All is not well between the Prime Minister and the men and women of the Commonwealth Public Service. There are considerable settling-in difficulties. This was evident in the recent Fuelwatch episode, where somebody in the public service — not a ministerial office — leaked the Cabinet documents on this issue.
Is the Prime Minister driving the public service too hard? Or does he in fact need to spill some senior public service heads left over from the Howard years, to send a clear disciplinary signal to public servants in response to this serious leak of Cabinet information?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. The Labor Government is certainly making public servants work harder. Many public service policy areas became comatose under Howard. There wasn't much interesting policy work going on, and it mostly got done in ministers' offices or in trusted highly politicised outposts.
Howard staffed key policy areas such as national security and counter-terrorism with his most trusted people, rotating them in and out of ministerial offices. The sidelining of Treasury on water policy was a typical example of the style.
Rudd says he wants the public service to get back to the traditions of efficiency and relevance that it had under Fraser, Hawke and Keating. He says he wants it to learn again how to work harder and smarter.
My impression, however, is that he and some of his ministers do not yet trust public servants to deliver — perhaps with good reason, in some cases. A lot of public service work is being done in a great hurry, then shelved without follow-up. The ministerial office minder system remains dominant.
This style risks becoming a self-fulfilling expectation. It can only demoralise public servants keen to make a new start under Labor, if they come to feel that their departments are suspected of not giving first-rate advice.
Are departments being given tight-deadline work to keep them busy and perhaps 'road-test' their performance, while the most important policy thinking is still being done, as under Howard, in ministerial offices? I think so.
Rudd, a former public servant himself, still seems undecided how much trust to put in the public service. That is what makes the recent Fuelwatch issue instructive, out of all proportion to its inherent minor policy significance. Cabinet was entitled to take the course of action it took. But perhaps it was a final