Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I rise to speak in favour of the Public Service Amendment Bill. We all interact with the Australian Public Service at various points in our lives, whether it be something as basic as visiting a doctor and relying upon all of the systems that the APS manages that allows doctors to provide the services, whether it be visiting a library or whether it be receiving support payments. There are so many services that people in our community rely upon and those services rely upon not only policy design and implementation by the APS, but, at the coalface, as it were, APS staff to actually help people navigate those systems.

I see this every day first hand, but I saw it in particular when floods ravaged a part of my electorate recently. Services Australia staff were so instrumental in helping people receive government benefits. Services Australia staff walked through the suburbs, going street by street, house by house, finding people and helping them to navigate online government systems. And then staff from Services Australia and other Australian Public Service departments came to that community and were physically there to answer questions. They placed themselves there in a community that was in so much trouble. Those staff provided such assistance to those people in need.

When I was thinking about the APS and its role in our lives, it occurred to me that the APS provides so many services on a daily basis but also other services that so many of us rely upon that are more momentous, more once-in-a-lifetime and everything in between. It really is a cradle-to-grave institution. The other thing about the APS when one thinks about its role in our own lives, in our communities and in the nation is that it really is something that is there as a steward across multiple governments, across multiple generations. That is why the reforms that we're looking at today are so critically important. This bill is going to be part of the government's broader agenda of building up the APS's capability, of making sure that it is suitably forward-looking and focused on the long term so that it can meet society's current and emerging challenges.

I started my career in the APS—my first job in the APS was in the Attorney-General's Department—and so many of the issues that we are dealing with today and, in fact, across this parliament are matters of proper governance and integrity, which are so integral to the issues that I was dealing with as a young lawyer back at the start of my career. When I reflect on the issues that I was dealing with back then, it is very gratifying to see that this government is progressing issues relating to integrity and good governance, so important to underpinning the work of the APS.

The second job that I had in the APS was in the Department of Finance, and again this makes me think about some of the very important reforms that we're re dealing with in this bill but also, more broadly, across the government's priorities. The Department of Finance is one of the central agencies that thinks about the APS's capability in a whole-of-government sense. In a sense, the Department of Finance is there to help the government think about how to marshal its resources and deal with, on the one hand, all the various trade-offs that it needs to make, the finite resources that it has and the finite funding and spending envelopes, and on the other hand the many things that it wants to achieve. But the other thing the Department of Finance does and did when I was there is, in a sense, mirror the Public Service and constantly think about the Public Service's capability. How is it able to best achieve the various objectives and outcomes that it's seeking to achieve? A lot of the reforms we're talking about in this bill tonight resonate very strongly with me and my experiences in the Public Service.

There are five APS Values in which public servants are committed to service, and that goes back to what I talked about earlier: that public servants are there in our lives. They're there in our lives in a daily way. They're there in our lives on our most momentous occasions. They're often there in our deepest and darkest hours. The values include that public servants be ethical, that public servants be respectful, that public servants be accountable and that public servants be impartial. They are all absolutely critical values, and I saw these values in practice. I saw how important they were to underpinning the rigour of the advice that the APS was providing to the government of the day but also to underpinning the way in which the APS dealt with people in the community, because the jobs of so many members of the APS are to help people very directly. So many tens of thousands of people in the APS are there at the coalface, where impartiality, respectfulness and accountability are so important.

Of course, I also think those values underpin some of the other overarching concepts we often think about when we think about the APS. Some of its best attributes are that the APS be frank and fearless and that the APS help governments think through how they actually implement the policy priorities that they have. Governments often will come into power with a very well formed agenda. But even when governments have thought through a lot of their policies, there's so often a great deal of complexity in actually implementing that, and it is absolutely critical that public servants have the capacity to help governments think through all the nuances and complexities of how to take a policy and make it into something that can be implemented in a practical and effective way. That's where the frank and fearless advice becomes so critical. That's where providing workable options becomes so critical. That's where having the capability to undertake rigorous cost-benefit analysis and where undertaking very detailed consultation processes throughout the community become so critical. That's why it's important to look at the reforms that we're looking at today in the broader context of some of the challenges the Public Service is facing. A number of speakers have talked about the fact that the Public Service has seen an erosion in some of its capabilities—through outsourcing to consultants is one example; just through a lack of funding in some areas is another.

