CETA: Citizen Engagement Team of the Australian Public Service
Genuinely empowering the Australian Public Service requires equipping it with the resources to do innovative and meaningful citizen engagement
TLDR; the Australian government should create CETA, the Citizen Engagement Team of the Australian Public Service (“BETA” for citizen engagement)
Empowering the public service requires equipping it with the resources to do meaningful citizen engagement.
We’ve heard a lot in recent months about empowering the Australian Public Service (APS) to provide quality, independent policy advice and restoring citizen trust in the APS. But until the APS can meaningfully and directly communicate with the Australian people, it will remain fundamentally disempowered. Its current toolkit for citizen engagement is outdated, disproportionately consisting of non-transparent, non-deliberative and non-representative “consultation” processes. These limitations ultimately prevent the APS from communicating complex and nuanced policy recommendations that can’t be sold in short soundbites. Public agencies and departments across the globe are implementing more transparent, deliberative and representative processes.
While promising plans appear to be in train via the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources to establish a digital APS Engagement Hub which serves as a “landing point for guidance, advice and support” in relation to citizen engagement, agencies need more than a digital platform. Agencies and departments across the APS need access to resources that support them to identify appropriate contexts for innovative citizen engagement processes, design the right process for the relevant context, deliver a high-quality process and robustly evaluate it. The APS collectively needs to take a strategic and systematic approach to deploying these methods, testing them, communicating them to the public, sharing learnings across agencies and continuously improving.
This requires not just an information portal, but a dedicated team who can advise on and support the delivery of innovative citizen engagement process for agencies and departments across the APS, and do so in a strategic, systematic and rigorous way.
The APS should be empowered to deliver frank and fearless policy advice
Principle
In the Westminster system, it has long been the convention that the public service provides frank and fearless advice to Ministers. Professor David Richards writes that “this approach sought to provide a deliberative space to allow officials to “speak truth unto power”.
The first object of the Australian Public Service, set out in Section 3 of the Public Service Act 1999 (PSA) is “to establish an apolitical public service that is efficient and effective in serving the Government, the Parliament and the Australian public.” Section 57 of the PSA casts a secretary as the “principal policy adviser to the agency minister.”
The independent panel of the relatively recent Australian Public Service Review set out as the first objective under its broad vision for a “aspiration for a trusted APS, united in serving all Australians” to “provide Government and Parliament with excellent policy advice on complex issues.”
In short, it’s written into our political system, our laws and our culture: it’s a central role of the Australian Public Service to provide frank, fearless and independent policy advice.
More than this, it makes good sense that public servants should be empowered to craft policy. It has been suggested that “the Public Service by virtue of size and history and repositories of corporate knowledge does exercise custodianship of the longer term.” It has also been suggested “sometimes coyly” that “one of the most important things they do is ‘follow up on’ the implementation of decisions announced by ministers and governments”; they often have more time and deep subject matter expertise and a better sense of what it takes to implement policies.
Political support
This principle has also enjoyed a political revival with the election of the ALP. Their public policy platform “recognizes the unique and essential role of the APS in designing and delivering services for the public good and in developing policy solutions to the challenges the nation faces both now and into the future.” Albo declared recently that he intends to prioritise “serious consideration of policy based upon advice from the public service,” reversing the trend of “undermin[ing] over a long period of time…the independence and processes of the public service.”
But notwithstanding the particular criticism that might be levelled at the Morrison government for undermining the public service, the principle is not a partisan one. It was John Howard who said in his 1997 Garran Oration that “preserving its value and nurturing its innovation is a priority of this Government.”
But delivering apolitical advice doesn’t mean advising on apolitical questions
The notion of an “apolitical” public service can be misleading. It might be more useful to use the terms “non-partisan” and “independent”. The independence and non-partisan nature of the public service don’t mean that the questions on which the public service is tasked with advising aren’t profoundly normative and non-technical in many respects; or to put it in another way, in a broad sense “political”.
