Not Fit For Purpose
Victorians are at the mercy of a clunky public service led by an incompetent government fixated on bashing the virus into submission. By Nick Cater.
The battering Victorians have received from the novel coronavirus was not an accident, nor has New South Wales avoided the worst of the pandemic through luck.
Victoria’s misfortune is to be in the hands of a clunky public service, ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of COVID-19, led by a spectacularly incompetent government. A series of mundane failures in service delivery, from the supervision of quarantine hotels to the inability to track and trace contacts, have coalesced into an omni-shambles.
Horror stories abound. Employees continue working alongside infected colleagues at Cedar Meats because of errors in the handling of tests; a month-long delay in the use of information from the COVID Safe app defeats the purpose of collecting it; a woman whose mother tested positive receives her first call from a contact tracer a week after her mother dies and more than a month after she tested positive.
True, mistakes have been made in NSW, such as the handling of the Ruby Princess. The difference is that NSW had the smarts to limit the damage and learn from its mistakes.
The contrast between the two is a case study in public administration; brawn on one side, brains on the other. The NSW government is trying to outsmart the virus while the Victorian government wants to beat it into submission. The success in NSW shows that government bureaucracies are not irredeemably hopeless. They can be programmed to deliver services better and can acquire the capacity to respond to new challenges.
At the start of April, NSW was Australia’s coronavirus magnet with 2600 cases to Victoria’s 1100. On April 5, 39 cases were being treated in intensive care in NSW, three times more than in Victoria. This was partly due to NSW receiving the majority of overseas arrivals as well as the botched disembarkation of the Ruby Princess. Yet already there was evidence that NSW was getting its act together having conducted 121,000 tests to Victoria’s 56,000. Between the beginning of April and the start of July, the virus spread three times faster in Victoria than in NSW. Victoria has recorded 576 deaths since the start of July; in NSW it’s three.
The NSW public service wasn’t always this good. In the nine years since Barry O’Farrell ended 16 years of Labor rule, it has steadily improved with measures that rarely grabbed the headlines but together constitute a revolution. O’Farrell and his successors did not attempt the wholesale privatisation of government services that had achieved mixed results in other states. Instead, they introduced the principle known as contestability, the credible threat that the work of a department might be outsourced if the bureaucrats didn’t lift their game.
NSW has invested massively in digital innovation. Five years ago, it established the Data Analytics Centre, a silo-busting, cross-government hub capable of analysing all the information available to government. Last year it launched the Digital Design System, essentially a template for the efficient delivery of every kind of government service.
When the virus arrived, the NSW public service had the culture and capacity to hit the deck running. It was able to monitor the mobility of residents, particularly in the early stages, a strong proxy for the spread the contagion.
With real-time information about transmission, authorities set up COVID pop-up testing clinics in potential hotspots. Those who tested negative were sent a text releasing them from isolation.
The digital infrastructure made it possible to rapidly and efficiently track and trace, issue border permits, dispense business grants, roll out QR codes to register patrons at restaurants and many other mundane but useful measures to keep the pandemic at bay while being open for business.
Victoria is less efficient, having spent 17 of the past 21 years under Labor. Relying heavily on the votes of the service providers, Labor is ill-placed to represent the interests of the service recipients – known in NSW as customers. Under Daniel Andrews, the number of state public servants has grown 21 per cent, almost double the state population. The wage bill rose $2.2bn in 2018-19 alone. Yet it appears there has been no corresponding increase in capability.
While NSW was able to dampen emerging hotspots with relatively little coercion, Victoria Police has shown an astonishing lack of discretion in the deployment of its resources. A quarter of Victorians live in postcodes where no one is infected. Two-thirds live in postcodes with fewer than 10 cases. Yet the authorities clamp down indiscriminately with no attempt to concentrate resources in areas of highest risk.
Reforming the public service is arguably the single most useful thing that can be done to stop a repeat of this fiasco. Best practices might usefully be sharpened in other states.
The Victorian government should look at its failings and drag itself into the 21st century by turning a deaf ear to the public service unions and replicating what is happening elsewhere.
Federal politicians should be doing what they can to encourage this – the commonwealth foots the bill for state government incompetence. Efficient and effective government, however, is not yet on Labor’s to-do list, if Anthony Albanese’s recent headland speeches are anything to go by. He demands more government to enforce Labor’s values of fairness and security, proclaiming his “belief in the power of government to shape change to the advantage of working people”.
The government, he says, must create more permanent jobs, revitalise manufacturing and generate more clean energy. The list goes on: nation-building infrastructure, more public service jobs in Centrelink, more government investment in social and affordable housing.
The vision, as ever, is for a world in which government is made responsible for an ever-expanding range of services, and ever more ambitious tasks with seeming disregard for its ability to deliver or any intention of holding the public service to account.