from Crikey .....

Keane essay: the myth of governmental competence

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

ANAO, BERNARD KEANE ON THE FEDERAL ELECTION 2010, HOWARD GOVERNMENT, HUNG PARLIAMENT, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

"Competence" has proven to be a potent tool for conservatives here and elsewhere recently. Republicans have assailed Barack Obama as incompetent, particularly in the oleaginous wake of his handling of the BP oil spill. David Cameron hammered Gordon Brown, whose economic competence was once his principal claim to the Prime Ministership, over it in the lead-up to the UK election. And it was the central theme of Tony Abbott's campaign against Labor that has him on the cusp of minority government.

It's a longstanding theme in politics. The Left is soft-hearted, but has no discipline. The Right is hard-hearted, but good at management. In an ancient Simpsons episode from a generation ago, an elephant escapes and rampages through Republican and Democrat gatherings. The Democrats clutch placards saying "We can't govern!" and boo the animal, while the Republicans, bearing signs like "We hate everything", cheer. It sums the narrative up perfectly.

However, competence in a Westminster-based system, or a variant of it like Australia's federal system, is altogether more complex than slogans might suggest, given that elections change governments, but not administrators. Politicians act as executives, and make major decisions, but the implementation of their decisions is left to unelected bureaucrats. Further, as more and more functions of government have been outsourced, much of the implementation of their decisions is increasingly in the hands of the private sector, acting either under contract to government, or acting unilaterally, but with some market-based incentive reflecting policy intentions.

The Howard Government is conventionally viewed as a competent government - fiscally lax in its last term, true, and it left us with a structural budget deficit, but it was solidly reformist in at least its first two terms.

But as I pointed out back in March, if the same standards that were applied to the Rudd Government by the Press Gallery in the context of the insulation saga had been applied to the Howard Government, a different perception might have emerged. There was a direct link between IR decisions by Howard Government ministers and the deaths of building workers. There was a direct link between the failure of the Howard Government to remedy the military justice system despite repeated warnings, and the deaths of ADF personnel. These deaths are far greater in number than those attributed to problems in the insulation program for which Peter Garrett was so unfairly pilloried.

Considered from the perspective of administration, too, the Howard Government's record was very mixed, and not just in high-profile areas like Bronwyn Bishop's kerosene bath disasters in aged care, or the nightmarish treatment of Vivien Solon, Cornelia Rau and Mohammed Haneef by a gung-ho Immigration Department. Crikey has examined the reports of the Australian National Audit Office from 1998-2007 in an effort to get a complete picture of how "competent" the Howard Government was, to compare with the ongoing campaign by the Coalition - which boasts considerable continuity with the Howard Government - to claim it is automatically more competent than Labor.

First, some perspective: nearly all ANAO audits find something to criticise. The auditors are advocates of Best Practice - or, as management-speak now renders it, Better Practice. About the highest praise you can get from them is the comment "there are some examples of better practice in the Department's administration of this program" - the equivalent of a gold star from the hard-to-impress folks at Centenary House.

But we found 29 examples of serious criticism of Howard Government programs from the auditors, where they laid into the way programs were run or policies were implemented, not just for poor filing or not having KPIs identified right from the outset, but for errors that cost substantial amounts of taxpayer money.

Some were, in the scheme of things, not that important. The guns buyback scheme - probably John Howard's finest moment - was rushed so quickly that millions of dollars ended up being spent buying weapons that were already illegal, from people who should have faced prosecution rather than been given compensation. The private health insurance rebate was initially set up so that people were able to double-claim millions of dollars. The Federation Fund was found to be entirely politicised in its administration by the Prime Minister's own office. The $400m Plasma Fractionation program was badly administered by the Health Department.

But the Howard Government was repeatedly criticised for mismanagement on a much greater scale. The first tranche of the Telstra sale was badly underpriced, and it cost taxpayers $12b in 1997 dollars (the best part of $18b now). And the sale agency, the Office of Asset Sales and IT Outsourcing, didn't even bother checking the invoices it got from high-priced sale consultants, and simply paid them, adding a huge premium to sale costs.