Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 97

PUBLIC SERVICE IN THE NEWS | Increased pressure on public service spending

Efficiency divident to be more efficient > An increase in the Public Service Efficienty Divident to 4 per cent.

Unions, Greens condemn public service cuts > Unions and the Greens have been quick to condemn the proposed budget cuts for Commonwealth departments.The Government says the increased efficiency dividend, or savings program, can be achieved without forced redundancies.

Civil Service 'will adapt as needs change', says top civil servant > Top civil servant calls for more heart in policy making, implementation

Guardian Focus podcast: public sector strike >    Unite's Rachael Maskell, Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers Alliance and Tom Clark discuss this week's public sector strike over the reform of pensions. With Hugh Muir

Job cuts planned during critical period > "Decentralisation is just an excuse to cut jobs," he said. "Already, only about 200 of 700 [Office of Water] jobs are Sydney-based but they play a very important function in supporting regional water management by providing many of the high-level science, policy and planning functions."

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

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PUBLIC SERVICE IN THE NEWS | Federal Government increases pressure on public service savings, UK's largest strike in 30 years over cuts to public services

Efficiency divident to be more efficient > An increase in the Public Service Efficienty Divident to 4 per cent.

Unions, Greens condemn public service cuts > Unions and the Greens have been quick to condemn the proposed budget cuts for Commonwealth departments.The Government says the increased efficiency dividend, or savings program, can be achieved without forced redundancies.

Civil Service 'will adapt as needs change', says top civil servant > Top civil servant calls for more heart in policy making, implementation

Guardian Focus podcast: public sector strike >    Unite's Rachael Maskell, Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers Alliance and Tom Clark discuss this week's public sector strike over the reform of pensions. With Hugh Muir

Job cuts planned during critical period > "Decentralisation is just an excuse to cut jobs," he said. "Already, only about 200 of 700 [Office of Water] jobs are Sydney-based but they play a very important function in supporting regional water management by providing many of the high-level science, policy and planning functions."

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

[image error] Help us counter evidence-free attempts to downsize and privatise our public sector – Become an Ideas Sustainer.

Public Service in the News | Federal Government increases pressure on public service savings, UK's largest strike in 30 years over cuts to public services

Efficiency divident to be more efficient > An increase in the Public Service Efficienty Divident to 4 per cent.

Unions, Greens condemn public service cuts > Unions and the Greens have been quick to condemn the proposed budget cuts for Commonwealth departments.The Government says the increased efficiency dividend, or savings program, can be achieved without forced redundancies.

Civil Service 'will adapt as needs change', says top civil servant > Top civil servant calls for more heart in policy making, implementation

Guardian Focus podcast: public sector strike >    Unite's Rachael Maskell, Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers Alliance and Tom Clark discuss this week's public sector strike over the reform of pensions. With Hugh Muir

Job cuts planned during critical period > "Decentralisation is just an excuse to cut jobs," he said. "Already, only about 200 of 700 [Office of Water] jobs are Sydney-based but they play a very important function in supporting regional water management by providing many of the high-level science, policy and planning functions."

 

 

John Menadue | Refugees Arriving by Boat Deserve Equal Rules

After years of locking up asylum seekers who arrive by boat, but allowing those who arrive by air to live in the community while their refugee claims are being processed, the Federal Government has decided to start processing both parties in the same way. Welcomed by the UNHCR, this decision could move away from the toxic controversy that surrounds this issue and possibly lead to a more positive and prosperous outlook for asylum seekers themselves, as well as the Australian community at large.

John Menadue, CPD Board Director and former Secretary of the Department of Immigration in the Fraser Government 1980-1983, writes:

"As a community, we are paranoid about asylum seekers who come by boat. What is important is the merit of their claim for protection, not their mode of arrival.

In treating boat people in the same way as air arrivals, we will be following the policies of almost all major developed countries that have found locking people up will not deter them. The decision by an asylum seeker to flee his or her home country is driven by what is happening in their own country – Afghanistan/Iran/Burma/Sri Lanka. In most cases they would not know about detention in Australia. If they did they would invariably make a calculation that detention in Australia would be more acceptable than the terror they're escaping from."

This article was first published by The Age here…

 

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James Whelan | Hard to Know Where the Axe Will Fall

The public service is a political victim in an economic debate obsessed with racing to a surplus. When Wayne Swan delivered his mini-budget last week, he announced a further 2.5% in cuts to the public sector without any evidence of the impact. At CPD we step to tell our politicians why they must put their axes down, revealing the consequences of the continual squeeze placed on our public services by the 'efficiency dividend'. In uncertain economic times we need a capable public service more than ever.