To cite just a few examples in the health space, the functions assigned to the Department of Health in its Corporate Plan include “addressing disparities in health care and health outcomes for specific population groups, including women and girls, through various services, policies and programs, recognising the impact of the wider determinants of health,” “developing the National Tobacco Strategy 2022-2030” and “working in partnership with First Nations people and communities to improve health outcomes through the National Agreement on Closing the Gap”. These are manifestly not questions with purely technical answers. They involve tough questions about how to prioritise scarce resources across different communities, trade-offs between personal liberty and community safety, and what good health and prosperity look in different cultural contexts, to name just a few. And these are questions that fall directly to the Department, after having taken direction from the Government on its high-level priorities.
In this light, dialogue with citizens is a critical aspect of the APS’ role
So the APS finds itself tasked with providing impartial, non-partisan advice on highly political questions. This might seem at first glance to be an impossible ask.
But it’s not. There’s a way of advising impartially on political questions; the answer is to fairly and representatively engage the community on their normative aspects. This is absolutely not to deny the role of expertise; not every element of these policy issues is normative and of course even normative decisions on which the community is consulted should be informed by expert advice. So for example, in developing a National Tobacco Strategy, the Department is tasked with advising on how to “continue to reduce the affordability of tobacco products” according to World Health Organisation guidelines. This requires technical advice about the likely impacts of increasing the tobacco excise, especially on lower-income communities. But even after knowing these impacts, there’s a question about trading off personal liberty and harm reduction. One legitimate way of answering this question impartially is to ascertain the informed views of a representative sample of the community.
Ultimately, the political nature of these questions makes public trust in the APS and the policies it delivers vital; without it, uptake of programs and services and compliance with policies suffers. The APS Independent Review centered trust throughout, asserting, for example, that “being trusted is essential if the APS is to fulfil its purpose” and that “low trust undermines the APS’ ability to tackle complex policy issues.”
Listening to citizens
The first element of dialogue is listening. This of course isn’t a new idea in the context of public service. It was in the 1990s that the “a new language of community consultation, stakeholder participation and responsiveness” swept through the public service, “recognis(ing) the importance of taking a broader conception of the public as citizens whose agency matters and whose right to participate in decisions that affect them is not only inalienable but should be actively facilitated.” More will be said about the suite of tools the APS currently deploys for gathering community input below.
Speaking to citizens
The second component of dialogue is speaking to citizens; explaining their plans and policies in a way that facilitates understanding and acceptance. In fact, the “APS Values and Code of Conduct in practice” document prescribes that “APS employees have an important role to explain policies and the reasons behind them, to assist the elected government to achieve its policy aims, and help meet program objectives.”
But right now, the capacity of the APS to engage in this dialogue is severely constrained
Ministerial pressure
In practice, the public service faces a range of pressures to conform to the will of the government of the day, removing or making redundant their agency to engage independently in dialogue with the community.
At the most extreme end of the spectrum, the government might quite explicitly undermine their advice as a general principle; Scott Morrison went so far as to say that “I don’t think public servants sitting in Canberra have a better idea about what people need in their communities…politicians…ultimately make decisions because we’re the ones accountable to the public – not public servants.”
You might argue that the ideological commitment of the new government to an empowered public service alleviates this pressure to conform to Ministerial will in giving advice to a significant extent. But this effect can be overstated. There are broader systemic and cultural pressures that continue to operate on public servants independent of the change in government. Professor Andrew Podger cites, among other things, “the thickening of the interaction between the APS and ministers” and the “professionalisation of politics.” Ultimately, Secretaries are appointed. The professionalisation of politics has seen parties of all persuasions centre “public opinion research” (very much distinct from the informed views of the public, ascertained through lengthy deliberation) in the formulation of policy.
The challenge of communicating complexity
There’s a reason why this “public opinion research” does not typically involve lengthy and balanced deliberation; that’s not how members of the general public typically inform themselves about policy in the status quo system, dominated as it is by soundbites and slogans. Often, what public servants perceive to be good policy is hard and complex to sell. And as long as the APS relies on traditional tools for engaging the public, it will remain extremely challenging for it to communicate nuance.
The inadequacy of existing tools for citizen engagement
The APS currently deploys several tools for citizen engagement, but the most common ones according to the framework put forward by the APS Framework for Engagement and Participation take the form of “share” and “consult” engagements”. The Framework recognizes that “public servants will be familiar with ‘Share’ and ‘Consult’ engagements. They have been our traditional ways to engage and will remain important into the future.”
The Framework defines “share” engagements as those in which “communication is one-way, from the government to the public. People receive factual information to describe an event, new initiative or changes to an existing process.” While these are necessary engagements, no-one, not least the APS, is claiming that they provide the kind of meaningful dialogue envisaged in this post.
The Framework defines “consult” engagements as those in which “government starts by posing a question or topic for the participants (usually citizens and/or stakeholders) to consider, then asks them to provide their views on it.” Participants are provided with an opportunity to present their views; decision-makers should assess these positions on their merits; and decision-makers should provide the rationale for their final decisions. You might say that focus groups and town halls fall into this category.
These kinds of engagements suffer from serious shortcomings. Focus groups may often be broadly representative, but they aren’t designed to elicit deeply considered and informed opinion (for example, through presenting citizens with a range of balanced arguments for and against particular policy approaches and empowering them to deliberate in a facilitated way to arrive at a conclusion). They’re “easily controllable” and not typically particularly transparent. This means that at best, they seek to draw out citizens’ relatively superficial views on a topic; and at worst, they’re relatively tokenistic validations of pre-existing positions.
Town halls or public meetings suffer from the additional shortcoming that they aren’t typically representative. They are likewise not often structured to elicit deep and considered judgments and deliberative discussion, but also typically entail recruitment of “the usual suspects”.
Ultimately, they don’t allow the APS to effectively converse with the public about complex and nuanced policies.
Co-design is another tool that the idea of citizen engagement processes might call to mind for those in the APS. Co-design involves the “iterative development of insights, prototyping, evaluation and scaling of new solutions…with the underlying belief that engagement with citizens in the development and delivery of products or services will lead to better outcomes.” While co-design is an exciting engagement tool that perhaps more directly and less superficially draws on citizen experiences, it is not typically fit-for-purpose for the kind of policy decisions that are the subject of this post. Instead, “co-design comes to the fore when it comes to the design of public services, products and experiences/interactions”; it does not have “a particular focus on issues of public policy and legislation.”
More generally, the approach of the APS to citizen engagement isn’t highly strategic. PM&C’s Citizen Experience Survey is a step towards a more strategic approach to evaluating the quality of citizen engagement and experience, but as noted by the APS Review, “it is also illustrative that the APS has not previously tracked citizen trust, experience or satisfaction and does not use these metrics as objective service-wide performance indicators.”
The APS should explore exciting new tools for citizen engagement, particularly deliberative processes
This proposal certainly isn’t new. The APS Framework for Engagement and Participation itself recognizes, in particular that “deliberative…engagements are less familiar, but potentially transformative. They offer a pathway forward for those complex problems that require adaptive thinking: balancing values, interests and priorities; and shared action built on public trust and support.” It’s worth emphasizing that these processes certainly aren’t new in Australia either; they’ve gained traction in particular in the context of local government, but are yet to be deployed widely by the APS at the federal level.
Deliberative engagements have been deployed successfully by public servants in a range of other jurisdictions. A quick recap: citizens’ juries are groups of randomly selected citizens who deliberate at length on a policy issue, with reference to a range of balanced evidence. They are increasingly being recognised by governments around the globe as transformative tools for citizen engagement.
