Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

The public sector
back to the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report to the British government. This report
essentially established the Westminster tradition of a professional and non-partisan
public service recruited on merit rather than patronage. The Westminster tradition
hadaformativeeffectonthedevelopmentoftheAustraliancolonialgovernmentsat
the time, and, subsequently, on the Commonwealth government. 3
The tradition includes the principle that the public service is accountable to
ministers, and ministers are individually and collectively accountable to parliament
and the electorate. The Westminster tradition clearly distinguishes between the
political role of ministers, who ‘have the last word’ on all matters for which they are
responsible, and a bureaucracy that is non-partisan, in that it can only be appointed
and removed according to legislated rules, works loyally for whoever occupies
the ministry, regardless of their political stance, and strenuously avoids active
political participation. 4 The principle of ministerial control over the departments
and agencies in their areas of responsibility is a pre-eminent factor in determining
how the public sector is structured, a matter we return to in the next section.
Australia’s federal system provides the second set of norms and principles governing
the public sector. The public sector operates at three levels of government: the
national government, state and territory governments and municipal governments.
Officials work with one another within each of these levels, and across the
Commonwealth–state and state–local levels to develop and implement government
policies and programs, particularly when national policy frameworks are needed
to deliver economic, environmental or other reforms. The federal system shapes
the way policies are designed and implemented by the three levels of government,
including how, when and to what extent the different levels of government engage
with one another, how responsibilities for policy design and delivery are allocated,
how performance is measured and reported and, perhaps most importantly, how the
resources for these functions are collected and distributed.
The structure of the public sector
The relative independence of a public sector organisation from the government
of the day is a fundamental design principle inherited from the Westminster
tradition. 5 Within that context, the structures, forms and functions of the public
sector at any time reflect government choices about what public goods and services
to supply, to what extent and in what manner. Accordingly, the way public sector
bodies are set up and function varies considerably along a continuum from the
3 Parker 1978, 349.
4 Rhodes 2005. The risk of politicisation, or even the appearance of such, has become greater in
the age of social media and the erosion of traditional public servant anonymity. The changing
ways in which public officials engage with the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’
and the blurring between them is explored in Alford et al. 2017.
5 O’Faircheallaigh, Wanna and Weller 1999, 87.
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