Governments use the efficiency dividend to cut spending while avoiding political pain writes CPD's James Whelan in The Australian Financial Review. As the Research Director of our Public Services program, James added a voice of reason to an otherwise largely one-sided and evidence-free debate:

 "The efficiency dividend is not an intelligent or evidence-based strategy to motivate innovation, economy and creativity but a blunt instrument that can reduce or compromise the work of public sector agencies. Government reviews of the mechanism in 1994 and 2008 found that it places significant stresses on agencies and recommended that alternative measures be investigated. After over 20 years of being asked to cut an arbitrary percentage of their budgets, few agencies have room for further 'savings' without reducing their core functions"….

If the rollercoaster trend in public service firing and rehiring in the last two decades is repeated, the short-term cost savings will prove costly in the longer term….

The fact is that governments use the efficiency dividend not to increase efficiency but to cut spending while avoiding the political pain of spelling out what those cuts will mean for people who rely on public services. We need strong and capable public services to build Australia's resilience in times of global uncertainty. Instead, Australia's major parties are locked in a race to the bottom."

Read the entire article in The Australian Financial Review, page 63 on 1 December, 2011.

James Whelan | Public Service Race to the Bottom

Labor's mini-budget continues politician's obsession with a surplus. In their race to the bottom, Swan announced a temporary increase to the efficiency dividend from 1.5% to 4%.

CPD's Public Service Reseach Director, James Whelan unpacks this political manouvering and reveals the real consequences of starving our Australian Public Service.

The shaky rationale for increasing the efficiency dividend has received widespread criticism from economists and other commentators. This is not an intelligent or evidence-based strategy to motivate innovation, economy and creativity but a blunt instrument that can reduce or compromise agencies' outputs. After 20 years, few agencies have further room for further cuts without reducing their core functions. Government reviews of the mechanism in 1994 and 2008 found that it places significant stresses on agencies and recommended alternative measures be investigated.

Treasurer Swan this week justified the increase in the efficiency dividend by invoking the bipartisan obsession with a rapid return from a modest deficit to modest surplus. This is now widely recognised as an unhealthy fetish. Australia has a remarkably low level of public debt and a low level of public sector investment. A survey conducted by Essential Media just this month found that more than 70 per cent of Australians support deferring the return to surplus in order to maintain public services. Other surveys during the last 20 years have found strong support for increasing public sector spending, even if it means increasing taxes.

Read the full article on ABC's The Drum here.

Ben Eltham | Inquiry Bursts Gas Bubble

The Senate inquiry into coal seam gas has issued a remarkable rebuke to drillers and revenue-hungry state governments. What's even more striking? All political parties agree it's time to stop, writes Ben Eltham

Read the full article in New Matilda here.

As wildcat booms go, it has been a doozy. Coal seam gas exploration took many years to get underway in Australia, and we came to the party somewhat later than the continental United States. But once the invitations went out, mining companies turned up in their droves, drilling thousands of exploration wells all over inland Australia.

Radio National's Ian Townsend filed a report on the gas rush in mid-2010. It gives a flavour of the excitement in the coal seam export industry at the time. Townsend talked to a rural consultant named George Houen who told him that "people have to realise that we're sitting on probably one of the greatest energy provinces in the world, and between the coal and the coal-seam gas, we have a resource here which is obviously going to be exploited for its value to the country".

A number of energy companies such as Santos and the Queensland Gas Company have announced vast gas export projects worth tens of billions. According to Bond University's Tina Hunter, there are plans to drill over 40,000 wells in Queensland alone over the next five years.

What are they drilling for? Natural gas. Methane, to be precise, a hydrocarbon that is a potent greenhouse gas, but also a valuable source of energy. When burnt in a new combined cycle gas turbine, methane is responsible for about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal, which is why many energy analysts see it as transition fuel on the road to fully renewable electricity generation. Coal sea methane gets its name from its origins, in the vast coal beds that lie underneath much of central Queensland, the Darling Downs and down into New South Wales. Coal mines have long been known to be "gassy"; the trick of coal seam gas is to capture the gas and eventually sell it to generators either in Australia or overseas.

Unfortunately, to get the gas often requires hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". Fracking requires lots of water, and some nasty chemicals. And where this polluted water goes, once injected deep underground, and what effects it will have on vital aquifers, is very much the subject of the current controversy.

It's also the focus of a recent Senate inquiry, chaired by New South Wales Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, on "the impact of mining coal seam gas on the management of the Murray Darling Basin". The inquiry was launched earlier this year, in response to growing community alarm, particularly in rural and farming communities, that has led to the prominent Lock the Gate protest movement.

