How much damage can a politicized public service do? Lessons from Australia

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Andrew Podger,Donald F. Kettl
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13789

PRACTICALLY SPEAKING

How much damage can a politicized public service do?

Lessons from Australia

Andrew Podger

1,2

| Donald F. Kettl

3

1

Former Commissioner, Australian Public Service, Canberra, ACT, Australia

2

Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

3

Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Correspondence

Andrew Podger, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.

Email: andrew@podger.com.au

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Many public administrators are struggling with the rela-

tionship between themselves—most of whom are career

civil servants—on the one hand, and those political offi-

cials who are elected or appointed on the other, and with

whom they must deal every day. That struggle has even

spilled over into the debate in the US and elsewhere over

the existence and influence of a so-called “deep state”

bureaucracy that according to some, really runs our

governments.

So, the practical question: Are civil servants subordi-

nate to political officials and to those that elect them, or

are they co-equals with them, collaborating with them

but each with its own separate but overlapping set of

interests and responsibilities? Or given the inherent ambi-

guities here, does that relationship vary depending on

the issue at hand?

These questions have all sorts of day-to-day implica-

tions for those who practice and study public manage-

ment, and that is the subject of the article that follows. It

focuses on lessons learned in Australia during the devel-

opment, implementation, and subsequent undoing of

something called Robodebt (see the details below), an ini-

tiative that could easily happen just about anywhere,

especially given the promises and perils of artificial intelli-

gence (AI).

That is one of the reasons Robodebt is relevant to

practitioners, and it raises issues that have become all too

common in public administration. In Australia’s search for

cost-cutting initiatives, its government launched a new

algorithm (a.k.a., Robodebt) to catch overpayments to

recipients of the country’s social welfare programs. That

automated system compared government payments with

what the algorithm calculated people should have

received.

For many recipients, however, the algorithm mistak-

enly generated big bills, which caused big financial emer-

gencies and even led some recipients to suicide. Elected

officials were impatient with the warnings of Australian

career civil service experts. And for their part, those

experts were afraid to provide the warnings that elected

officials needed to hear; indeed, some senior civil servants

were so keen to please their political leaders that they

promoted the scheme and ignored their expert staff. The

result: Robodebt ended in scandal.

A subsequent Royal Commission concluded that

Robodebt was “a crude and cruel mechanism,”and “a

costly failure of public administration.”It asked the former

commissioner of Australia’s public service, Andrew Pod-

ger to provide his views on the public service breakdowns

that gave rise to the policy. Among other things,

Mr. Podger’s report (as summarized herein) called for a

searching re-examination of governance in Australia and

its long tradition of public administrators providing “frank

and fearless”advice to politicians, but it also has impor-

tant implications for the “deep state”debate in the US

and in countries around the world.

Co-authored by Mr. Podger and noted political scien-

tist and public administration scholar Don Kettl, the article

deliberately departs from more traditional academic

research—a departure that we hope will become more

Accepted: 28 November 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13789

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

160 Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:160–172.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar