Does anyone in the Australian public service get held to account?

To the extent that it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: the once-respected public service has a major problem around competence.

We’ve been tracking the growing problem of public service bungling for a couple of years now, and the evidence is that things are getting worse, not better. The highest profile public service casualty of recent times has been Border Force’s Roman Quaedvlieg, but his dismissal wasn’t the result of underperformance. The comprehensive failure of the agriculture department to effectively regulate live export companies for animal welfare, revealed by the decade-long non-compliance of sheep exporter Emanuel Exports, led to the relevant minister publicly savaging his own bureaucrats for their failure to do their jobs properly. No one at agriculture will, as far as we know, be held to account for the failure, though. Bureaucrats there will just endure the humiliation of having Attorney-General’s staff come in and give them lessons on how to regulate properly.

Nor will anyone at Prime Minister and Cabinet will face legal action in relation to the trove of sensitive material that found its way to the ABC before being handed back by a cowed national broadcaster. Given the Abbott and Turnbull governments have dramatically extended their own powers to combat what they describe as “insider threats to national security” but which the rest of us call whistleblowers, it’s a strange outcome. Having postured about the need for draconian powers to ensure national security information isn’t revealed, having sought to criminalise basic forms of journalism such as receiving information that is in the public interest, the loss of thousands of pages of sensitive and in some cases cabinet documents seems to have yielded surprisingly little in terms of consequences for the bureaucrats involved.

Perhaps they’ve moved on to other jobs or retired. That’s one of the great mechanisms for avoiding accountability in the public service, one that’s regularly on show at every estimates hearings and at senate inquiries involving the public service — bureaucrats nodding understandingly and declaring how much they wished they could help the senator with her question, but sadly the officer involved is no longer with the department and they themselves have only recently commenced in the position.

But even for public servants that remain in position, there’s little to fear as a result of demonstrated incompetence. Last year, the Australian National Audit Office, after examining the handling of underperformance in eight public service agencies, concluded “there is significant room for improvement in the management of underperformance”. According to the ANAO, “underperformance is not being accurately identified and the proportion of employees undergoing structured underperformance processes is very low in all agencies.”

While you’d hope that a low number of employees would have been identified as underperforming, the plethora of problems found in the public service in recent years — Immigration bungling billion-dollar contracts and locking up Australian citizens again, the census debacle, the robodebt scandal, the repeated loss of personal information, and many others — suggests that the low level doesn’t reflect a dearth of candidates. Instead, there are internal barriers to managing underperformance — it’s time-consuming for managers, the procedures required are often repetitive and unnecessary and underperforming public servants can use sick leave to evade the process or allege bullying or harassment — which in turn deters managers from trying to deal with underperformers.

Sometimes, from the point of view of agencies, there’s been no underperformance. Immigration refused to accept the ANAO’s criticisms of its quite spectacular bungling of offshore processing contracts. Agriculture’s refusal to properly regulate live sheep exports perfectly fitted the view of former minister Barnaby Joyce, who boasted of restoring the trade. If there’s no disincentive for underperformance, then underperformance becomes inevitable — and all the more so if the underperformance is actually endorsed from the Secretary or Minister downward.