If the eye-popping contents of the Victorian Ombudsman’s report on the politicisation of the Victorian public service don’t alarm even probably the most ardent supporters of now-former premier Dan Andrews and Victorian Labor, then presumably nothing will. It spells out intimately how the Andrews authorities debauched the Victorian public service in a manner that surpassed even the excesses of Scott Morrison in Canberra.
The report by Deborah Glass may have — ought to have — been much more startling for what it reveals concerning the Andrews authorities’s inner workings, however she was stymied in pursuing strains of inquiry, together with one matter raised by a former departmental secretary, each by Labor’s obsessive use of cupboard secrecy and by the unwillingness of senior figures to go on the report or converse in any respect with the Ombudsman out of worry of reprisals from the federal government.
Glass can’t be accused of getting an anti-Labor agenda. The inquiry arose because of a Victorian higher home reference referring to an Age article on the politicisation of the Victorian public service. In response, Glass particularly rejects lots of the claims that Andrews authorities staffers have been inserted into senior positions. “Our in depth investigation, carried out throughout a number of fronts, discovered no direct proof of widespread partisan hiring of the type recommended within the Legislative Council referral.” Certainly, Glass says, “Folks’s reputations had been unfairly sullied by stints, typically a few years beforehand, in ministerial places of work.”
However what she did discover was widespread abuses of, and failures of, hiring practices at senior ranges within the Victorian public service, adequate to undermine perceptions of merit-based recruitment. There have been “a number of examples of rushed and shoddy recruitment practices, poor record-keeping and opaque choice strategies … direct appointments are used too regularly by some companies, typically to rent or promote former ministerial staffers … selections weren’t at all times correctly recorded or defined. We additionally observed poor report preserving and procedural irregularities when it got here to filling some marketed vacancies.”
The report additionally particulars the bypassing of the general public service in favour of consultants for politically favoured initiatives. This was notably the case with the huge Suburban Rail Loop mission, a serious Andrews election dedication, which has suffered repeated, mammoth price blowouts and is now headed for a price of $125 billion regardless of having a profit: price ratio of simply 0.7. Glass says:
It was so secret it was saved from the secretary of the related division, and a lot of the board of the originating company. The acknowledged motive for the secrecy — to mitigate towards land hypothesis — doesn’t stack up, as no land was acquired by the accountable company earlier than a public announcement, and in any occasion wouldn’t justify preserving the related secretary at the hours of darkness. It was “proved up” by consultants relatively than developed by public servants, and its announcement ‘blindsided’ the company arrange by the identical authorities to take away short-term politics from infrastructure planning.
This was a recurring theme within the Andrews authorities’s method to initiatives: “Extreme secrecy and using consultants additionally featured within the early Commonwealth Video games planning. Historical past has since revealed main flaws within the assumptions underpinning the monetary modelling.”
This isn’t separate from politicisation — it is politicisation: “As one former Secretary informed us, the extra the general public sector is weakened in its means to offer coherent senior recommendation, the extra politicised it successfully turns into: ‘It’s not by planting individuals, it’s just by reducing [important people] out of the advisory loop’.”
Glass additionally discovered a well-known theme of bureaucrats feeling stress to be “responsive” to the federal government: “There may be widespread concern that the benefit choice precept is sidelined when responsiveness to authorities is at stake. Senior public officers with little job safety are feeling extra pressured to align their recommendation to the obvious political imperatives of presidency.”
Every of those components — the appointment of former staffers, the sidelining of the general public service in favour of consultants, the reliance on secrecy — had been hallmarks of the systemic politicisation of the Australian public service underneath Scott Morrison. However the Andrews and now Allan governments seem to have gone even additional, presumably as a result of they knew and know they’re unlikely to lose energy to a feckless and ineffective opposition any time quickly.
“We had been additionally deeply troubled by the quantity of people that had been afraid to talk to us,” Glass says. “It’s disappointing and disturbing that to guard the identities of so many individuals we had been unable to comply with some promising strains of enquiry.”
Even Labor discovering out a former public servant had spoken to the Ombudsman can be sufficient to finish any risk of additional authorities employment. One former deputy secretary informed Glass “It might be the notion that you just had spoken to me, that’s all. I imply, I nonetheless need to work within the public service in Victoria and prefer it or not, they may type a view that I’m untrustworthy as a result of I spoke to you.”
The worry extends to these working within the non-public sector:
One other former government expressed reservations about talking freely even underneath affirmation and with a promise of anonymity, for worry of jeopardising their non-public employment: “I need to be as expansive as doable, however … if I’m vital of governmental course of or no matter, I believe that might be the top of my profession.”
This ongoing tradition of worry and intimidation — that the federal government can nonetheless wreck your profession even in case you have moved to the non-public sector — is extraordinary and has not often been seen earlier than — exterior the times of the Bjelke-Petersen authorities in Queensland. If it had been a Coalition authorities perpetrating such intimidation, the outrage from the left and Labor can be palpable. Daniel Andrews and Victorian Labor have taken the Victorian public service to a really darkish place characterised by worry, intimidation and secrecy — and it’s Victorian taxpayers who bear the associated fee for generations to return.