How much damage can a politicized public service do? Lessons from Australia
本文以澳大利亚Robodebt丑闻为例，分析职业公务员与政治官员关系破裂如何导致政策灾难，对公共管理实践者和学者具有警示意义。
Many public administrators are struggling with the relationship between themselves—most of whom are career civil servants—on the one hand, and those political officials 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 subordinate 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 ambiguities here, does that relationship vary depending on the issue at hand? These questions have all sorts of day-to-day implications for those who practice and study public management, and that is the subject of the article that follows. It focuses on lessons learned in Australia during the development, implementation, and subsequent undoing of something called Robodebt (see the details below), an initiative that could easily happen just about anywhere, especially given the promises and perils of artificial intelligence (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 mistakenly generated big bills, which caused big financial emergencies 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 Podger 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 important implications for the “deep state” debate in the US and in countries around the world. Co-authored by Mr. Podger and noted political scientist and public administration scholar Don Kettl, the article deliberately departs from more traditional academic research—a departure that we hope will become more common in the Public Administration Review's “Practically Speaking” segment—and instead, summarizes the report prepared by Mr. Podger for the Royal Commission on the Robodebt debacle…for that is what it became, largely because of a breakdown in the relationship between senior civil servants and political ministers. That is something all of us can learn from. For example, the Podger/Kettl piece examines the role of the Australian Public Service (APS) and its relationship with elected ministers in that country, with a particular focus on the specific responsibilities of public servants Australia's social services apparatus; the relationship between policy and administration, generally and in Australia; the concept of customer service and its role in public programs; the reliance (or perhaps the overreliance) on information technology in the Robodebt matter; and the seemingly dichotomous relationship between compliance and compassion in the administration of Australia's social services. The article closes with a provocative examination of such longer-term issues as the capability of, and the culture in, the APS. But at the risk of belaboring the point, these issues are not unique to Australia or the Robodebt debacle. Rather, in our view, they are universal, applicable to just about every level of government in any western democracy that puts a professional, independent, merit-based civil service together with a superstructure of elected and appointed politicians. And that means that these issues affect pretty much all of us. The following article has been adapted from a report prepared by one of the two co-authors named above, Andrew Podger, former Commissioner of the APS. That report (Podger, 2023) was prepared at the request of a Royal Commission looking into the so-called Robodebt scheme, and as submitted, it addressed each of the matters the Royal Commission identified in its request, along with recommendations made by Mr. Podger in each instance. However, as our two co-authors point out, the relevance of the Podger Report—and the Australian Robodebt experience more generally—to what is going on in other western democracies, as well as the often-tragic lessons that we can all learn from them, is striking. Thus, it is a fitting beginning to our section on “Practically Speaking” and (hopefully) its relevance to both public administration practitioners and scholars. As the editors of the Public Administration Review, we have deleted some of those sections in the interest of the primary focus of this article—that is, the critical relationship between professional (that is, career) civil servants and politically elected or appointed policymakers who must coordinate with—and in some cases, supervise—them, and we take full responsibility for those actions. However, the full text of the Podger Report may be found at https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/andrew-podger-ao-report-robodebt-royal-commission. In each case, in place of the Podger Report's recommendations to the Royal Commission, the conclusions and recommendations of the Royal Commission itself are summarized. The article ends with a summary and conclusions. 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It is a for both practitioners and around the about the of governance they by Australian as of the Australian the of Australian Andrew Podger is former Commissioner of the Australian Public is of Public in the of the at the Australian is a of the of the in Australia and a of the of Public Don is at the of Public at the of and a with The for Public The and The is the former of the of Public at the of is a of the of Public