The interim report was handed down yesterday. It's the most comprehensive so far on the possible environmental effects of coal seam gas mining on groundwater aquifers. The Committee discovered that very little is truly known about the Great Artesian Basin, and the likely impacts of such a widespread drilling program on it. A CSIRO expert who gave evidence to the inquiry told the committee that "the complex movement and interactions of different layers of water can be hard to detect but they have a direct effect on the sustainable use of the resource, such as protecting fresh groundwater from being polluted by nearby saline layers".

The problems of pinning down what the environmental impacts of mining might be are exacerbated by the behaviour of many mining companies, which fall short of "best practice".

The Committee found that "particularly in its early stages there was no shortage of examples of 'cowboy' behaviour by exploration companies". It records "examples of land degradation caused by seepage from extracted water storage ponds, leaking gas pipes, untreated water seeping into watercourses and erosion caused by poorly installed pipelines". It also discovered an embarrassing level of uncertainty among mining companies about their processes.

The report doesn't pull punches. It recommends that coal seam gas exploration be suspended in Queensland and New South Wales "in that part of the Murray-Darling Basin overlying the Great Artesian Basin".

Speaking on Lateline Business last night, Heffernan was at his forthright best. "Obviously I think there's been some serious errors made," he told the ABC's Ticky Fullerton. One of the big issues the report identified was the amount of saline brine that would be generated by all the fracking. Heffernan points out that one proposed drilling field will have 7,000 wells with the potential to generate three million tonnes of salt. It's a dramatic demonstration of the toxic possibilities of the industry.

On the issue of fracking itself, the report sits on the fence, stating that it was "beyond the resources of this Committee" to settle to controversy about just how toxic fracking really is. The report notes that fracking is common practice in the industry and that Geoscience Australia and the CSIRO think it is low risk. However it also recommends that fracking fluids used in wells be kept in separate water-tight storages, or, before being disposed of, "are treated to the highest standards".

Perhaps most alarmingly, it found that only two of the 23 commonly used chemicals in the fracking process were even the subject of the National Industrial Chemical Notification and Assessment Scheme. It recommends that the government provide funds to have all these chemicals properly assessed in the next two years.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the report was that it was tripartisan. There aren't many issues that can unite the Coalition, Labor and the Greens, but coal seam gas exploration appears to be one. The political kaleidoscope has suddenly aligned against coal seam gas exploration; a moratorium of further exploration should logically be the government's next move. The release of this report shows that political action can indeed make a difference: it is difficult to believe the industry would ever have been subject to this much scrutiny, particularly from the conservative side of politics, if farmers had not joined with environmentalists to make the issue impossible for parliamentarians to ignore.

Ultimately, the responsibility for the boom must lie with the states who approved it in the first instance. Most of the Australian states, particularly Queensland, have long prided themselves on a pro-development mentality, seen in this instance by the Queensland Government's policy of "adaptive management", which loosely translates to approving exploration until it can be proven that they are a danger to the environment. It's hard to argue with Bill Heffernan's point that the lure of mining royalties and jobs for the regions has allowed sensible precautions to be put aside in this instance.

As the interim report makes clear, coal seam gas is likely to be an evanescent boom, running out within 15 years, but with the potential to despoil prime agricultural land that could help feed Australian cities for generations.

James Whelan | Government slashes public sector to meet its budget surplus promise

The government will take a knife to the public sector in order to meet its promise of returning the budget to surplus in the next financial year. Releasing the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook today, the government said it would reduce the baby bonus, scrutinize rorts of the living away from home allowance, and postpone some spending measures. But perhaps the greatest burden will be placed on the public sector, which is being asked to find an additional 1.5 billion dollars in savings, on top of significant cuts that had already been announced.

Listen to the full audio story here by producer Tim Roxburgh, 2SER The Wire on Tuesday, 29 November 2011.

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Why Australia DOESN'T need Public Service Cuts | James Whelan

James Whelan – "Most Australians support government exercising an active role in society and the economy…"
With the Federal Government expected to announce major spending cuts as part of its mid-year economic forecast, debate on the size and role of the public sector has reignited.

CPD's James Whelan argues that the community does not support drastic cuts to public services. Below is his response to Institute for Public Affairs Director Julie Novak's call for savage Budget cuts, published in Online Opinion this week.

Let us know what you think by postiing a comment below.

Evidence please, not more  public sector bashing

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is no friend of public servants or of the idea of public service. They champion privatisation and outsourcing, believing instinctively that the private sector cannot help but maximise efficiency. By their definition, the public sector is an inefficient and ineffective way to meet community needs.

