Australian Government - click here to go to our home page

go to start   text resizing

Australian Public Service Commission
About the Australian Public Service Commission. Click to go to the Corporate page

go to related resources

Related pages

on our site

Site help

help with using this site

Site menu

news

Home page
> About the Public Service Commissioner > Speech
> Media >
‹ Previous page

“All those who stand and wait—putting citizens at the centre”

Presentation by Lynelle Briggs
Australian Public Service Commissioner
John Curtin Institute of Public Policy
Curtin University of Technology
21 May 2009

Good morning. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we are meeting on today and their ancestors. I’m going to talk to you today about putting the citizen at the centre of public service.

The Australian Public Service exists to do one thing—to serve the Government, the Parliament and the Australian people.  Despite the criticism levelled at us, public servants do serve and, by and large, they do so effectively and efficiently.

It is therefore somewhat paradoxical that I should be saying that what we need now is for the public service to lead us in new directions. We need public servants to lead those whom they serve, in order to serve them better. Public servants must become public facilitators, and the public themselves must do more self-serving. Standing and waiting1 won’t cut it anymore.

The last 10 years has seen a concerted effort globally to improve the relationship between governments and their citizens. The objectives may differ—to strengthen democracy, to enhance accountability or to improve service delivery—and the drivers have differed, as has the role of the citizen— from user to collaborator to partner. What is the same is that a focus on the citizen is at the centre of them all.

What is it that has led to this new role for the citizen in public administration?

Evolving services to meet the needs of people

I think it is that citizen focused governance is a natural and inevitable evolution in democracy. It has become more and more apparent to an increasingly educated, informed and affluent public that governments can’t deliver all of the answers to all of the issues that matter to them. Similarly governments have realised that increasingly complex problems are beyond their ability to manage alone. A desire for more say by the citizenry has converged with a need by governments for more active engagement and input from those same citizens to make services work better. A new paradigm has emerged.

Do we need to go down this path? Well yes, because it will happen in any event. Things are not the same as they were when our current systems of government and public administration were developed. A changed environment inevitably forces changes on those who live in it; either that, or it weeds them out.

The Australian public service is an intrinsic part of this evolution. It is the dominant structure in the citizen-government interface. Jocelyn Bourgon has said that “endowing citizens with a voice to articulate their values and their preferences in relation to the issues that most effect them will likely remain a central tenet of any public sector reform in the 21st century”. I agree with her.

The public sector has become very good in the last 20 years at designing and delivering more efficient programmes. But it does so from the point of view of the inputs and outputs—the programmes themselves. We need to look at programme effectiveness, not in terms of how easy is it for us to manage and deliver, but how well it addresses the needs of those to whom it is being delivered. We need to deconstruct our services, and then rebuild them back to front—to tailor them more to the needs of people and less to the structures of government.

It’s self-evident that this will require a shift away from a traditional public sector model. We started to do this with the introduction of Centrelink. We have followed it up with the e-Government Strategy—we can lodge our tax returns and fill in the census on-line and Australians can use a portal to link their on-line log-ins for Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support Agency services.

These outcomes should not mask the fact that while we have plenty of threads, there does not appear as yet to be a comprehensive blueprint for citizen centred service.

The first component would need to be a clear and simple articulation of what it is we mean by a more citizen centred focus.  I think it is that we will change the design and delivery of public services so that they more often reflect the needs of people and, by doing so, reduce the frustration and stress involved in accessing government funded services.

Take the example of Phyllis, who is 86 years old and has lived alone for 10 years since her husband died. She is losing her sight, and her children live interstate. She and her daughter Elizabeth start to explore options for her future care.

Elizabeth rings the Council of Aging and gets some helpful information, including a list of aged care facilities that have entry fees within Phyllis’s means. Elizabeth visits two of them but neither seems suitable.  She rings the Commonwealth Carelink Centre, the Aged Care Information Line and the Seniors Information Service.  All send more information about community and aged care services.  They include lists of services, some private and some community care.  It isn’t clear what would be available sooner, what the costs are or which one would best suit her.

One document talks about Aged Care Assessments so a phone call to Carelink gets details of the local ACAT. There is a wait for appointments, and then an illness delays the assessor.  Phyllis is ultimately assessed as low care and is given information about the types of packages and assistance that entitles her to.  It is not clear whether an aged home or community care would best meet her needs, and what services would be covered by the community care.  She then starts to worry about what effect all this will have on her pension, and is advised to ring Centrelink.

