POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Anne Tiernan

Hugh Heclo describes government agencies as “bundles of memory and practices that are inherited from a particular past and carried forward.” Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay confirms this: an institution’s memory lies partly in its traditions – in its processes of socialisation and the stories that are told and retold from one generation to the next. Seldom is such knowledge written down. Much of it is tacit, known informally and passed on verbally. It is learnt through apprenticeship and refined through practice and experience.

Many observers (including the chiefs of staff and senior officials I have interviewed) believe that institutional memory is now under threat. In Westminster systems, the bureaucracy’s rationale is to provide continuity of administration and institutional memory for governments, whatever their political hue. Instead we have what British political scientist Christopher Pollitt describes as “organisational forgetting.” Of course, as we have seen, there is nothing neutral about institutional memory; politics is inherent to judgments about what to remember and what to forget – hence the ferocity of the history wars that were once waged between the political parties, but now rage within them – including, as we have seen since 2010, and as Malcolm Turnbull is learning to his chagrin, within incumbent governments.

Laura has taken what was until now an academic and insider debate and made it accessible to an informed readership. She builds a compelling and mostly persuasive case. Our political institutions and policy processes have become debased to the point where a large proportion of Australia’s citizens, its business and community leaders now seriously doubts their capacity to address current and future challenges. I strongly concur with her diagnosis that this is the unintended consequence of more than forty years of almost continuous “reform.” She is so right when she observes that, “we have not at any point stopped to look back and frankly assess what has been good and what has been bad, and whether we need to change not just policy but the way we think about entire issues, and how we think about the role of the public sector.” 

I am less convinced that problems delivering the Rudd government’s stimulus programs in response to the global financial crisis were attributable to a lack of memory within the Commonwealth public service about how to implement large capital programs. I contend that this exposed a quite different kind of forgetting – one that is much more pervasive and troubling. It seems to me Australia’s political class and the press gallery no longer remembers what constitutes an appropriate role for the federal government. Successive reviews and inquiries have shown that much of the necessary expertise was available at the state level. As with so many recent Commonwealth forays into areas of state responsibility, this expertise was neither sought nor heard. The issue, then, was less one of institutional memory than of habit and culture among Commonwealth ministers and their departments in their dealings with their sub-national counterparts; and a lack of respect for the “rules of the game” about who can and should do what within Australia’s federal system. 

Laura’s provocative questions are “Can we fix it?” and “Where does it lead us if we don’t?” I have argued elsewhere that ministers are the missing link in public sector reform. We have a structural problem that, in many ways, ministers have brought on themselves. The hybrid model that emphasised responsiveness, that has led to centralisation, small group decision-making and a tendency to focus on the short term, has begun to fray and show its limits. Political leaders are failing to learn the lessons of experience – theirs and others – and it is costing them.

The question is how to build a plank of continuity into the arrangements of government. The United States has been grappling with this dilemma for sixty years. It is a fruitful source of ideas for mechanisms to enhance institutional memory. In the American parlance, the goal of every new administration is to “hit the ground running.” Yet few incoming presidents have been able to make the most of the opportunities that present briefly at their transition to government. What Terry Sullivan has called the “triple curses of arrogance, adrenaline and naiveté” can afflict electoral winners, making it difficult fbor them to absorb the lessons of past experience. Yet learning is crucial, to facilitate a smooth and successful transition and to avoid repeating mistakes that can have long-term consequences for a new administration. 

In the United States, scholars and practitioners have made two major efforts to address the problem of institutional memory in the White House. The first are studies of the president’s chief of staff, where former occupants of the position, from both sides of politics, come together to share insights and lessons from their time in office. The published outcomes of such projects provide “primers” for current and prospective White House staff. The second is an ongoing research collaboration, the White House Transition Project, which provides non-partisan advice and information intended to support an incoming administration to make a smooth transition to government. Its findings are available on a dedicated website: whitehousetransitionproject.org.

Such detailed empirical work into the roles and functions of the Australian prime minister’s office and the offices of senior ministers and other key office holders is perhaps less necessary here than in the American context, where many thousands of positions are filled by political appointees at the start of a new administration. Even if diminished, a professional and impartial career public service remains a potential source of institutional memory – available to all leaders, should they choose to engage it. But, as Laura has shown, this will require significant renovation, including the fashioning of a new narrative tradition that would enable the public service to transcend the serious damage wrought by the disruptive changes of recent years and the behaviour of political and some bureaucratic leaders.

A generation of public servants no longer knows or understands the “rules of the game” because these rules have been violated or dismantled. In the words of the legendary mandarin Sir Arthur Tange, the “symmetry” of the Westminster model has been fractured and not replaced. We know from research that there is no agreement on either the stewardship role of the public service or what now constitutes a “proper” relationship between ministers and public servants. This is a live debate in the UK, where civil servants have identified the relationship with ministers as the “unresolved constitutional question.”

Focused effort is needed to recover the craft of public administration. We need, too, to broker a new bargain between ministers, their staff and public servants, where the default is trust, mutual respect and a commitment to work together in the public interest.

In Australia, Rod Rhodes and I have suggested that the search to preserve institutional memory could begin with a review of the arrangements for ministerial staffers. This hybrid system has evolved through accretion rather than design. We might consider other models which ensure that prime ministers get the mix of responsive and neutral competence that they need to discharge their complex obligations. We could ask, for example, whether a politically appointed Senior Executive Service, in preference to ministerial staffers, could help to improve links between ministers and the public service. Other systems cope with politicised public service appointments by requiring candidates to be subject to confirmation processes, for example.

Other options might include considering whether Australian prime ministers might be better served by longer, more formal transition periods. In the US, the period between the election and Inauguration Day is seventy-five days. It’s unlikely so long a period would be required (or tolerated by our hyper-partisans), but something a bit longer than the current “morning after the night before” might be worth contemplating – not least because, as we know from Kevin Rudd’s experience, and perhaps too from Tony Abbott’s, exhausted people taking the reins after a frenetic and bitter election campaign may not make the best decisions. It may be worth considering, too, formal support for transition planning, as has been the case in the United States since 1963.

There remains a fundamental dilemma about how to reconcile responsiveness and agility with experience and institutional memory. Laura has made the case for why we need a wide-ranging debate about how we can learn to remember. So urgent has the loss of institutional memory become that Rod Rhodes and I have argued that the next wave of public-sector reforms should focus on ways of preserving it. 

Anne Tiernan