Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to start off by making a statement that I assume those on the opposition benches will refute, that they will disagree with. Over the last nine to 10 years, the coalition government diminished the important role of our Public Service. What I mean by that is that the Australian Public Service—and this is factual; I don't know if they can refute this—became far too reliant on contractors and consultants. We were simply outsourcing our policy and our policy development work. The workforce also was being casualised. There was a lack of interest in investing in and nurturing our public servants. Again, this is a truism: the Public Service is far too critical to have been distorted and changed in this way. Our Public Service is where we, in government, receive frank and fearless advice. That's a critical function of our democracy. In recent years, as we worked through the pandemic, natural disasters, increasingly economic instability, we've seen how important it is to have a public service that works in unity and acts swiftly.

We've also learned how important public trust is. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 41 per cent of Australians trust governments to do the right thing. That's not good enough, and I think the opposition would agree with that. This government, the Albanese government, is all about enhancing our transparency and our accountability. In this case, we're being more open about the state of the Public Service, and we'll begin to help build up the community and public trust again in the Public Service and therefore in our government.

I was a public servant. So there's no conflict of interest in my speech, I was a public servant; I still am, as a member of parliament. We all are. But I was a public servant in the Public Service for a number of years, so I know how important the work of the Public Service is. We really couldn't function if we didn't have public servants. The vast, vast majority do fantastic work. So much of our everyday lives and the lives of Australians are intertwined with the functions that the Public Service deliver and the policy work that they develop. Whether it's getting your tax return, receiving your Medicare rebate or checking for paid parental leave on myGov, these are all Public Service functions, and they're critical to our day-to-day lives.

Of course, there are healthy goals of a high standard in the Public Service. I remember when I was at DFAT for a period there was a view that we were much better than Treasury and all the other departments! And I'm sure Treasury would have thought they were the better public servants. But all of us were striving to provide quality advice and quality policy, to do our best to the highest possible standard in providing that frank and fearless advice. Of course, the APS, the Australian Public Service, contributes to our national interest in that critical way. It's integral to our national policy development. It's the driving engine room. It churns out the ideas, the policies and the priorities that should be considered by the government of the day.

The Public Service Amendment Bill 2023 is a key part of the Albanese government's APS reform agenda. It's an agenda that acknowledges the need for ambitious reform of the APS. That's why today I'm speaking in support of this bill, because I believe we do need to reform and rebuild the APS. These reforms are being introduced to help us start that process. This will help us reform and improve our Public Service after years of neglect and years of diminishment under the previous government. It will help us, of course, increase the numbers of the Australian Public Service, but that is just one part of it. It will help us build trust in government and the Public Service and the work that they do.

There has been a fair bit of media about outside consultants recently. They do have an important role to play, don't get me wrong. There are certain policy areas and other areas of expertise where outside consultants can play a very important role in providing value-add to the work of the Public Service. There is no doubt about that. But it is, I think, quite ridiculous when everything starts to get outsourced—pretty much every function—to consultants, and the work of those Public Servants is completely diminished. We don't need to look far to see why this may be a problem. We've seen the recent PwC case, and other cases as well, highlighting risks around confidentiality and conflicts of interest. It's also not smart from a budget perspective, because in Australia the big four consulting firms increased their work, or the costs into the budget, by 400 per cent between 2012 and 2022 period. It's not a coincidence when it comes to aligning those years with the coalition being in government.

The diminishment of the departments first started, I think, even earlier than that, when there were changes made during the Howard years around contracting senior public servants at a high level—deputy secretary and secretary—to two or three year contracts. I'm a bit old-fashioned. I know the US system is quite different to ours. When there is a change of administration there is a turnover from probably assistant secretary or first assistant secretary above across all the systems of the US government. They are clearly called political appointments; they are Republican or Democrat party appointments to those senior positions. That's how they do it. Our system, based on the Westminster system, has had a tradition of a public service that is frank and fearless and non-partisan: frank and fearless in their advice and non-partisan in their posture, regardless of who holds the Treasury benches, the government benches. The Howard era was where we started to see some of the diminishment occur—that non-partisan independence that we value start to be chipped away slightly.

This bill amends the Public Service Act 1999 to enable transformational change. It supports the APS to best serve the Australian government, the parliament and the Australian public. The proposed amendments were recommendations from the 2019 Independent Review Of The Australian Public Service, the Thodey review, and support the intent of that review. The review established that the APS did not have a unified purpose, was too focused internally and lost capability in critical areas. This bill does a few things. It strengthens the core purpose and value of the APS, builds the capacity and expertise of the APS and supports good governance. We will be introducing a new APS value of stewardship, which all APS employees much maintain. It will ensure the APS purpose statement will be reviewed every five years and will have the Secretaries Board oversee the development of this. We will also ensure all agency heads uphold and promote the new APS purpose statement. This is in addition to the APS values and employment principles. Having a purpose statement provides a common foundation for collaboration, provides a shared sense of purpose and encourages a 'one APS' way of working. In other words, in short: break down the silos between the departments.