Instead of providing Phyllis with an avalanche of information about programmes and services, a citizen centred approach would probably involve Phyllis attending her local government service office.  Certain information may have been sought in advance—assets, needs and desires.  Health and aged care assessments would occur on site, and a package tailored to suit Phyllis would be designed for her.  Pension and other assistance would all be available. She needn’t be worried whether it was Centrelink, Health and Aging, a community care programme, or a private facility—or a mix of all of these—that was involved in delivering the final outcome, and she would get it without the grief.

Another good example of this approach can be found in the Centrelink Drought Bus, which took government information and assistance out to rural communities.  Over 13,000 customers had access to land experts, financial consultants, social workers and a range of other relevant providers.  Similarly, the co-ordinator general approach is being used increasingly to join up approaches across different areas, and Indigenous Co-ordination Centres have brought together the majority of the Government’s indigenous services into a one stop shop environment.

While some could argue that these centres are not necessarily the best model for effective engagement, I think we have turned full circle and public servants understand that they can no longer tell a citizen what he or she wants and will get. To do so misses the point. There will still be some “telling” involved—this is what your level of entitlement is, for example—but, citizen centred service is about designing and delivering services based on the perspectives of the user rather than those of the deliverer or the funder.

So, for example, even though we know that the internet is the most popular method of contact with government, we can’t rely solely on the internet for service delivery. Face-to-face and phone contact needs to be maintained because less than 10% of citizens do all of their contact with government on-line and about 40% do none. Convenience is the key component of the choice of delivery system, and the ability to talk to a real person who can explain things and assist with services is valued.

There will always be citizens who do not want to use government services in any given way, and often this varies with age and gender, locality, affluence and the type of service being accessed. Some services (eg prisons and customs controls) may not actually be wanted by their recipients, although how they are provided will be critical. Citizens can also be contrary creatures, wanting different things at different times. Particular life events give rise to different needs, both in terms of services desired and the delivery system. Busy new mothers want to be able to access information in ways that enable them to do other tasks at the same time, and want information to be tailored and to the point. Students by comparison have other needs that are not so time focussed. As citizens move through life, the delivery systems of even the same service will need to accommodate these differing and changing desires.

The ultimate goal of citizen centred service is one in which the Government would come to be regarded as approachable, services would be easy to locate and understand, and citizens would be able to choose from a range of service models based on their particular needs, without having to understand which agencies deliver what services. Authentication and personal information would need to be provided only once in order to access government services, and diverse transactions would be grouped and completed together. Citizens would manage the integrity of, and access to, their personal details throughout the process.

So, how do we give this vision real life? Work done for the Management Advisory Committee has identified a number of principles which would guide public sector bodies.  These are:

What we need now is to build the map of the terrain between where we are now and where we want to be. Important steps along the way include: a proper understanding of the relationship between government and citizens; work to understand what citizens want and to engage them effectively both in policy development and service delivery processes; better integration between the policy and service delivery arms of the public service; openness to tailoring services to meet citizens’ needs rather that primarily government delivery and accountability requirements; and an appreciation that a citizen focus will necessarily involve public servants becoming more innovative, experimenting more and taking on more risk.

Relationships with citizens—Engagement and empowerment

The OECD has identified three levels of relationship between governments and citizens: a one-way relationship whereby governments produce and deliver information to citizens; consultation, where citizens provide feedback to government based on prior definition by government of an issue on which citizens’ views are being sought; and collaboration, which is based on a partnership and involves citizens actively engaging in defining the process and content of policy making and service delivery. It shouldn’t be assumed that every government-citizen relationship will or needs to be collaborative; but providing information will always be necessary and will very likely underpin any of the other relationships. The particular type of relationship will be determined by the particular objective being pursued.

Another way of approaching the relationship is in terms of power sharing, or more fundamentally empowerment of the citizen. Geoff Mulgan has identified a number of different levels of such empowerment. First level empowerment simply involves treating people with responsiveness and respect—in essence, treating them as if they have power. Second level empowerment involves choice, and the third level is voice. The fourth level involves resource power, where true monetary might is shifted to the user. Irrespective of the approach taken, it is important to recognise that a shift in power is at the heart of citizen centred thinking and, as we all know, a shift in power is not often willingly ceded or comfortably managed.

What citizens can expect and should give

There is, of course, a tension between what the citizen wants, what the citizen needs and what the Government can afford or manage to deliver. The balance will generally be what the citizen can reasonably expect. The need for medical assistance is very different to the desire for medical assistance. Governments can close the gap by providing choice through things like triage and assessment call centres, but they can likely never fill it to the satisfaction of all users and they often simply cannot afford to do so.