IPA research fellow, Julie Novak, launched her latest broadside on the public service in Online Opinion this week.

Her 'cutting the slack' invective echoed another missive earlier this year where she yearned nostalgically for the 'meat axe' to wield 'savage spending cuts' and appropriately decimate the 'new endangered species' of 'pen pushing bureaucrats' (public servants).

Before the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) launched our Public Service research program this year, the IPA enjoyed considerable political space where their anti-government and anti-public service rhetoric was unchallenged.

When Novak described an upward trend in the number of Commonwealth public servants, no-one responded that this upward curve came after years of retrenchments that saw almost one-third of the Australian Public Service gutted.

In this week's baseless vent she again describes the public service as 'fat', contrary to the reality that there are no more public servants now than in 1990 despite 20 years of steady population growth.

In September, CPD released 'The State of the Service: An Alternative Report'. Our analysis of public service staffing and funding trends, public sector reforms and community attitudes toward public servants and services was based on extensive research including twenty years of attitudinal studies, scrutiny of five years' parliamentary and media discourse and included 174 citations.

In contrast to the IPA's casual 'poison pen' approach, we found that Australians have high expectations of public services, consider public servants 'highly committed' and a growing proportion of Australians would cheerfully pay higher taxes to increase the funds available for public services (by OECD standards, we under-invest in the public sector).

Our research highlighted the gap between the IPA's anti-government politics and the attitudes of ordinary Australians.

Novak argues that a speedy return to budget surplus will require increased pressure on agencies through the efficiency dividend and the elimination of some programs. In reality, popular programs have already been cut, and almost 70% of Australians support delaying the return to surplus.

Novak asserts that CPD's report 'bemoans' Australia's successful privatisation record'. The IPA's ideological passion for privatisation is shared by few Australians.

Who benefits from privatisation? An EMC survey conducted just this month found that only 6% of Australians believe that the general public has benefited most: 59% believe that private companies have benefited most. Significantly, Coalition voters share this belief.

Privatisation and outsourcing have been key elements of public sector reforms by both Coalition and Labor governments, contrary to community wishes.

Most Australians support government exercising an active role in society and the economy, strongly prefer public (rather than private) sector agencies to deliver services such as transport, policing, health and education and have much more confidence in public service agencies than major companies.

And no wonder. Just last week, New Matilda learnt through Freedom of Information that Serco, the international service company engaged to operate Australia's immigration detention centres, hires untrained guards, check's detainees' welfare only four times each day and has no obligation for an independent audit.

We welcome this discussion. Decisions about the staffing, funding and role of the public service are decisions about what kind of society we want to live in.

Equally, though, we hope for a rigorous discussion rather than oppositional ranting.

We drew attention to the lack of justification in Joe Hockey's pledge to retrench 12,000 public servants, and will continue to advocate a considered and evidence-based approach to public policy.

 

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Ben Eltham | You Wouldn't Read About It

The Gillard Government's media inquiry has provided the big players with an opportunity to deny there's anything amiss in the industry. That's rank hypocrisy, argues Ben Eltham

First published in New Matilda here.

Here are three riddles.

If a large industry with significant public profile and a demonstrated recent history of legal malpractice tried to pretend that there is essentially nothing wrong with the way it does business, how would the media report that?

If a company that supplied 70 per cent of — I don't know, let's say telecommunications — to Australia's capital cities had recently had several of its parent corporation's key executives arrested in London for a series of major crimes, how would the media report that?

If the major corporate players of the coal seam gas industry were called before a government inquiry and they told that inquiry that there should be absolutely no government regulation of their industry whatsoever — none — how would the media report that?

If that company was News Limited and if that industry was the media, then the response would be to attack the very basis of the inquiry and to confidently assert, not only that nothing has gone wrong in this country, but that any regulation of the media is self-evidently a Bad Thing.

I'm talking about the government's Media Inquiry, of course, and the quite astonishing hypocrisy that has been demonstrated by key sections of the industry it is investigating.

According to outgoing News Limited CEO John Hartigan, "the inquiry has been called by a government that is on the nose with the public and is looking for someone to blame". That sentiment has been echoed throughout the newspapers he has presided over. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, carried this piece of corporate propaganda by Vanda Nelson last week, while also taking the time to cock a snook at Margaret Simons' sandals.

Hartigan went on to attack the very basis of the inquiry, which he claimed rested on "three presumptions" — all of which were false. These are that News Limited hacks phones, that it is biased against the government, and that the Press Council is not working.

