In a sweeping introduction to his 1958 book Australian Democracy the Melbourne political scientist A.F. Davies notoriously claimed that “the characteristic talent of Australians is not for improvisation, nor even republican manners, it is for bureaucracy.” Laissez-faire, he wrote, “was, in any full-blooded sense, a non-starter in Australia.” Why? “From the first, the conditions of settlement made economic development dependent on government aid and government action” — action that was “roared in by popular agitation.”
Davies was writing in the wake of a significant expansion in the powers of the federal government during and after the second world war, and particularly its takeover of income taxation. He describes a “national government machine which, thoroughly professional at core, is nevertheless neither invidiously recruited, nor authoritarian in outlook, but even able, in an odd way, to draw nourishment from its envelope of representative democracy.”
Yet he also bemoaned the fact that the “great grey plain of contemporary administrative routine… has invaded private life — spreading like a stain from the growing proportion employed in bureaucracies, private and public — which becomes increasingly tidy, passionless and ‘pre-ended’.”
The reasons for Davies’s ambivalence about government and administration in Australia remain, even if the particulars have changed. Last year a survey by the Centre for Social Policy Research at the Australian National University found that a little over 50 per cent of respondents trusted the federal government completely or somewhat, compared to ratings for religious institutions of 30 per cent and social media of 15 per cent. Fifty per cent had confidence in the public service — which is not dreadful, but could be much better.
All sorts of things affect these ratings, of course, including the perceived performance of institutions, their behaviour and the nature of their tasks. And averaged sentiments can hide wide disparities. A farmer recently slugged with a big tax bill may not feel as warmly towards the Tax Office as she does towards an ABC providing all sorts of helpful information every day.
If citizens don’t have confidence in their public services, at least on balance, they will be more reluctant to pay taxes and the extent and quality of services will spiral downwards. It’s worth remembering that prosperous countries invariably have strong and effective public services while nations down on their luck usually have corrupt and ineffective ones.
Given that much of the work of public service organisations is remote from day-to-day experience, any lack of confidence and trust will partly reflect ignorance about what they do. Government ministers and their departments are not good at explaining what they’re up to. Departmental annual reports are clogged with rhetorical blather; few people would know of their existence, let alone read them. Highlighting the achievements of officials in the Order of Australia awards is typically seen as evidence that they have their snouts in the trough and are being glorified for “just doing their jobs.” Prizes handed out to government departments by the Institute of Public Administration look too much like officials patting each other on the back.
Picking up on similar sentiments in the United States, the author and financial journalist Michael Lewis set about drawing aside the shroud that hides much public service work. The magazine articles he “stapled together” in his 2018 book, The Fifth Risk — which looked at the fate of several departments during the transition to the first Trump presidency — attracted more attention, he tells us, “than just about any other magazine articles” he’d ever written. The book, an intimate description of the work of individuals in three government departments, sold half a million copies.
Lewis has now repeated the dose, although with a variation. He’s gathered together a series of articles from the Washington Post, each one devoted to the work of an individual government official. One article is Lewis’s and the others are by notable writers — Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell. Each author, he says, has been “surprised by how well it pays to write about federal bureaucrats.”
The book, Who is Government?, deals with people working on mine safety, the criminal investigation of tax rorting, the keeping of archival records, the search for life on other planets at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, anti-trust law and public education about new treatments for rare and deadly diseases. Lanchester bucks the style by writing about the consumer price index.
Lewis says all the essays are “great,” but some are greater than others. It’s pity a writer of Eggers’s reputation lets hyperbole off the leash to claim that the work of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is “the most inspiring research and exploration being done by any humans on our planet.” The work is certainly impressive, although some might find the search for life on other planets a little remote from the exigencies of their lives on planet Earth.
Lanchester’s ode to the consumer price index lacks a little grip by not dealing with the people involved in its preparation. Yet its subject is apposite, with reports trickling in about suspicious fiddling with data collection for the US price index as Trump’s tariffs begin to bite.
The portraits by the other contributors, however, are especially engaging and impressive. They show dedicated, conscientious officials hard at work making life better for all. It’s far away from the ugly stereotype of the semi-motivated public servant in low gear, free of the incentives alleged to be available in entrepreneurial organisations in the private sector, and far, too, from the deadening hand of Charles Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, which was “beforehand with all public departments in the art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.”
Of course, examples of individual public servants doing fine and worthy things don’t prove that a government organisation is working as well. But they can help to improve understanding of what is being done and what the community is getting for its taxes. And stories about individuals can be more telling than massed reporting about departmental achievements arrayed around “key performance indicators” and other such nonsense.
Donald Trump has shown how gripping yarns about individuals can engage audiences, no matter how mired in his lies and distortions. As he scythes through the US federal civil service to convert it into a reflection of his ravenous ego, Lewis’s book couldn’t be better timed. It won’t affect Trump, who isn’t a great reader of books or anything else. But if Lewis can sell half a million copies of a volume on the important contributions of public servants to the common good, something should give somewhere. As Trump is wrecking the joint, those who can should fight, fight, fight.
Of course, Australia is not Trumpland. Yet part of the Coalition’s pitch at the last federal election was to cut 41,000 public service staff out of Canberra. This had no rational basis other than the likely but unspoken assumption that it would appeal to voters in the rest of the country. That the Coalition lost the election should not be taken as a sign that meat-axing government departments has lost its allure.
Australia is a relatively lightly taxed country with generally competent and effective public services. In the end, however, the quality of healthcare, education, public transport and other services depends on how much taxpayers are prepared to pay for them. As demands for government services grow and broaden, proposals for even the tiniest increase in taxes are usually sternly resisted. If trust in government could be pushed above the present 50 per cent mark, it’s possible marginal increases in taxes might have better prospects and government actions might once again be “roared in by popular agitation.”
Is there an Australian Michael Lewis out there who could gather ten or so sprightly authors to tell the tales of good works being done by public servants and make a book of them? How about one retelling the story of how modern Wi-Fi was invented in the CSIRO? If Lewis’s experience could be replicated here, the authors might even make a few bob out of it and the quality of public life could be given an upwards nudge. •
Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Michael Lewis | Penguin | $55 | 272 pages
