Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

There are nevertheless areas that require attention, including:• the specification of strategic priorities should be enhanced through development of a clearline of sight from vision to delivery and back – the entirety of what the ACTPS doesshould be explicitly aligned with achievement of the Government’s priorities;• objectives, priorities and actions should be specified at a level that is meaningful andmeasureable, and should also be manageable in number;• the trend to fragmentation of responsibility across the ACTPS must be reversed;• current arrangements in relation to land and planning are at best hindering, if not activelyobstructing achievement of the Government’s priorities;• the ACTPS needs to work better together in a genuinely collaborative and aligned way inpursuit of the Government’s priorities;• the ACTPS needs to work better with the community and genuinely engage with therecipients of services, and centres of expertise, in policy and program design;• the ACTPS needs to embrace learning, adopt leading practice and harness the capabilityof its workforce to improve systems and ways of working; and• the ACTPS needs to be structured in a way that supports the ways of working, alignmentand cohesion of effort that will be critical if it is to continue to meet the expectations ofgovernments of the day, and the people of Canberra.Traditional public service departments and hierarchies are not well adapted to dealing withthe complex and interrelated issues to which governments around the world are increasinglybeing required to turn their minds, but structural change alone is a blunt instrument forimproving performance. The ACTPS is nevertheless uniquely (and fortunately) placed to bea leader in innovation in public policy design and service delivery. The size of the ACTPS,the contained geographic scope of Canberra, the presence of leading academic institutions,and collocation of the Australian Public Service create fertile ground for developing anddemonstrating leading public service practice and performance.The ACTPS will be able to serve the Government better by focusing on a smaller number ofpriorities to which meaningful, measurable indicators can be attached. The ACTPS is smalland spreading it thinly across a large number of priorities risks achieving none of them. TheGovernment’s strategic planning framework, centred on the Canberra Plan, is sound, butcould be implemented better.There is, for example, a gap in the formulation and articulation of “how” the Government’sstrategic intent will be delivered and how priorities interrelate. The ACTPS is succeeding inthe detail, but perhaps missing the mark in its understanding and pursuit of the whole.It is generating a reporting burden that is a genuine risk to delivery of results, and theGovernment on occasion makes decisions on what might be good things, without robust,coordinated, and comprehensive advice from its officials on whether they are the right things.Executive Summary: 3