The next long wave of reform: where will the ideas come from? Part 2.

Economies such as ours are now experiencing a new debate about localism (as it is described in the UK), or a increasingly broad role for city government or regions (this being the focus of the debate in the United States). The Europeans have for some time called this subsidiarity for some time. Community deals is another way of thinking about it.
This trend to localism has also begun to emerge in Australian public policy debates, which turn on a positive view of the public sector and its many institutions. We have seen this over the last 12 months in the reviews by Sandra McPhee into jobactive, by Peter Shergold in his review — still not released — of settlement outcomes for refugees, and just last week by David Thodey in his ongoing review of the Australian Public Service (APS). It is all about connecting flexibly at the local level with networks, service providers, local government, and opportunities. By this means, we can localise accountability and build connection and support for those who need it.
The Centre for Policy Development has been active on this front for some time. We have found that locally-connected, place-based approaches to delivering critical services achieve good results. In recent months, one of our staff members has been embedded in the City of Wyndham to help them develop a new economic and social inclusion framework. The City hopes to receive State and Federal funding for the trial. This requires activity-based funding for recognised pathways to employment, not a tender-based model driven by price rather than results. It means Canberra letting go to a backbone institution at the local level. It requires an active role for government on the ground.
The current system is madness. We have buckets of money being spent by federal, state, and local governments, as well as by charities, on the same people, without any coordination, often without local experience, and usually with poor results. Coombs found in the mid seventies that the Commonwealth needed to find a new way to operate at the local level. It has been a singular failure in social policy programs. We need to admit failure, and invent new approaches.
I hope local approaches are backed and our obsession with the contracted state ends, because of David Thodey’s review of the Australian Public Service (APS). But I fear we are at grave risk of dancing around the most critical reforms. The announcement last week by Minister O’Dwyer that jobactive contracts would be extended by two years to 2022 is the latest example of putting the hard reforms into the too hard basket.
Which brings me back to my brief, and to the Australian Public Service. In a speech about 18 months ago, I argued that government and the public service must get back in the game. We need that now more than ever.
The starting point for Australian missions — the starting point for our new moonshots — is to reinvest in the creative elements of our public services, enriched by direct experience of the services Australians expect government to provide.
Just as it was rebuilt to deliver on nation building, and rebuilt again for the second wave of reform built on insights from economics, the APS will need to be rebuilt once more for the third wave of reform, once it is agreed. Reform initiatives focused on institutions and delivery will support if not open the way to these big ideas, or to others like them. Such initiatives might be based on five proposals:
Unless we renovate our institutions and the approach taken by the federal government to the delivery of services, we are at risk of heightened populism in the next decade, and all the disharmony and simple nastiness which will flow from it.
All of us have responsibility to advocate for a debate about the next wave of big ideas — the missions we can all support and — a contemporary view of the light on the hill.