the key independents, and would probably have been voted down.

It was a transparently thin argument that unravelled within hours, as commentators and some of the independents themselves asked why the Government didn't put the legislation to the floor of Parliament to find out.

Meanwhile, Andrew Wilkie vented his frustration, ending his ongoing arrangement with the Government (although stopping short of promising to vote against Labor in any no-confidence motion). "The Government has failed to seize the opportunity to enact genuinely meaningful poker machine reform," he wrote in his media release. "This Parliament presents a remarkable opportunity to finally do something about poker machine problem gambling and its devastating social and financial damage cost. But instead the Government took the easy way out."

Wilkie is right. The Gillard Government has squibbed it on gaming machine reform. The issue is popular with the electorate but deeply unpopular with powerful vested interests within our political system. The clubs lobby has poured millions into their anti-reform campaign, and they've succeeded. Score another point for the power of big marketing, at the expense of democracy.

Malcolm Farnsworth put it best today over on the ABC's Drum.

"Is there anyone who seriously believes this is an honest attempt to tackle problem gambling," he asks, "and not an expedient exercise in placating the powerful clubs industry, especially in New South Wales and Queensland?"

If there is, you'd be hard pressed to find them in the media. The reaction to the Gillard Government's backdown on poker machine reform has been stinging. Nearly everyone has agreed with Tony Abbott's assessment of the deal, as a "betrayal" of independent MP Andrew Wilkie.

There have been a few commentators that have begged to differ. Rob Burgess in Business Spectator makes an important point, which is that Gillard and Labor never took poker machine reform to the electorate as a major election policy in 2010. Poker machine reform, he writes, is a bit like the carbon tax: a policy cobbled together by Gillard to win the support of the Greens and independents. As such, Tony Abbott can't logically argue that passing a carbon tax was dishonest, while simultaneously arguing that Gillard should have honoured her promise to Andrew Wilkie.

Continue reading Ben Eltham's article here.

[image error]

Help us fill public debates about refugees and asylum seekers with good ideas not more fear and misinformation – Become an Ideas Sustainer.

Ben Eltham | Uncertain times for the economy and your super

The tides of global macro-economics may finally be aligning against Australia, writes Ben Eltham in ABC's The Drum online.

Superannuation was meant to be a powerful savings tool for working Australians, who would otherwise not save enough for their retirement. Yet, many workers saw their super funds shrink in the last few years. It wasn't meant to be like this. Ben takes a look at the fear in the markets, the global economy & what this means for your super. He comes up with some doomsday scenarios.

Ben Eltham writes:

It's not hard to construct a doomsday scenario in which a Greek or Italian bond default sets off another global credit crunch at roughly the same time as a Chinese real estate implosion causes a hard landing in the Middle Kingdom.

With most of Europe already in recession and America only slowly emerging from one, Australia would be caught with weak domestic demand at the very time our resource exports started to stall. A recession would ensue.

Even if Australia muddles through with below-trend growth, one thing's for sure: Wayne Swan can kiss his budget surplus goodbye. We're going to have get used to more uncertainty, more volatility, less confidence, and less growth.

If I were you, I'd be examining your super portfolio. Perhaps "balanced" is not that balanced after all.

Continue reading Ben's piece in ABC's The Drum here.

[image error]

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

 

Ben Spies-Butcher | Numbers don't back business lobbying

Ben Spies-Butcher writes in The Sydney Morning Herald about the widening gap in wages.

Two years since the changes to the IR legislation, the business lobby has been vocal in their criticisms and claims that Fair Work Australia is driving down productivity, increasing paperwork for employers and driving up wages. But Ben takes a look at the broader trends and asks are we living in the land of the 'Fair Go'? Where is IR policy headed with Fair Work Australia, taxes, wages and the GFC?

Ben writes:

For most of the last century, Australia was one of the most equal countries in the developed world, despite comparatively low taxes. More than most other countries, Australia sought to achieve a "fair go" through wages, rather than welfare. Our governments sought to ensure we had enough to begin with, rather than giving us more at the end.

Since the 1970s, the processes of globalisation and deregulation have placed greater strains on the way Australian governments traditionally achieved equity. While today unemployment is low by international standards, at about 5 per cent, it is higher than at virtually any time between 1950 and 1975. And during the past 30 years the proportion of national income going to workers as wages has consistently fallen – from more than 62 per cent in 1974/5, to 53 per cent in 2010/1 – while the proportion going to business owners in profits rose from 17 to 28 per cent.

Continue reading the article in The Sydney Morning Herald here.

[image error]

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

Eva Cox | More to life and Labor policies than just getting a job

Eva Cox, in Crikey, questions the ALP's recent efforts to halt increases in the Newstart allowance. They believe that the low payments act as an incentive to find work. Eva Cox writes:

If the government thinks penury is an incentive, it fails to understand the difficulties facing the 600,000-plus people dependent on this payment. According to Shorten:

"Participation in the workforce is a priority the Gillard government is passionate about. Work is at the core of our beliefs."

