(by bearing the costs of inefficient government)
Sir Humphrey Appleby (“Yes Minister”) would be proud of the massive improvements in the remuneration of public servants in Australia, especially (but not exclusively) at senior levels.
As Sir Humphrey (the fictional Permanent Secretary in the show) would have explained;‘the trick is to convince the public these exceptionally qualified senior bureaucrats modestly serve us all, beavering away behind closed doors performing the vital tasks that keep the National running ‘. Once that image of unstinting service has been successfully propagated it (he would have gone on to say) ‘it is simply bad manners for voters to ask how much these selfless servants of the nation are paid’.
Bernard Woolley (the Minister’s secretary in the 1980s tv series) would have translated the above for Jim Hacker (the Minister) as something like… ‘you have to convince the public they’re doing a lot because you have to pay them a lot.
SOME FACTS
You might think it’s simply a matter of googling to find out what the salary packages of our senior public servants actually are. After all, as taxpayers, you’d think we’d be entitled to know what we’ re paying. Try it. It’s not easy if you want current figures. Yes, you can find out if your’re persistent. But why the obstacle course? Maybe they’d prefer not to say ….or is such a thought mere paranoia on my behalf?
Anyway, as of 2021 the “pay points” of Commonwealth Department Heads ranged from $720,000 to $914,000. Parliamentary Department Heads (Dept. of The House of representatives, Dept. of Senate. Parliamentary Budget Office etc.) ran at around the $400,000 mark. The Remuneration Tribunal (2021) lists the positions of Commonwealth agency heads and commissioners. Packages here are, in the main, between $400,000
and $800.000.
In Government departments there are plenty of middle to senior appointments in the upper one hundreds to the near $300,000 range.
In addition to these ‘staff’ costs the Morrison Government alone (in its last year of office)spent $20,000,000 on consultants, contractors and the outsourcing of government services. The government prior to that spent about the same amount helping our Commonwealth civil servants (which number somewhere around the 170,000 mark) do their jobs.
Such staff-costs are duplicated at the State Government and (to a lesser degree) council level.
It is often said that Australia is an over governed country. That’s a moot point. What is certain, however, is the expense of that governance is high, given that average income of workers is a fraction under $90,000. (2024 figure)
VALUE FOR MONEY?
The media is very good at turning over rocks – and then exclaiming in mock surprise -‘Oh, look what we’ve found here!’- to wit, yet another example of a gross looseness with taxpayer monies. The jeremiad of woes is endless. A Council pays $100,000 for 100 metres of footpath (over $1,000,000 per km for resurfacing roads), $30,000 for wheelchairs at NDIS, a new fleet of over a hundred electric BMWs for COMCAR (retail price $150,000 + each), $800,000 to refurbish a Minister’s office at the Dept. of Defence, a Land Council in WA that wanted to charge a million dollars to provide advice on tree planting on a private farm, a North Shore Council’s swimming pool’s refurbishment cost blow out from $30 million to $105 million (and it’s not yet finished).
Similar stories hit pages 2 and 3 of the papers every couple of weeks. They attract eyeballs and much gutting.
The media often exaggerates details to make these stories more sensational (‘Bill Shorten hires speech writer for $620,000 in a department that has 172 communication staff’ turns out, when checked, to be ‘Bill Shorten did not hire a speech writer, the NDIS did at the rate of $310,000 per annum on a two-year contract because it has only 14 marketing staff and 3 event organisers’). Nonetheless where there is
smoke there’s usually fire. Even when accurate such stories are but titbits in the grander scheme of things.
NATION BUILDING
At the macro level big bundles of bucks are often expended to achieve, well, nothing.
Someone, for example, must have a rough idea of how much our political and bureaucratic classes have spent in their unsuccessful attempts to secure Australia a handful of adequate submarines over a fifteen year plus period. It’s been in their interests to smokescreen the cost (direct and indirect) of replacing the Collins fleet.
And they’ve been highly successful in avoiding telling the public the $s involved for fear of embarrassing themselves.
We could have ‘modernised’ Collins (there were a couple of LOTE programmes mooted, without publicly released price tags attached, those plans are being discussed yet again right now), we could have bought a dozen Japanese subs at a cost of about $6 billion but decided not to. We agreed to a $90 billion deal with the French only to see that cancelled at a cost of around $6 billion for zero boats…and then we moved on to commit approx $14 billion to ease production bottlenecks in the UK and US to help keep delivery schedules on track for boats that won’t be supplied for at least another decade. That’s a total of $20 billion plus to stay in the talking game.
