Taking advantage of Australia’s high level of Internet use, by 1999 Australia was recognised as a leader in e-government with European and North American policy makers visiting Canberra and Melbourne to see how it was done. Though it is suggested that Australia has fallen away from its pioneering role since 1999, with e-government pages being used by 47% of the total Australian population by 2003 (Canada 57%, the Netherlands 52%, the US 44% and UK 18%), e-government is still achieving important aims. For instance, by 2002, 25% of the 2.2 million Australians doing their own tax returns were doing so by submitting e-tax forms. An Australian Business Number (ABN) was introduced to assign a unique identification number to every Australian business in conjunction with the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2000; and Australia scored well in regard to tax agency staff efficiency and low administrative costs — with 639 registered taxpayers per Tax Administration Employee for 2004 (669 in Canada, 420 in Japan and 358 in the UK), and use of e-governance with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) recording 12.4 page requests per registered taxpayer by 2006 (New Zealand 9.4, Canada 8.1, The Netherlands 3.4, USA 3.3, UK 2.1 and Japan 0.6).

In 2006, a new ‘Service Agenda’ was also introduced in Australia with the aim of producing fewer letters (either paper or electronic) by 10% per year from 2006 to 2010 (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow and Tinkler 2008).

Other recent measures by Australian governments to both improve direct government services and help society more efficiently utilise resources include:

• The introduction of the BasicsCard, a PIN-protected card for buying essential goods and services through the existing EFTPOS network, which helps ensure that half of welfare payments force targeted recipients to purchase essential items (APSC 2008).
• The use of electronic voting for Australian Defence personnel serving overseas at the 2007 federal election — which marked the first time this capability has been used in both a technical and a business context (APSC 2008), and offers a possibility for the technology to expand to enhance cost and efficiency at future elections.
• The Australian Taxation Office easing public and business difficulties by producing and improving a Making It Easier to Comply booklet over the past five years which details ATO’s ‘current and future work designed to make the taxpayer experience easier, cheaper and more personalised’ (APSC 2008).
• To improve citizen-centred service delivery, Centrelink provided a drought bus to assist communities in drought and flood-affected areas with advice on specific drought and flood relief and to assist on tax, health issues and even depression. In the year to June 2008, a large proportion of the 13,000 customers who utilised the bus were new to Centrelink (Moran 2009).
• The introduction of the Queensland government’s QGap, another citizen-centred delivery service, that delivers 100 services through 70 outlets in rural and remote Queensland. By offering services at one counter in a community (perhaps a post office, a local clerk of the court, a newsagent or another small shop), a cheaper system emerges while the public interacts with a local person rather than a distant bureaucrat. The system also promotes local business and helps an individual town. A franchise agreement with the State pays the agent per referred query. (Moran 2009).

Public service innovation is also an emerging area of academic inquiry, referred to as ‘new governance’. New governance is concerned with articulating a more explicitly ‘experimentalist’ approach to innovation in public policy. This work, which draws upon innovation management experience in the automotive industry, stresses the ways in which, in an uncertain decision-making environment, managers in the public sector are better off adopting explicitly exploratory and experimental approaches in which goals and intended outcomes are fairly fluid, efforts are redirected as learning advances, and overly hierarchical command and control systems are avoided (see Sabel 1994; Sabel and Zeitlin 2003).

There is academic criticism of new governance literature and similar approaches. For instance, Cohen (2008) argues that ‘New governance scholars have paid less attention to micro-questions of how citizens might capably engage in decentralised and participatory models of governance than they have to macro-questions of public institutional design’.

Further, Alford and Hughes (2008) believe that New Public Management and more recent approaches (such as networked governance or collaboration) still share with ‘their predecessors the problem that they tend toward a one-best-way orientation’. They stress the need for ‘public value pragmatism’ which notes that ‘the best management approach to adopt depends on the circumstances, such as the value being produced, the context, or the nature of the task’ (Alford and Hughes 2008).

There is also evidence to suggest that cost-cutting has been a feature of recent governments, an aspect which complicates the aim of risk-taking public innovation that may require considerable resources devoted to experimentation and an associated likelihood of failure.

For instance, it has been argued that New Labour’s emphasis upon the Third Way ideology in the UK has stressed ‘equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome’ (Taylor-Gooby 2008) and has been associated with an enhanced role for Non Government Organisations (NGOs) in Whitehall’s reform agenda. As a result, public sector innovation in the UK has been accompanied by the turnover of voluntary organisations increasing from about £16 billion to over £27 billion between 1997–98 and 2004–05 with the associated Third Sector workforce increasing by about 20% (Laffin 2009).

