verging_on_random

Outsourcing government

June 15, 2007 on 3:43 pm | In Uncategorized |

I posted a while back about the Howard mob’s brazen cheek in claiming credit for managing the economy when they had outsourced most of the key economic decisions to independent bodies like the Reserve Bank and the Fair Pay Commission. Just this week two other bloggers have posted with variations on the same broad theme.

First Ken Parish at Club Troppo wrote a terrific piece about the way contemporary politics has degenerated into one continuous election campaign, while over at Blogocracy, Tim Dunlop noted the secret workings of a group that is trying to change the way pharmeceuticals are priced in Australia.

The theme that runs through these and other pieces is that governments are no longer governing - they are devoting all their energies to getting re-elected. Politics has become one more reality TV show, with the endless polls the public’s way of voting for their favourite candidates. I suggested in jest recently that someone should set up an electoral worm that continuously monitors voting sentiments amongst the population but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it happens.

The inevitable outcome of this of course is that governments no longer have time left to worry about governing. This is obvious in the states where public administration has gone from bad to dreadful over the last few decades. Whether it’s public transport in Sydney or public hospitals in Queensland or water supply practically anywhere, state governments have proven to be incompetent at basic public administration. The same thing is apparent in the USA, where all levels of government are still struggling to work out how to sort out the mess in New Orleans from two years ago.

In federal politics the managerial catatonia of the Howard Government is evident in its record since gaining control of both houses in June, 2005. With the exception of WorkChoices, which was basically a political act aimed at destroying trade unions and thereby the whole Australian labour movement, the government has done bugger-all with its power. Indeed it continues its relentless election campaign as if it was the opposition, trying manfully to discredit the policies of the Rudd Government.

Even politicians, however, are smart enough to know that public administration still has to be done. That’s why we have seen the steady growth of inquiries and commissions and all manner of other institutions that are taking over what used to be the core business of government. And far and away the biggest beneficiary of this outsourcing of public administration has been the private sector.

The privatisation of administration could be justified in the beginning on grounds of better service and lower costs. Competition drives efficiency improvements in the way public service never can etcetera. This rhetoric, soundly-based as far as it went, disguised the fact that you can’t outsource administration without simultaneously outsourcing policy. Talk of service obligations and so on is all very fine but it soon becomes obvious that these are empty words. What’s going to happen if Telstra lets regional services decline … is the government going to re-nationalise it? Deport Sol Trujillo?

The same kind of emerging problem is evident in Iraq, where there are nearly as many quasi-military contractor staff as there are US troops. These private armies are not subject to military oversight or command and have become a factor greatly complicating the Bush Administration’s attempts to manage a coherent occupation policy.

Fortunately, within Australia, empowering independent bodies to carry out government tasks has produced pretty good results so far. That’s probably because once you appoint people to things like courts and commissions you largely insulate them from the public backlash if their actions cause some pain in the community. That’s why pollies like using them of course: they can tell people to direct their anger at the Reserve Bank if interest rates go up, nothing to do with us mate. At the same time the public can’t do anything worth a damn to punish the independent body apart from whining on talk-back radio, so everyone involved in public administration is happy and the technocrats can make decisions that are in the best interests of the whole community.

The trouble is that there are limits to the extent to which the business of government can be outsourced without changing the whole nature of our society. The Fair Pay Commission, for example, is now authorised to make decisions affecting millions of workers but it’s literally a law unto itself; its decisions are made in secret and are subject to no oversight by anyone whatsoever. It is quite literally unaccountable. Should we ever get another Clyde Cameron as Minister for Labour, he could quite easily stack the FPC with those dreaded union bosses and smile while they forced minimum wages up to unprecedented levels.

Issues like the minimum wage, which have strong party-political overtones, also greatly outnumber those like interest rates where the public policy objective of containing inflation has broad community support. The greater the number of contentious matters sent off to ‘independent’ bodies to run, the less influence do ordinary citizens have over things that concern them and the less democratic our system of government becomes.

Even worse, the practice of outsourcing everything becomes an ingrained habit so that governments refuse to act unless they can do it. This mentality has been evident in public discussions of the water crisis, with Steve Bracks suggesting that instead of governments overseeing a $10 billion program it should be gifted to a ‘Reserve Bank style’ body. Anything, in other words, but accept responsibility for administration. We saw where this ends with the AWB fiasco, where people allegedly acted corruptly and against Australian national interests and nobody in government was prepared to accept that it had anything to do with them.

If this tendency continues, governments will eventually become like the Board of Directors of a sprawling conglomerate; the only function of politicians will be to appoint the members of the various institutions that actually run the place. Everything else will be one endless grubby struggle for the perks of office. Some might think that might lead to better outcomes than the model of ministerial accountability that we’ve had for so long.

Me, I think it’s a recipe for Australia to become like the larger South American nations, where politics is a corrupt joke and nobody is accountable for anything.