I do want to go to the initial paragraphs of the report of the Thodey review. Early on, the report's authors say they are not undertaking these reforms because the APS is broken. The report says:

… there are many examples of excellence across the service. But the APS is not performing at its best today and it is not ready for the big changes and challenges that Australia will face between now and 2030.

I believe that that is actually a fair representation of where we stand now. I don't believe the APS is broken, but I do believe that, given the complex, long-term and dynamic nature of some of the challenges that our community is are facing, we need to strengthen the APS, and that's where some of these changes come in.

I want to put the changes that we're talking about in the context of the Albanese government's broader APS reform agenda. Priority 1 is that we have an APS that embodies integrity in everything that it does, priority 2 is that the APS puts people and businesses at the centre of policy and ideas, priority 3 is that the APS is a model employer, and priority 4 is that the APS has the capability to do its job well. What we're talking about in this bill dovetails all of the priorities that the government has set out and, indeed, helps it to achieve them. I won't go through all of the recommendations and the different elements of this package, but one of them, clearly, is adding stewardship as a sixth value:

The APS builds its capability and institutional knowledge, and supports the public interest now and into the future, by understanding the long-term impacts of what it does.

I want to refer to a few of the reflections on and responses to a survey that was undertaken of APS officers as to what it meant to add stewardship. I might say that that survey indicated that adding stewardship resonated very strongly with public servants, which says a lot about how important this will be as a sixth value.

It also said that, overwhelmingly, the responses indicated that it will help the APS to look ahead and provide advice that considers the long-term interests of Australians. A majority of the respondents in the survey of APS officers indicated that stewardship to them meant taking care, thinking long-term, taking into account future generations, maintaining knowledge within the APS and responsibly managing the issues under the responsibility of the department. When it came to public servants thinking about what it meant to act like a steward, they provided a number of responses. I will mention a few of them. There was mention of providing frank and fearless advice in relation to long-term impacts. For me, even that phrase indicates that it dovetails with and supports some of the existing values and adds that long-term perspective to what the APS already does. There was mention that it supports staff to grow capability and to meet challenges. To me, that response indicates that adding stewardship is going to help the APS to think about their own staff in a more long-term way, investing in them over the long horizon. It was mentioned that it will help to maintain information and good record keeping, absolutely critical for good governance, and that is will also help to build better and longer lasting systems. That survey, to me, was very insightful in that it added a lot of meat to the bone on what it means to add stewardship.

When you think about some of the challenges that we're dealing with today, like climate change, long-term changes in the labour force, the jobs of the future and how we prepare current people for those future jobs, that is all going to require long-term thinking. Of course, it's always been important that public servants think about the long term, but, given where we are and given that some of the challenges that we're facing now—an ageing society, climate change, the workforce of the future—some of these changes will have impacts over multidecades and multigenerations, so it is absolutely critical that we add stewardship.

Another important element of the reforms that we're considering today is that we add a purpose statement—that, alongside the addition of the value of stewardship, a purpose statement be developed that will create a unified vision of what the APS aspires to do. I think that's absolutely critical, and it takes me back to my days at Finance, trying to think about the APS in that whole-of-government sense. That reflects the fact that a lot of the challenges that we're facing aren't just long term but will affect so many different departments and agencies at the same time. Work of the future, the ageing of society—these are challenges that will affect multiple departments and agencies, so it is absolutely critical that we think about the APS in a more holistic way, and, also, that we undertake a capability review. Again, I go back to that statement that I just read out from the Thodey review: a capability review that isn't motivated by some sense that the APS is broken, which it isn't. The APS does so much and has done so much for so long that is at a very high standard. What it does reflect is the fact that we need the APS to be even better, particularly given the challenges that we will be facing.

In conclusion, the APS is a ubiquitous institution in our lives, in our community, in our nation. But it's also an incredibly important institution. It's there on a daily basis for our everyday events, but it's also there at so many of the most important times of our lives. It's there to help pick us up at some of the most difficult times of our lives. It's also an institution that is permanent, that does have stewardship of so much in our community. It outlasts the government of the day. It is there for multiple generations. It helps the multiple generations that are alive now and it thinks about the many generations that are yet to come. That's why it's so important that we make sure that the APS thinks about the future in a long-term way—that it has stewardship at its core—and also that its capacity is strengthened so it is able to deal with the very complex challenges that our society faces.

See this speech in context