Quiet achiever’s relentless pursuit CASSANDRA WILKINSON THE AUSTRALIAN AUGUST 02, 2014 WITH Senate crossbenchers expected not to pass several budget measures, it would be useful for Joe Hockey and his colleagues to pay a lot more attention to the Australian National Audit Office. Most of the attention at budget time is given to the rate of increase or decrease in the growth of departmental allocations. But the real meat of public value for money is in the large amount of business-as-usual spending that never attracts any headlines. The way most of the media and the political class discuss the budget, it seems like the only way we get more or better services is by paying more money. Conversely, any reduction in funding is assumed to reflect a real reduction in essential services. The truth is that sometimes we pay top dollar for programs that don’t work very well. A reduction in those programs affects very few people. At other times we get good value for money from a program which can be extended at very little additional cost. Unfortunately, there is not enough information available about which programs work well and which are a waste of money. Working to correct this problem is the humble and highly valuable Australian National Audit Office. The ANAO spends its time trying to work out which programs are working, which are not and how to make the poor performers improve. Examples of the kind of work they do include reviewing whether well-intentioned and grandly named programs such as the School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure actually work (sort of). They evaluate whether Services Delivered by Job Services Australia are any good (generally yes, but with room to do better). They look into capital programs, too, like the Supported Accommodation Innovation Fund to house the homeless (hard to say, because the department failed to consider budget risks properly in determining winning bids). Since 2012, nearly half of ANAO reports showed that the programs we pay our taxes for can do a better job of meeting their objectives. Troublingly, many programs are simply not collecting enough information about what they do and whether it works for us to know whether we are getting value for money. Reading a few of their reports, it’s clear the best place to find savings is not in small buckets like the foreign aid budget or ad hoc voter lures like the school kids’ bonus, but rather in the business-as-usual jobs that could be done better and cheaper. British public sector reformer Sir Michael Barber wrote in his 2011 book Instruction to Deliver that real reform isn’t achieved with headlines and rhetoric. Meaningful change, he wrote, comes from ‘‘the relentless pursuit of incremental improvement’’. It’s dull, it’s difficult and people rarely notice. Unless they work at the ANAO. Toyota is famous for building its engineering and commercial performance on just the kind of ‘‘relentless pursuit of incremental improvement’’ that Barber urges on governments. They call it kaizen, and it’s made them the world’s most profitable car company. Some people will protest that after continual rounds of ‘‘efficiency dividends’’ over the past few budget cycles, there is no more blood in the stone — no scope for kaizen. This simply isn’t so. The efficiency dividends have largely been achieved — as most ‘‘cuts’’ or ‘‘savings’’ are — by natural attrition of staff and reductions in non-core programs. That’s like cutting your hair to lose weight. It does nothing to address performance or structural growth. The parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit has begun a review of several recent ANAO reports. This will be a good opportunity for identifying ways to improve the budget position by incremental improvements should the Treasurer’s preferred measures continue to be frustrated by the Senate. A kaizen approach would focus on the lean delivery of the routine requirements of departments. It would require a simultaneous focus on efficiency and effectiveness. It would lead to a clearer understanding of what taxpayers really need to pay to have necessary services performed well. It’s easy to mistake politics for government. It’s easy to think that by changing the political leadership we have changed government. In most respects, while elections come and go, the governing class continues to govern, immune from the interest or interference of the political class. So while politicians fight about the minuscule portion of public tasks about which they have ‘‘announce-ables’’, the public service continues to be largely unaccountable. Except to the ANAO. It’s long past time we paid them more attention.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 01:20:52 +0000
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