If the past is the best guide to the future, there is more than a fair chance that this money will not produce a single operational-nuclear, ‘in the water’ submarine by the mid to late 30s. Add to these the costs of cutting off or cancelling a large part of the
Navy’s frigate and Army programmes and we are talking about a few(?) billions more of ‘unproductive’ dollars. And that’s only the ‘wastage’ within Defence.
We even waste money offshore.
Remember Nauru and its detention centre for boat people? That facility has been virtually empty since around the time of the last Federal election (and completely empty since June 2023). Recently the number of detainees has crept back to around 35. The cost of subcontracting the servicing of that facility for the three-year period between Sept 2022 and Sept 2025 is $421 million. That money isn’t being paid to the Nauru Government. It’s paid to the American Prison Services company MTD (contract
CM 3918654).The Nauruan Government is paid an additional $350 million a year. That’s between $10 to $20 million a detainee per annum.
Surely the above cases, although few in number, are enough to suggest it would be hard to argue those responsible for spending our taxpayer monies are doing a good job, that we are getting good value for our money – at a time when taxes have never been higher. Each billion dollars squandered is the equivalent of a thousand average wage earners
income for a ten-year period.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM
Back in the 1960s Donald Horne (The Lucky Country 1964) drew attention to the unimaginative and timid management class that then ran the Country. That conclusion can be equally well applied to our now much expanded public service. In spite of all the higher education, the rise of a self-confident ‘meritocracy’, the extensive use of expert consultants, improvements in salary and working conditions, the relative security of employment etc. there is little evidence the ‘productivity’ of our civil service (or our political class for that matter) have increased over time. If you doubt my word take a half hour or so and look at any Senate Committee when it’s reviewing a department. It’s a free and instructive thing to do.
Our politicians are always complaining about the lack of ‘productivity growth’ in the economy. Maybe they should start looking closer to home for answers as to why that’sthe case.
Those working in the caring, person-to-person industries (nursing, aged care and education) can hardly be expected to forever increase their patients/pupil loads without lowering quality standards or eventually running themselves into the ground. Ditto those in small business, those on the land or those (now few) who work in manufacturing. In these tough times it’s mortgagors who carry the heaviest load followed by wage and salary earners, the young starting out and the retired. By comparison our political leaders and senior civil servants live in a comfort zone largely protected from the sharper vicissitudes of life.
Where and when one is comfortable it pays not to rock the boat.
WHO SERVES WHO?
Governments of all persuasions are more comfortable collecting taxes from PAYE income earners than the very rich or major corporates and multinationals – especially if those corporates are of an oligopolistic or monopolistic bent. Taxpayers are sadly told they’ll, ‘unfortunately’, have to tighten their belts while, at the same time, our leaders
are more than happy to take large part of the credit for all-time highs on the stock market.
Public servants, for their part, prefer the comfort of anonymity to protect themselves from public scrutiny. Yes, bureaucrats are rightly obliged to be non-political, but that requirement doesn’t mean they should be able to hide from, or remain unaccountable to, the public – ie. ‘untouchable’. When the public can’t see what’s going on we remain unaware of gross inefficiencies being perpetrated over and over again in multiple areas of government activity, unaware of the pressing need for the better spending of taxpayers’ money.
The timidity of our political class + a preference for anonymity by senior public servants makes for a self-protective style of national leadership that has a distaste for transparency and accountability. The very attributes both arms of government claim
they desperately want to foster.
An old sage of the British political class once reflected (and I paraphrase him here ) – ‘we (meaning the British political class) are very good at working out what needs to done, but then take decades getting around to do it. By that time, it costs several times what we thought it would and we have to cut corners to produce anything’. Sound familiar? Our political class has mastered that Westminster tradition to perfection. It’s proved proficient in delaying what obviously needs to be done until it becomes a crisis, then rushing to find a quick (and usually expensive) substandard solution that is rarely monitored or policed to ensure the solution works as intended.
If Australia were a corporation, and we voters its shareholders, the current management class would be quickly dispatched in favour of a strong board (a political class) of real-world experience that could articulate strategy and be brave enough to set (and hold to) priorities. Management (the public service) would be held accountable for efficiently delivering to that strategy – or its executives would quickly lose their jobs (something that rarely seems to happen in our public service). A meritocracy not responsible for performance is an oxymoron.
We need to be careful of “A Future Made in Australia,” Albanese 2024 ) if it is based on the same management style that got us where we are today. More of the same will, depressingly, only produce more of the same, a quarry populated by too many people is not an inspiring prospect for anyone but a miner or minerals exporter.