Which raises the question of how far does citizen centred service have to cater for every contingency or every whim of every citizen? Clearly there are limits, but what are they?

Gerry Stoker has written that “public services are not there to do things for people but to enable people to do things better for themselves”. I like this essentially supportive role for public services in a modern democracy, but I am conscious that many Australians expect their government to do all manner of things for them and that there are a number of people who really do need the Government to look after them. At the same time, there is also a wonderful level of resilient independence among Australians which generally implies that they just want to get on with their lives, albeit with government support there when they need it.

I would like to think that a citizen centred approach to government service would be able to embrace both elements. We have come to expect and have been able to deliver quite good community standards of health, social security, education, defence, communications and infrastructure. What we are talking about now is improving the quality of government services and their ongoing effectiveness in meeting community needs, as well as the role of Australians in driving those services and responding to them.

What follows is that if service quality and effectiveness is to be improved in ways that focus on the citizen (beyond the simple automatic transactions that most people have with government), then citizens will have to do things too. With improved services and shared power comes shared responsibility for them. This extends not only to complying with rules, but also to changing people’s behaviours and accepting responsibility for the choices they make, including the bad ones. Clearly, an educative process will be required.

An approach of “if you build it, they will come” will capture a good number of motivated citizens, but there will be those, for whatever reason, who will not simply gravitate to a new dynamic. If we add “and once you have come, you are expected to do something in return”, or even “to be allowed to come you will first have to do something”, it invites a response of “why should I?” “Because it is good for you” is not a sophisticated enough answer, or a good enough public policy response.

Changing behaviour is not easy, and in the public policy context it is even more difficult. We have good examples of comprehensive behavioural change—the National Landcare Programme and the approach to tobacco control are two of them—but if we need a reality check, we need only reflect on the ATSIC experience.

My office has started to explore the behavioural change theories inherent in successful strategies and those approaches that influence change at the individual citizen, the interpersonal and the community level.  Those learnings need to be refined and applied to a citizen centred approach.   For instance, one of the Government’s social inclusion principles is “a greater voice, combined with greater responsibility”, which is further articulated as people having a responsibility—indeed an obligation—to take part and to make progress. We need to design a delivery system that will ensure that they want to do that. 

If we are going to expect more of citizens, the Government will need to tell citizens what they can expect from it. The Netherlands e-Citizen Charter provides 10 principles by which citizens can call their government to account and the government can examine the quality of its public performance. The principles encapsulate things like choice of communication method, rights and entitlements of the participants, accountability and benchmarking of outputs, and improvement and complaints mechanisms.  

Interestingly, the charter is not mandatory, and it is not intended to proscribe conformity, but be adaptable to different levels of government and different policy areas.  However, so long as the charter operates on the basis of “comply or explain”, it is clearly intended to build up public expectations that will in turn drive internal public sector reform. Given that the Dutch National Ombudsman has now picked it up as part of his evaluation principles, that pressure for change can only be expected to build.

This approach, especially given the different levels of government across Australia, is far more likely to be successful than a centrally mandated proscription. It also enables a progressive approach at different levels and at a different pace towards a stated objective. Local governments can determine what they can deliver now, and look at how to move towards implementing more in the future. There is also a nice synergy with the broad notion of citizen empowerment through a citizen centred approach—by the Government promulgating a set of “expectations”, the pressure to force reform and change is applied ultimately by citizens.

In my experience, change happens whenever you can measure something—so it’s important that we start measuring client focus and outcomes. To that end, I intend to write to all public service agency heads and asked them to review their service charters to ensure that this external pressure is genuinely applied to existing service delivery models.

Changing tack slightly, input from citizens can help design services, but a partnership with citizens, giving them an equal part in policy decision making, must be part of the bigger picture as well. The Australian Government has undertaken a number of initiatives in this area. Community cabinets and the 2020 summit are obvious examples. So too the reforms to the Freedom of Information legislation, which are aimed at creating a more open culture of government decision making—“if in doubt, let it out” will provide more accountability and give citizens more access to relevant information.

I am afraid, though, that the public service is still fumbling around with citizen engagement models. We haven’t yet found the right formula and at the moment we feel as bombarded with citizen input as most citizens feel about their email overload. Governments are used to managing big things on a large scale and making single big announcements, so personal e-communications or summits with thousands of people are difficult for us to respond to quickly and as effectively as participants might like. What should we extract from chat rooms and blogs, and how do we deal with citizens who are looking for immediate reactions to their wisdom?