Phone hacking? Doesn't happen in Australia. "We do not hack phones and we do not pay bribes," Jonathan Holmes reported him saying. News Limited biased against the Gillard government? Nonsense. If News Limited was really powerful, Australia would be a republic by now, as the company has always campaigned strongly for that. And what bout the Press Council — isn't it a toothless tiger? Not in the slightest, argued Hartigan. "We don't control what it does and we don't have any say in its adjudications on complaints about News Ltd. Our editors publish its adjudications prominently, and absolutely hate it when the umpire finds against them."

So there you go: nothing to see here, folks.

Over at Fairfax, matters have been every bit as sanctimonious, albeit with a more high-minded tone. Fairfax boss Greg Hywood also appeared at the inquiry, apparently aggrieved that he should even have to answer to such an affront. "What problem are we solving here?" he asked the Inquiry's head, Ray Finkelstein QC. "What's the issue current in the media, in the way that we're operating, that needs a solution?" Given that even a first-year cadet (if indeed Fairfax is still employing any) can look up the Inquiry's terms of reference, it was an arrogant response.

Hywood has lately been spruiking a Panglossian perspective of news media. In his recent AN Smith Lecture on journalism at Melbourne University, he claimed that the "the future of journalism has never looked stronger," which must be news to the hundreds of journalists his own company has let go in recent years. The internet, he claimed, is just another technology, and journalism would be able to adapt to whatever format audiences wanted to consume it on.

Given the recent history of the newspaper industry — given the well-known industry gossip that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are already money-losing propositions — it was crazy-brave stuff. I watched Andrew Rossi's documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times this week. At least the high priests of the famous Grey Lady know their business model is threatened. Captain Hywood seems to be celebrating the sighting of icebergs as the possible savior of the Titanic.

The recent public performances of Hywood and Hartigan show that, when it comes to self-delusion and denial, few industries are as richly endowed as the media. If you to read about the Media Inquiry in the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph, you would think it is all just a political scape-goating exercise. If you've followed it in the online media or the ABC, you'd probably just be confused about what it's actually supposed to be doing. Very few reports have attempted to contextualise the Inquiry in terms of its actual terms of reference, or the existing regulatory architecture of Australia's multi-faceted media sector. At the very least, audiences need to be given a brief primer on the dynamic changes being wrought by media convergence — such as those neatly explained by this recent ACMA paper.

Instead, the bulk of the coverage has been fulminating jeremiads against the evil of government regulation. This is disingenuous at best.

The media is an industry with huge power over the lives of ordinary citizens. It currently suffers little in the way of regulation, and yet has a demonstrable record of getting things wrong. In the case of newspapers, the industry is almost completely self-regulated, while in the case of radio and television, it is very lightly regulated. Despite — or perhaps because — of this, the media regularly trespasses on the private lives of ordinary citizens, meddles in the everyday workings of democracy, and peddles untruths, distortions and falsehoods for commercial gain. To argue that the media should be completely free of any fetters of regulation, as many in the media are so fond of, is merely a particularly self-serving form of special pleading, up there with the best efforts of the mining lobby.

I'm quite disappointed with the tenor of the Media Inquiry's questioning, which I think has been rather too accommodating so far. There are some very serious issues that must be grappled with here: particularly the way our democracy curbs and regulates the power of those who control the means of producing symbols in our society. Convergence seems to have hardly been touched on, while the role of television current affairs shows — in Australia, some of the worst abusers of media privileges — have not yet been called to account for their standards.

A final word needs to be said about the usual arguments trotted out about "the public's right to know". Like most cliches, this one contains a grain of truth. But the very fact that so many journalists cling to it as some kind of get-out-of-jail card to justify the worst excesses of the industry shows the impoverished standards of much of what passes for journalism in this country.

Rights, if they are anything, are a complex bundle of legal traditions, ethical standards and social norms. The "right to know", like that other cliché, "speaking truth to power", is something that can never be absolute in pluralistic democracy with a rule of law. It must be balanced against other rights, like the right to not be defamed, and to right to go about your everyday life without a media scrum shadowing your every move. More generally, even in a country that values free speech more highly than our own, such as the United States, there are curbs on the exercise of that right, and there are limits to what can count as speech itself, free or not.

Few in this country want to see Australia move to heavily regulate the media or to control what gets said about the government of the day. But just as rare are the journalists and editors who appear to be genuinely thinking hard about the role of the media in our society, and in particular, how their daily craft can advance the final phrase in the Media Inquiry's terms of reference: "the public interest".

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Read our Media Ownership and Regulation in Australia | DISCUSSION PAPER

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