To be frank, our public service has been far from fearless - and well before robo-debt

For all the legitimate outrage at politicians for their culpability in the robo-debt scandal, there has been a grand omission in the heated commentary: the repeated failure of the Australian Public Service Commission to promote and safeguard the duty of public servants to provide frank and fearless advice to such politicians.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes’ royal commission report found that the conditions that led to robo-debt applied to several agencies, not only Services Australia. The Attorney-General’s Department failed, as did the Ombudsman. And we can add the so-called co-ordinating departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet and of Finance, which did not intervene when it was obvious robo- debt was an unlawful program.

But the APS Commission neglected its very purpose by not identifying how the disempowering of the public service had undermined its ability to tell ministers that robo-debt was unlawful. Indeed, you won’t find the word robo-debt in its reports, but you will be told, in every report, that the Commonwealth public service is characterised by high integrity.

Similarly, you won’t find in its reports a study of “sports rorts”, the term depicting the decision of public servants in 2020 not to tell the then sports minister, Bridget McKenzie, that she had no legal power to award any grants from the Community Sport Infrastructure Program, let alone award grants on a biased basis, as the Commonwealth auditor-general found.

And the APS Commission did not mention the 2018 Moss Review, which found the Agriculture Department fraudulently altered veterinarian assessments to avoid its legal responsibility to report abuse in the export of live sheep. The then newly appointed minister, David Littleproud, was “deeply disturbed” by televised vision of animal suffering.

These abuses were unlawfully ignored when Barnaby Joyce was the agricultural minister. He had abolished the department’s animal welfare branch. Public servants might well have assumed that Joyce did not want adverse reports on live sheep exports.

The Agricultural Department’s actions were no doubt influenced by Joyce’s sacking in 2015 of its secretary, Paul Grimes. Joyce wanted to show he was boss. He told a community forum in 2019, in remarks aired on The Project, that he had “invited the head of the department up, brought him into my office and sacked him, just to remind him where the authority starts from. And then I got a lot more sense out of the rest of them. They were great.” Joyce was thus mimicking John Howard, who had dismissed six secretaries in 1996, and was presaging Scott Morrison’s five sackings in 2019.

These are not the only examples of APS Commission negligence. Though past public service commissioners, including Andrew Podger and Peter Shergold, have frequently written and spoken of serious limitations on the ability of Commonwealth public servants to provide frank and fearless advice, recent State of the Service reports have ignored the issue.