Citizen focus requires integrated policy and service delivery

What citizens care about at the end of the day is how they experience government policy in reality. This requires much stronger integration between policy development and delivery, and not seeing them as entirely separate, because the public doesn’t see them that way.

Taking the aged care example I used earlier, many of the concerns for citizens like Phyllis are probably at the service delivery end—they don’t know or understand how to find their way around all the different services. If public servants spend all their time on policy at the programme level, even if they do consult users, they don’t see how those citizens experience dealing with a particular issue or event. It is therefore important that policy advisers engage actively with service delivers and citizens on the front line of service delivery.

Similarly, if we say that the citizen is at the centre, it is not enough to know what the citizen wants and thinks. The data and information provided by citizens needs to be strategically interpreted and analysed, and embedded in everyday public service business processes in order to drive service improvements and ensure the focus remains on the citizen.

Many public sector agencies have significant amounts of citizen intelligence, and those agencies that collect user satisfaction information generally report good levels of client satisfaction. But, it’s not enough; that information needs to be collated across agencies, mined to produce genuine insights, and used to change government programmes.

This is done, but only on a very limited basis today. It would be quite a revolution to have public service policy makers’ and service deliverers’ or programme managers’ work fully integrated around the needs of citizens, rather than largely separated and disconnected as now. More often than not policy makers and service deliverers are in a tussle, with each side demanding that they listen to the other and do what they want.  We see this dynamic played out again and again within government agencies, across jurisdictions and between government and non-government service providers. Getting these feedback loops working well is fundamental to delivering citizen centred services and the public service; could and should be doing this much better.  

We need to develop some best practice solutions to assist in capturing and analysing the citizen experience for policy makers, and then guide its integration into both business outcomes and service inputs, like training and development.

To this end, I would like to see:

Changes to the public service to focus on the citizen

What I am talking about is a departure from the standard model of public service delivery.  It requires public servants to not only operate in a new environment but to help change that environment.

Others need to be involved as well. Our legislators need to create the legal framework that will enable change to occur. Our agency heads, working with their Ministers, need to create the structures and funding arrangements within the public service best suited to a changed environment. There also needs to be a cultural shift to give service deliverers the power to structure services to individual needs and to enable them to do this within supportive accountability and risk management frameworks.

Such an approach isn’t driven just by benevolence on the part of government. Tailoring services to needs, rather than continuing to administer programmes from a supplier-driven perspective, can lead to better achievement of the outcomes desired by both governments and administrators. Such an approach, through closer engagement with service users, should also generate better signals back into government to refine policy and services.

Our Venturous Australia, captured by the recent innovation report, made the following observation:

“Innovation in the first decades of the 21st century is more open and pervasive, characterised by skill in collaborating and making connections so that knowledge flows and grows, and so becomes available to meet customer and community needs.”

Innovation and a citizen centred focus go hand in hand. Human capital is central to innovation and public servants, both State and Federal, need to be, if not hot-beds of innovation, then at least its breeding house.

Innovation won’t flourish in a non-nurturing environment. As Geoff Mulgan has succinctly put it:

“An explicit system of innovation needs to balance innovation-friendly internal structures, processes and cultures with sufficient porousness and permeability to make the most of innovations that come from outside.  In other words, public sectors need to exercise their own ‘innovation muscles’ and cultivate their hinterlands.”

A study of innovation in Commonwealth countries has shown that most innovation in the public sector is initiated by front-line staff and middle managers, and motivated more by recognition and pride than reward. These types of outcomes need to be understood by those charged with creating the new environment.

We clearly have work to do in the Australian public sector based on the results of my most recent State of the Service report. Only 49% of employees at middle manager levels felt that their agency encouraged innovation, only 54% were satisfied with their chance to be innovative and creative at work, and the vast majority didn’t think their agency had an “innovation culture”.  However, at a more personal level, 94% of employees were keen to learn new ideas, with more than 80% interested in trying new ideas regardless of the length of time they had been in the APS. 93% also said they were able to adapt to new challenges, and 85% said they were flexible and open to change. This suggests that if we can provide the structures and processes, we have a good start on the breeding house for the culture required.

To be innovative about citizen service, we will need to look at things like what are the real opportunities, who has responsibility, which aspects require a political will or direction, how will the budget be allocated, and how do we measure success. We need a performance model where we value innovation in organisational operations, and in which staff are actively encouraged and then supported to develop and implement ideas. Talent management and recruitment are important, and targeted mobility of staff will help break down entrenched methods and prevent stagnation. Above all, our leadership needs to take responsibility.