That sounds good when you say it quickly and appeals to the puritan core of prejudices the government often uses to justify such policies. What if the jobs are not there? Can we justify paying so little that even big business is backing a rise in payments? How can the government ignore its own statistics, which show that moving off the dole is not just a matter of will and commitment by the recipients?

Continue reading the article in Crikey here

[image error]

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

Eva Cox | 'Call Me Whatever The Hell You Want'

Feminism, not religion, is at the heart of controversy about Melinda Tankard Reist. Who decides who gets to use the f-word, asks Eva Cox in New Matilda

Melinda Tankard Reist last week threatened legal action against a blogger who alleged that she downplayed her religious affiliations in an interview for Sunday Life magazine. This has prompted an almighty discussion about free speech, religion and feminism.

The issue of Tankard Reist's religious beliefs and whether they are acknowledged is not the real issue here. It is a surrogate argument about who can call themselves a feminist. Tankard Reist's critics are mostly opposed to her claims to be a new-style feminist. They it hard to frame such an argument — so they look for other hooks to hang her on, such as suspect affiliations.

Interesting, the final line in the article that started this interchange stated, "For Tankard Reist's part, she says she's not interested in labels — she just wants people to engage with the substance of what she has to say. 'Call me whatever the hell you want, I don't care," she says. "I believe my work is pro-woman, pro-girl. Just let me get on with it.'"

Why therefore has she taken this action? Since the blog in question isn't heavily trafficked, Reist's lawyer's letter may be part of a strategy to gain publicity rather than suppress comment. Threatening legal action against a blogger who has strong free speech views is likely to attract wider media attention to the blog posting and its subject. As Tankard Reist is herself a blogger, writer, speaker and so on, media coverage is very desirable to raise her profile further.

I'm not inclined to use people's religious affiliations as a basis for judgement but there is an argument for publicising religious beliefs. While adherents of each religion may have many different ways of using their faith, their stated beliefs can connect up dots to create a wider picture. As far as Tankard Reist's public views are concerned, it may allow critics to try to identify underlying sources. It may be that her beliefs do mean that her views fail to meet what I would see as basic feminist criteria

Tankard Reist's views on porn and sexual images suggest that she sees women as needing protection from depictions that may result in wrong assumptions or choices. She taps into anxieties about the status of women in an increasingly commodified world. Her earlier political involvement was anti-abortion and presumably anti-contraception, and her role while working for Brian Harradine ties in with this approach.

Her collection of public priorities can be seen to reflect some puritanical views that are part of feminist history. Women members of the Christian Temperance Union fought for women to get the vote in the hope that women would vote to ban alcohol. However, politics has changed over the past hundred years — and I hoped we had overcome the particularly limited view that the role of women, as God's police, was to keep evil masculinity on the straight and narrow.

The new prominence of Melinda Tankard Reist forms part of a current retro groundswell which derives from current anxieties about the dominance of markets over ethics in the public sphere and the loss of what are seen as community values. This is in evidence in the numbers of women in politics who are pushing conservative social views. These are not Maggie Thatchers or Angela Merkels, hard-headed members of political parties who play it very like men. Rather they are younger, populist women with conservative, anti-choice views on family issues. The Tea Party in the US seems to attract many of these. They do increase the number of women bidding for power; but can also undermine feminist gains by promoting traditionally differentiated gender roles. Is this the feminism we want to encourage?

Feminism, in my view at least, should not use the power of institutions, including the state, to protect women from the right to make up their own minds. Equality must both redress gender biases and redistribute power so we all take on our share of responsibilities as well as rights. Setting up women as needing protection from male-driven sins means denying the role of Eve as the tempting source of knowledge. As an unbeliever, I quote these archetypes to illustrate my objections to some forms of so-called conservative feminism. It is not feminist to infantilise women by removing our right to make the wrong choices.

We need to recognise that all genders have similar capacities to make good and bad choices and need similar conditions in which to make them. While I am no fan of sexploitation, of objectifying and commodifying human beings, I do not see tactics of censorship and banning of particular manifestations as useful. Emphasising women as victims also contributes to gender-based biases in political thinking.

We need to address the current policy machismo in the priorities of our political parties, which emerges as encouraging individual self-interest as against social sharing. Good societies require political culture changes to encourage us all to be socially connected, more cooperative, ethical and caring. This is my feminist push. Campaigns against tasteless porn and crappy T-shirts may seek to protect women, but they fail to address the broader gender biases of market forces. This is the argument we should be having — not nit-picking about perceived religious ties.

First published in New Matilda here

[image error]

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!