As Bourgon (2008) argues, public innovation in partnership with NGOs is needed because ‘Governments cannot do it all’ and ‘there is no going back to the all-knowing, all-encompassing role of the government in the context of welfare states’. ‘We need to find ways to engage ministers in the decision-making process surrounding risks, innovations and experimentations’ as ‘there have been few serious discussions about these topics between elected officials at the highest levels in Cabinet, in government and in the legislative assemblies’.

As Heilmann (2008) states, policy experimentation, which refers to the workings of novel policies and their impact on major social, market, or administrative actors, often means ‘innovating through implementation first, and drafting universal laws and regulations later’. This is in direct contrast from standard assumptions about policy-making given that the ‘conventional model of the policy process that is widely taken for granted by jurists, economists, and political scientists holds that policy analysis, formulation, and embodiment in legislation precede implementation’ (Heilmann 2008).

In other words, as put by the UK National Audit Office, NAO (2009), ‘an innovation is a project for which an organisation has no tried and tested method or track record of success’. And with the current global economic downturn and tightening public finances, the NAO(2009) has stipulated the need for ongoing public innovation given that ‘there are pressing social, demographic and environmental challenges that will demand the development of innovative products, business processes and ways of delivering services’.

An urgent need to promote innovation to address complex issues has long been recognised by the APSC. A 2007 publication Tackling Wicked Problems, A Public Policy Perspective, which refers to major policy issues that are very complex and highly resistant to resolution, urged new ways of solving problems in order to grasp ‘the big picture, including the interrelationships among the full range of causal factors underlying them’. For instance, in regard to the issue of land degradation, the report urged solutions that involved private landholders who managed 60% of Australia’s land in order to promote sustainable production systems to help prevent further degradation, achieve rehabilitation and assist sustainable resource use (APSC 2007: 1–2).

The APSC (2008) also notes that, despite recent government attempts to promote greater innovation and flexibility through structural reforms that reduce hierarchy and increase autonomy for staff, there is a need to consider a better performance and accountability framework and increase incentives in performance management systems to encourage innovation among staff.

In a 2007–08 APS survey, the APSC found that, despite 93% of employees indicating that they were able to adapt and respond to new challenges quickly, the proportion of employees confident about how ‘their agencies managed change’ dropped to 36% in 2007–08 compared to 43% in 2006–07.

Furthermore, the proportion of respondents ‘satisfied with their chance to be creative and innovative at work’ fell to 54% in 2007–08 compared to 70% in 2006–07, and the proportion of public servants who believed that innovation is important to their job satisfaction declined from 30% in 2002–03 to 18% in 2007–08.

In regard to perceptions at different levels of the Australian public service, 14% of employees at the APS 1–6 levels were the least motivated by innovation compared to 38% for senior executive public servants (APSC 2008), whilst 45% of levels 1–6 concluded that they encouraged innovation compared to 49% for executive level employees and 70% of senior executive public servants (APSC 2008).

The APSC (2008) has also called on government agencies to work ‘in partnership with other agencies, State and Territory Governments and the private and not-for-profit sectors’, and improve links and gather knowledge from overseas government agencies.

It has even been suggested in the Venturousaustralia: Building Strength in Innovation report, released by Senator Carr on 9 September 2008, that a body be appointed to help the Council of Australian Governments ‘reform payments to encourage innovation, experimentation and evaluation among the states and territories’ (Cutler 2008).

More recently, Terry Moran, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, urged greater innovation if Australia’s public service is to become the best in the world. Moran noted the need to attract and retain the highest quality creative thinkers and managers to enhance public sector management; greater coordination in regard to the roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth and the States and Territories in relation to service delivery; the need of the APS to work with people from the private and community sectors, think tanks, academics, stakeholders and members of the public; the need for APS staff to work together rather than as a ‘collection of separate institutions’ by promoting the mobility of APS officers to enhance the transfer of knowledge, skill and people across different levels of government; and better measurement of results to test the effectiveness of policy interventions by also asking citizens what they think about the quality of the services the APS provides and taking action to make them better.

Moran also stressed the need for the APS to strengthen focus on service delivery which enables public servants who create policy to learn from those who deliver it. This may mean that public servants (including senior officials) should experience front-line policy implementation by perhaps spending a week staffing a Centrelink claims desk or a Medicare office (Moran 2009).

In short, how to achieve public sector innovation is regarded as a topical but challenging issue by a range of practitioners and academic commentators. Or as put by Stephen Goldsmith, Director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, the innovation process ‘cannot remain a top-down, bureaucratic process, far removed from the concerns of citizens. Governments need to draw upon all their sources of innovation … to produce regular and successful innovations’ (Eggers and Singh 2009: 3).

The new impetus to fostering innovation in the APS has now resulted in the Reform of Australian Government Administration initiative. The aim is to develop a blueprint for the reform, able to position the APS as the best public service in the world (Advisory Group on Reform of Australian Government Administration 2009).

 

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