Finally, we will strengthen provisions within the act to ensure that ministers cannot direct agency heads on individual APS staffing decisions. The new wording and language will be stronger, so it is clear that the onus is on ministers not to direct an agency head. We will do this to ensure the APS can continue working in an apolitical way and to enforce a culture of impartiality in the Public Service. This creates clear limits on inappropriate involvement by ministers in APS employment matters and ensures integrity in the Public Service.

Integrity is very important to this government. These reforms feed into our broader work with the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which will work across government to introduce corruption measures, improve protections for whistleblowers and establish a code of conduct for ministers and staff. Strengthening the core purpose and values of the APS is critically important. The APS is complex. It's made up of dozens of departments and agencies, and these reforms will help the APS to operate in a more integrated way.

We will complete independent capability reviews every five years for each department of state, Services Australia and the Australian Taxation Office. These reviews will assess strengths, identify areas for improvement and create reports and action plans to respond to findings. These reports will be released publicly because the Albanese government feels strongly about the importance of transparency. We will also ask the Secretaries Board to commission long-term insight reports to assess medium- and long-term trends as well as risks and opportunities facing Australia in the policy space. This also provides the APS with an opportunity to engage with academics, experts and the broader Australian community on long-term policy challenges facing our country.

Collaboration and partnerships are key to tackling long-term policy challenges. Reforms such as the APS Academy are already helping to boost capacity across the service. These reforms help the APS build ongoing capability and expertise in staff. This will ensure the Public Service continues to manage modern policy and service solutions in the long term. The APS was too reliant on consultants; we've established that. This government is working to develop an in-house consulting model for the APS to strengthen its core capacity and functions, giving it more of the flexibility that's needed within the Public Service.

There is so much expertise within the APS, and we need to create the opportunities to better utilise the expertise of the wonderful staff that work so hard in our Public Service. We want to ensure that agencies' APS Employee Census results are published, in addition to action plans. This is information, through data collection, about the attitudes and opinions of APS employees. It provides us with an opportunity to hear from employees and allows them to share their experiences. This will foster a sense of accountability and ownership over the mission we're all working towards, which is to make good policy for Australia, and encourage continual improvement within our agencies. We want to ensure workplaces in our country are inclusive and respectful, and we need to model this within the APS.

There will also be measures introduced by agency heads to allow employees to make decisions at the lowest appropriate classification for those decisions—we don't need unnecessary hierarchies—and this will reduce bureaucratic bottlenecks and help with staff professional development. We want to support APS employees to feel empowered, to feel heard, to feel like they belong and the work they do is valued.

We've listened to others, and we're trying to ensure that the APS can operate in the best way possible to serve the Australian government, parliament and public. This has been a collaborative process. We've worked with employees, representative groups, agencies, experts, the public and interested parties, including the Community and Public Sector Union. This bill supports the broader Albanese-government APS reform agenda, which aims to ensure the APS stands for integrity in all that it does, puts people and business at the heart of its policy and its services, is a model employer and has the capability to do its job well.

The broader goal of this bill and the government's broader APS reforms is to restore public trust and faith in the government and its institutions. The Thodey review called for a Public Service that is trusted, future fit, responsive and agile to meet the changing needs of government and community. The view of public servants by Australians across the country—some of the cliches and stereotypes about public servants clocking off at five to five might have been true back in the sixties or seventies, but I know for sure that, even when I was in the Public Service, people were working long hours and doing what they needed to do to get the work done and the advice to the government of the day. Their work was quality work, and their commitment should not be questioned.

This bill delivers on the key recommendations of the Thodey review—being future fit, being even better than it is today, breaking down the silos. We need an APS that acts with agility, with a common purpose and with the existing values of impartiality, commitment to the service it provides, accountability, respect and ethics, and it will only be further strengthened by these reforms. It is critical to this government, to our parliament and to our community that we have an apolitical impartial approach to the work that the APS does. And it is important that APS employment remains apolitical and merit based. There is no place for political interference within our Public Service. These reforms will strengthen transparency, prevent political interference and enable the APS to do what it does best—provide quality policy advice to the government. It will allow the APS to do what it does best—give us frank and fearless advice and help us as a government to help the community to have better lives.

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