A fundamental problem is that the public service can’t be innovative in a straight jacket. The Commission recently published a paper which recognised that at the same time as policy implementation models are becoming less structured and more collaborative, accountability constraints tend to force public servants back into more traditional methods.

Citizen centred service will be less structured and more collaborative. Many services are already provided on behalf of the Government by third parties— public housing and employment services are just two examples. More and more, government will be a facilitator rather than a direct provider, and service networks across and between governments and the private sector will become the norm.

This will require risk taking and experimentation. No one would doubt however that accountability is fundamental to good government, least of all the citizen. We need to be able to find the balance and to design new accountability regimes that reflect the future environment.

We could think of our working environment as akin to a share portfolio. Most investors do not put all their funds into high risk ventures or shares; nor do they get ahead by keeping all their money in a shoe box under the bed. Many would have a portfolio with a few high risk strategies balanced by some moderate as well as low risk options.

We need to apply that strategy to the way in which we approach our operating environment—allow for some managed risk and be accepting of failure as a result. Not everything we do in endeavouring to serve the citizen will be perfect and not everything will be exactly what is required. We have to accept that, we have to try new things, and we have to learn and move on. Our accountability and responsibility regime needs to let us do that.

Threats and considerations

If we are genuine about a high level of citizen engagement, there is a whole different dimension to the issue. We need to avoid the DEAD end process—where we Decide, Educate, Announce and then Defend—and then call it participation. Your own Professor Janette Hartz-Karp has referred to this process in describing various community consultation initiatives where there is listening, but it is undertaken primarily to legitimise the decisions that then emerge (or have already been made), rather than to genuinely share decision making. Worse still is listening but doing nothing—a common criticism of government.

A more positive example might be the current review of Australia’s taxation system. The chair of the review Ken Henry stated at the outset that he wanted to approach issues from the perspective of everyday citizens. Public participation meetings were held across Australia, and over 50% of submissions received responding to a discussion paper were from individuals. These have been analysed and summarised, and released as part of an ongoing process. Further questions are asked, research identified, and an almost iterative process will continue up until the Government takes its decisions.

There are degrees of deliberative democracy—through community forums, citizen juries (as occurred here with the Reid Highway), citizen assemblies (which both British Columbia and Ontario have used successfully) and citizen initiated referendums. Each has their own plusses and minuses, and not all of them are suitable for each and every situation. We need to understand what works and when to expect the government to truly begin to let go.

Renee Irvin and John Stansbury also remind us that there is danger in romanticizing the process. They ask the question “do citizens care enough to participate actively in policy-making or would resources devoted to participatory processes be better directed toward implementation”, and they note that some citizen focused processes may be ineffectual and wasteful compared to traditional top down decision making. So too governments will not and cannot be expected to share everything—issues such as national intelligence for instance.

Federalism offers another dimension—common outcomes negotiated at the centre and spread across the nation through standard legislation is potentially problematic in an inclusive and open citizen involvement process.

There are also complex issues and threats which require strong action by nation states and public institutions at a global and national level, and Marcel Pochard suggests this role for public authorities may be “more decisive for the future than that relating solely to everyday needs of citizens”.

Conclusion

We cannot serve if we just stand and wait—the mountain certainly will not come to us—and we must be strategic in how we get to its summit.  I believe that in Australia we have a sound base camp from which to launch the assault.

We need to be cognisant of the issues and understand the key drivers. These need to be brought together with a clear set of values into a single policy statement, to guide our future service endeavours. We must ensure we then have the architecture in our systems—be it structural, operational or even electoral—to facilitate change, and that our human capital accepts that change is coming.

To paraphrase Susan B Anthony, “cautious careful people do not bring about reform.  Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the estimation of others, and bear the consequences”. The participants in this new environment—our public servants, our politicians, and our public—need to grasp what that means for all of them and to act accordingly. To do so, our dialogue needs to move from being one about citizens, to being one with citizens.

I have covered a lot in a short time, and hope that I haven’t done too much of it a disservice. I have hopefully poked some of the issues which I believe we need to bring together more cohesively, and be consciously aware of, as we move further down this citizen road. Some of them will no doubt be further examined and dissected at a CAPAM conference which I am pleased to be hosting in October this year, and to which you are all invited.

Thank you.

 

1. with apologies to John Milton.

2. which has also been adopted by New Zealand and South Australia.

go up Start of page