Let’s start with a public health announcement. Sometimes laughing is better than banging your head on a desk. I confess I chuckled after picking up the Australian on Thursday and reading that Scott Morrison wanted the federal bureaucracy to become more responsive to better serve the quiet Australians.
Just in case you missed it, and you may well have, Canberra’s most senior public servants had already been treated to a very similar homily shortly after the Coalition won the election in May.
The prime minister used one of his early picture opportunities to engage in some vigorous-sounding talk about congestion-busting in the bureaucracy, and setting clear performance targets – the clear instruction being to get your service delivery to the public right, and crack on with implementing our agenda.
I wondered at the time whether any of the senior officials lined up for their public remonstrance had the temerity to ask Morrison, once the summoned television cameras had left the cabinet suite: “Well, what agenda are we implementing prime minister? Did you happen to bring it with you?”
I suspect they were far too polite to name check the elephant in the room.
In any case, my purpose here is not to be gratuitous, because it is completely reasonable for a prime minister to have high expectations of his officials, and it’s also reasonable for us all to ask whether the federal bureaucracy remains fit for purpose in the digital age, which will doubtless be considered in a forthcoming review headed by former Telstra chief David Thodey.
The purpose in beginning with Morrison and his finger-wagging at the mandarins is to work through some of the basic contrasts of the week. Having passed the income tax cuts in the last sitting period, the new parliamentary week from Morrison’s perspective was supposed to be a simple and satisfying exercise. Let’s call the objective, “heads we win, tails we win”.
The business of the week was drought assistance, a national security bill, and a union bill. Labor would either oppose the measures, and be castigated as useless and possibly dangerous in their obstruction, or it would support the bills, and be cast as weak for bowing to the government’s agenda.
It was wedge week, in other words. We were supposed to be back to the comforting simplicity of the election campaign: “look at those bozos” – but with less time on the Townsville Strand declaring if you vote for Bill Shorten you’ll get Bill Shorten.
So thinking through our contrasts, we had Morrison’s muscular “get on with it shiny bums” rhetoric to the public servants. Playing alongside that we had back to the future in the parliament.
In the parliamentary theatre, Morrison wants to point the finger at Labor to buy himself time to work out what he wants to do substantively for the coming term (or, more pertinently, make a calculation about how much he can do, given he didn’t seek a mandate from voters to do very much).
As getting-through-the-day strategies go, this is logical enough. Sadly for Morrison, Operation Whack Out the Wedge encountered a couple of crosswinds.
One was Angus Taylor, and the eminently reasonable questions that won’t go away about the energy minister’s meetings with officials on endangered grasslands, and the possible intersection with his farming interests. The other inconvenience was the ideas boom under way in his own ranks.
Coalition MPs are deeply grateful to find themselves still in government. Most of them didn’t expect to be. But given Morrison’s self-professed 18 May miracle has conferred power and opportunity, a number of them don’t want to waste it. Government MPs have policy ideas, and they want to be able to pursue them.
That basic dynamic explains the internal breakouts about superannuation, Newstart and nuclear power.
But the ideas boom (fuelled in part by the onset of maiden speech season) met an immovable object in this week’s Coalition party room, when Morrison advised colleagues to be good boys and girls, and work on their ideas inside party processes, rather than treat political life as a rolling seminar.
Several MPs were pretty miffed with this feedback for a couple of reasons. The first was that some of the ideas brokers and fellow travellers see other colleagues going free range without much apparent blowback. In fact, sometimes the free-rangers are rewarded for allegedly bad behaviour if they need to be accommodated or neutralised for whatever reason. Call this the default perversity of public life.
The second element is an underlying current of frustration that has bubbled away inside the government for a long time. I noted a couple of Saturdays ago the vacancy of the Coalition’s policy agenda over the past couple of terms has been largely concealed from public view, hidden in plain sight, in part because Labor has been prepared to style itself as a government in exile – constructing a program, conducting substantial policy debates.
It’s a tough report card perhaps, but a fair one given the record since 2013, to observe that the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison governments have lurched between bouts of regicide and managerialism without facing much criticism for their collective lack of imagination as policymakers and purveyors of serious reform.
Similar views get expressed privately within the government: a pressing sense that the Coalition is in power, but both time and opportunity are being wasted.
So, to put it simply, the current tensions are about a prime minister wanting time and space to chart his own course, and a group of colleagues who know that three-year parliamentary terms are short, and building a public constituency to do something hard takes time. Australia is not standing still, waiting patiently for the Coalition to find sufficient internal equilibrium to be able to move forward.
It’s also moot, of course, whether the various ideas doing the rounds are good ones. I can’t fathom why Liberals scratch away relentlessly at superannuation, or why Liberals and Nationals viscerally opposed to carbon pricing would want to reopen a nuclear energy debate, given that’s where that debate inexorably leads. But as the prime minister is fond of saying, you’ve got to have a go to get a go.
Given we started with the public servants, I’m inclined to hand the last word to Martin Parkinson, who confirmed this week he would finish up as the secretary of Morrison’s department (the event that triggered round two of the public schooling of public servants).
The outgoing secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, who has served a Labor government at war with itself and a Liberal government at war with itself – a grim spectacle chewing up more than a decade of his public service – noted that Australia was falling behind in terms of global productivity.
Parkinson has an impeccable poker face, so perhaps it’s just me who heard a droll little aside when he observed neutrally that “for whatever reason”, Australia’s productivity performance is just not keeping up.
Hmm, I don’t know. Can anyone think what that reason might be? Might we have a stab? Could it be that officials have spent a decade or so working up policies that get legislated and scrapped, or binned before they can even be legislated as a consequence of the revolving door of prime ministers and culture war supplanting facts and evidence – the legacy of Australia’s deranged dance of hyper-partisanship? Could it be that?
I think Sir Humphrey would have approved of the locution.
