[Peetwo]

Balancing Acts & reform? - Part I

Quote from Sandy's letter to the IPA:

The governance of Australia's aviation was given over, in 1988, to what was euphemistically touted as an "independent government business unit" thus removing it from direct Ministerial control and allowing responsibility to be deflected away from the Minister. Calling it a business was always a lie pure and simple, it flouts every rule of commerce by being a total and unassailable monopoly.

I would add to Sandy's statement that in 1995 Air-Services Australia officially joined CASA on the list of 'independent government business units'. And in 1997 the government brought in the CAC Act to set the rules of accountability & governance of these independent business units.

Other 'supposedly' independent agencies - like the ATSB - were governed by the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 (FMA Act).

In 2013 these two Acts were merged and became the PGPA Act 2013:

5  Objects of this Act

                   The objects of this Act are:
                     (a)  to establish a coherent system of governance and accountability across Commonwealth entities; and
                     (b)  to establish a performance framework across Commonwealth entities; and
                     ©  to require the Commonwealth and Commonwealth entities:
                              (i)  to meet high standards of governance, performance and accountability; and
                             (ii)  to provide meaningful information to the Parliament and the public; and
                            (iii)  to use and manage public resources properly; and
                            (iv)  to work cooperatively with others to achieve common objectives, where practicable; and
                     (d)  to require Commonwealth companies to meet high standards of governance, performance and accountability.

  
Clear as mud? Okay yesterday Stephen Easton from the Mandarin put out a very interesting article, that includes a link and short statement from a interview with M&M by Stevie E from earlier in the year:

‘We need to move away from our focus on quantitative KPIs’

---

by
Stephen Easton
28.09.2015



PGPA reforms require a big shift in the public service and it’s testing even the leaders of the agency running the show, admits Finance head Jane Halton. Measuring actual outcomes is a great aim but hard to do in practice.


Jane Halton

The Enhanced Commonwealth Reporting Framework is forcing public servants to rebuild a culture of evaluation and develop the skills to measure the real impact of the policies and programs it implements, rather than just basic outputs.

The bureaucracy is not very good at acknowledging when something isn’t working, Finance secretary Jane Halton told a recent seminar organised by her department and the Australasian Evaluation Society. Neither is the government of the day, one might observe, in which case a more meaningful reporting framework is all the more important in the long run.

For those worried that greater transparency and more genuine accountability sounds risky, Halton pointed out the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act also demands “a more mature approach to risk”.

It’s easy to explain where all the dollars go and what they’re spent on, harder to measure the actual impact a given program achieves in the real world. To do so, public servants must use a more diverse set of methodologies including evaluation, benchmarking and peer reviews, the Finance chief says.

“We need to move away from our focus on quantitative KPIs,” she said, explaining there are a staggering 3500 quantitative KPIs under previous performance reporting arrangements.

She reminded those present that parliamentarians are watching, and some want agencies held accountable for non-compliance with the PGPA Act. ACT Senator Katy Gallagher recently criticised the 11% of agencies which missed the August 31 deadline to have new corporate plans in place, in the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit:

“I think in any other area of public life we look very dimly on people that do not observe their legal obligations, particularly those in senior leadership positions who should know better.”

Said Halton: “So [complete the plans] before that next Senate Estimates round is my strong advice.”

She suggested agencies were struggling to get the plans in place due to the difficulty of setting out those measures of real-world impact that they would later report against. A complete picture of performance requires information on the “how” and “why” — qualitative data — as well as the much simpler “what” that is described by quantitative data. Some Commonwealth entities already use “mature” methods of performance measurement that lead to meaningful monitoring and reporting, the Finance head acknowledged, but the standard of the APS as a whole is insufficient.

Despite the thousands of KPIs and reams of reporting being produced under the old system, parliamentarians are still not happy with the level of actual accountability.

“I don’t know how many of you have been grilled for hours and hours and hours in Senate Estimates, but you could really argue we’ve been spinning our wheels. And certainly there are many still-unhappy senators in relation to what we’re actually achieving with our reports.”

The lost art of evaluation

Earlier in the year, Infrastructure and Regional Development secretary Mike Mrdak said evaluation became something of a lost art in the APS around the year 2000, after Finance gave up central responsibility for it.

The PGPA has brought the need for evaluative thinking back in focus, and Halton advised senior bureaucrats to look to international expertise, share expertise with each other, and “plagiarise shamelessly” from successful work in other jurisdictions.

“Embedding best practice across the whole of the Commonwealth will take many years, but the commitment to do better is apparent,” she said.

“I feel a slight sense of déjà vu because I think I gave my first talk on evaluation in the public sector in about 1985, and we’ve come some distance but it has waxed and waned, so in my department we hope that it’s on the up. But to be frank, producing our first corporate plan under the new PGPA framework was challenging.”

Putting together the corporate plan required new “clarity of purpose” and a clear understanding of the department’s current operating environment, according to its secretary.

“This actually led to some very important, incredibly useful conversations in our leadership team, so of itself, it’s galvanised change,” she said.

Halton added that if asked for a self-assessment of her own department’s first effort at a corporate plan, she and her senior team would argue: “We’ve done OK.” She said they would give themselves a “pass” grade with a note: could do better next time.

It is worth noting that in recent Ministerial Statement of Expectations from Truss to both the ATSB & CASA there was several references to the PGPA Act:

CASA SOE:

3.        ensure that CASA, in performing its functions:

(a) acts in accordance with the Act and the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (PGPA Act) as well as other relevant legislation; &..

13.    maintain high standards of professionalism, service, probity, reporting, accountability and transparency, consistent with the provisions of the PGPA Act and have a code of conduct and values consistent with those used by the Australian Public Service.

ATSB SOE:

• • Maintain high standards of professionalism, service, probity, reporting, accountability and transparency, consistent with the provisions of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 and adhere to the Australian Public Service values and code of conduct.
    

Hmm..who do you reckon helped draft the Minister's SOEs?

MTF..P2

{ PartII: Next we move onto the CAA Act & the growing chorus from industry (in particular AMROBA) for amending the Act in order to make it legally binding for CASA to urgently action  the ASRR reform recommendations ASAP.}