Seems it’s OK for a public servant to work from home, but not from a regional town. Photo: Pikpick.
If the federal election was a referendum on the public service, it was a triumph for the 2.5 million Australians who work for federal, state and territory government agencies.
The message in the Coalition’s resounding defeat was clear – don’t cut our numbers, don’t move us to regional locations and don’t you dare make us leave home and come back into the office.
The public sector is now a behemoth that dwarfs all other segments of the labour force. It’s expanding by 85,000 employees every year. “If only industry could match this growth record,” Sir Humphrey once said on Yes Minister, an old British comedy (that might’ve doubled as a documentary).
The sheer size of our bureaucracy ensures that few politicians will dare to criticise it again – there are just too many votes to lose.
But as someone who has been employed by both the federal and state governments, I can’t help but poke the bear and point out a few mysteries of the public services that may eventually need to be addressed.
1. Still working from home?
As Peter Dutton learnt, anyone who questions working from home arrangements can expect a torrent of abuse. In fact, never in history have we seen such prompt, timely responses from federal public servants.
But let’s get real. It’s now been three years since COVID, yet 61 per cent of the APS are still working from home at least part of the week.
Sure, parents with infants might have a reason for doing so, but what about the tens of thousands of others who continue to do what most industries would never allow?
Anyone who’s worked in the public service knows it’s hard enough to get some employees to work in an office while supervised, let alone trusting them to do so in the comfort of their own home.
2. Why do so many need to be in Canberra?
When Barnaby Joyce pushed for public service departments to be moved to regional areas in 2017, Canberra-based Labor MP Andrew Leigh said this would make the APS “more inefficient and more fragmented”.
Presumably, he thinks having employees from the same agency working from thousands of different homes in Canberra doesn’t fragment it at all.
Therefore, if technology has advanced to allow flexible working conditions, then surely it is time to move more bureaucrats to the regional towns where their policies are being put into practice.
There’s been some decentralisation over the past eight years, but it still seems too much of the bureaucracy remains in the capital. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority, for instance, might be best headquartered alongside the river, rather than close to Lake Burley Griffin.
3. How fair is flex time?
Another unusual perk of the public service is flex time – a system whereby you can bank extra hours you work during the week and use that to take a day or two off.
What perplexed me as a public servant was how it was barely ever monitored. It seemed as if those who worked the fewest hours took the most flex days. There was one state government agency I once worked at where I’d routinely arrive at work at 9:30 am and have to turn the floor lights on. If I looked around the office at 4.59 pm, every chair would be spinning. But come Friday, up to half the office had earned a ‘flex’ and weren’t present.
Flexibility is wonderful, but a bit more scrutiny is needed for those on the taxpayers’ dime.
4. Is everyone an executive?
I used to work as an EL1 – Executive Level 1 in the APS. In my role, I took minutes for meetings, managed the office footy tipping comp and did coffee runs for morning teas.
It wasn’t really work that justified a six-figure salary and fancy title, but I soon learned EL1 was the magical sweet spot of every department – all the pay and perks but no responsibility.
In state bureaucracies, I took on the role of “senior policy officer” as the most junior person in the team. A review of managerial titles compared to work done is not out of line.
5. How do they get recruitment so wrong?
Anyone who’s worked in a public service knows that poor performance is commonplace – there’s at least one member of every team who needs to be micro-managed to produce any output.
This is hard to understand when recruitment is so bureaucratic. To get a job in the APS, you need to address word-salad selection criteria (like “Modelling flexibility, adaptability and resilience in a dynamic work environment” – yes, that’s real), and then provide two referee contacts and sit one, two or perhaps three interviews. After all that, many non-performers still slip through the net.
It’s time to either make recruiting simpler or, I dare say, employees easier to sack.
These observations make it impossible for me to ever run for parliament. But while taxpaying non-government employees are still (barely) the majority in Australia, let me say it now before the next election, by when it’ll probably be classified as hate speech.