For the purpose of this post, they have been deployed, in particular, by public agencies around the globe. To cite a few examples from a plethora:
Metrolinx Residents’ Reference Panel on the Regional Transportation Plan
Toronto Public Health Drug Decriminalization Plan
…and an extensive list of other Canadian agencies, including the Ontario Ministry of Consumer Services, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and Ministry of Infrastructure
Citizens’ Sounding Board on Electricity Grid Infrastructure, for the System Operator for Northern Ireland
Citizens’ Juries on Rethinking Water, UK Environment Agency
Pandemic Data Sharing Citizens’ Juries, NHS England and the National Data Guardian
Citizens’ Jury on waiting times in SUS services in the Porto Alegre metropolitan area, in collaboration with the state health council
Citizens’ assembly on Auckland’s future water source, Watercare NZ
To summarize the transformative potential of deliberative processes, relative to the shortcomings of current tools, they:
are genuinely representative, through random selection (or stratified random selection)
elicit citizens’ considered views, through carefully facilitating deliberation at length, providing balanced evidence and information; in this way, they allow the APS to engage in dialogue with the public about complex and nuanced policies
are transparent, through public announcement and transparent publication of process design, publication of a participants’ report and recommendations, and robust evaluation
Innovation goes beyond deliberation. Government agencies are experimenting with a wide range of other participatory innovations that I can’t do justice in one post.
But these processes are very challenging for individual agencies to implement alone
For a given individual agency or department, it’s very costly and very challenging to implement a process without access to the right expertise. Implementing a novel citizen engagement process requires, amongst other things, the resources and capabilities to:
Evaluate whether or not a particular context or policy issue is appropriate for using deliberation or another form of innovative citizen engagement
Design the right process; once you’ve decided to use a type of process, there are a multitude of design choices to make within this category (in the case of deliberation, for example, how many citizens to engage, over what timeframe, what questions to ask and experts to engage, how to compensate citizens, amongst others)
Deliver the process, in partnership with delivery organisations and/or delivered through the agency or department, which requires skilled staff and facilitators
Evaluate the process, typically in partnership with academia
Explain and market the process to the public at large
Conduct continuous research and development to identify new potential processes to deploy and incorporate learnings from other efforts
Just deciding to use a process doesn’t guarantee its quality; and we have good evidence that credibility and effectiveness in the eyes of citizens are ultimately contingent on the quality of the process.
As long as individual agencies are responsible for implementing these processes without cross-cutting support, there’s also a free-rider problem at play here; other agencies benefit from these activities of piloting, evaluating, refining, developing partnerships and trusted relationships and marketing processes to the public, without having to bear any of the costs.
The Government should pilot a Citizen Engagement Unit, analogous to Beta, the government’s Behavioral Economics Unit, to advise Departments across the APS on new ways of doing citizen engagement
The central team would be responsible for carrying out the activities listed above in partnership with particular agencies, solving the free-rider problem and more importantly, making the APS’ deployment of citizen engagement processes a lot more strategic, sophisticated and effective.
Jurisdictions across the globe have created or are considering the creation of dedicated central bodies for citizen engagement at the federal level that cut across multiple agencies and policy areas:
La Commission Nationale du Débat Public, France, is an independent administrative authority that guarantees public participation in the development of projects and public policies that have an impact on the environment. Its role includes “developing a culture of participation”, advising a range of stakeholders and reporting and evaluating on results of processes
In the UK, the Liaison Committee has recommended that “a single minister in a single department, be given responsibility for coordinating all matters related to citizenship and civic engagement,” centralizing responsibility for coordination of active citizenship issues, which falls across a wide range of Government Departments
The “Community Empowerment Team” of the Scottish Government oversees a new regulation-power enabling Ministers to require Scottish public authorities to promote and facilitate the participation of members of the public in the decisions and activities of the authority
In the US, “Day One Project” has made a compelling call for a central “center asked with improving methods and tools for integrating evidence about public values into federal decision-making”, which could exist, for example, as a “federally-funded research and development center or an innovation lab within an agency”
This is an opportunity for the ALP to deliver in a tangible way on its promise to empower the APS, restore Australian citizens’ trust in government and introduce a transformative reform. Without doing something genuinely different, we can’t expect things to change.
Wanted to share some really interesting feedback pointing me to the UK Gov's "What Works Networks" - an interesting model for feeding cross-cutting research into the public service.