Most public servants get through their careers without coming to the attention of the public. That’s the way they and their political masters like it. But some have the misfortune not just to attract some limelight at Senate estimates but to find themselves on a bigger stage.
Take Jason McNamara, a Band 2 SES officer at Services Australia, who gave evidence yesterday to the robodebt royal commission.
McNamara was heavily involved in the robodebt scandal, and can be found boasting of the success of the scheme back in 2019, proudly telling a Senate committee “our last 12 months, in terms of volume, has been the largest in the program”.
Within two months the government had admitted the whole scheme was unlawful.
McNamara’s evidence yesterday has drawn attention because of his role in seeking to influence the report of the Commonwealth ombudsman into the scheme, with the suggestion there was something untoward in the fact that Services Australia was providing text to the ombudsman.
In fact, as McNamara noted, this is perfectly standard in the Australian Public Service (APS). It is a giant distribution mechanism for approved words and slabs of text being exchanged within and between departments. Each word and sentence is carefully crafted to be as anodyne, uninformative and unhelpful as possible, with all possible meaning, nuance and utility ironed out until not a skerrick of potential for distress, embarrassment or even mild concern — to the government — is left.
The resulting pabulum can then be used over and over for ministerial correspondence, departmental submissions, government responses to inquiries, media releases — anything that will see the light of day.
That Services Australia took up a request to provide “standard words” to the ombudsman is neither here nor there. As McNamara noted, the ombudsman could always reject any or all of the provided text, and did so.
Nor is it especially noteworthy that McNamara used this as evidence of his skills in a later job application. To be an SES officer in the APS you have to be able to “communicate with influence”. Ideally that’s being able to marshal facts, logic and strategic thinking in a persuasive manner that convinces others. But sending standard words to another department will do at a pinch. Again, nothing to see here.
But other elements of McNamara’s evidence confirm some unpleasant stereotypes about the public service. One was McNamara lamenting the impact of robodebt on staff who had to take hostile phone calls from the public, who had to endure criticism of the program at weekend BBQs, and who had to read negative press about it.
Those who actually had to endure robodebt, or the families of those who took their lives or who suffered real health consequences over the scheme, might be forgiven for having zero sympathy for the poor bureaucrats forced to endure criticism over a Sunday barbie.
McNamara also complained that the negative press coverage of the scheme harmed the reputation of the department and the government.
But where McNamara really demonstrated how out of touch he and his Services Australia colleagues were was in his lament that people were too stupid to understand robodebt. Having to design a flyer describing the concept of averaging prompted McNamara to complain:
It told me there’s a fundamental problem with the Australian education system where people can’t understand averaging. It’s pretty poor that people can’t understand … But that’s where we’re at as a society. So I’ve still got to communicate with those people.
Averaging, it turned out, was an unlawful way to estimate income, something the government was forced to admit after being taken to court. McNamara is complaining about having to explain a method of estimation that was not merely wildly inaccurate in the case of a large proportion of robodebt victims, but unlawful to the uneducated idiots he’s forced to deal with.
Between having to communicate with “those people” and criticism over the barbie, his life must have been a misery.
Despite being the very image of an out-of-touch bureaucrat, McNamara’s lament doesn’t even make sense within the context of the APS. When bureaucrats design marketing and communication campaigns, the audience is central to the design from the start. Lots of money is spent on marketing and communications consultants to make sure the right audience is being reached and reached effectively, in a campaign. Except, apparently, at the very department where this should have been most important of all.
McNamara’s evidence provides another example of Hannah Arendt’s often quoted remark about the banality of evil. She was not saying evil is banal. Her point is that evil can and sometimes does result from typical, dull, ordinary activities, when they are done in the service of something dreadful. Arendt was discussing Adolf Eichman. He was just a bureaucrat arranging train timetables. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Now we have the Australian bureaucrats who were simply following orders, calculating average incomes, sending emails and letters to Centrelink claimants and responding to inquiries about the scheme they were running with the dullest and most uninformative verbiage they could devise. All very banal. And evil. Nowhere near on the same scale as Eichman and his colleagues, certainly, and I’m not pretending there is any equivalence at all. But Robodebt is an example of evil and there should be dire consequences for those responsible.
I know many will disagree with me, but I don’t think this is a fair critique. At the end of the day the public service works for the elected government, and while we dispair at the harm caused by the program now, this “cruelty approach” was perfectly acceptable to the general public for three election cycles (’13, ’16, ’19), and remains the case when it comes to our off-shore refugee camps (acts of barbarism that we continuously endorse). Unlike the examples you have raised, the things our government have done have been well known for some time.
It is a bit rich to offset our guilt on to others that we (yes we) consented to. If the alternative is to have a public service that can say no to the elected government, well I’m fine with that, but is the rest of Australia so accepting of what would be called a “technocratic elite”?
What about “fair & frank” advice?
Was for 9 years essentially a sackable offense. The Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison regime made it clear several times publically that the APS was for doing, not for thinking. I don’t think this was the right thing at all, but that was the nature of the government that was elected 3 times.
Frank’s resignation when Tony Abbot was elected and fearless is hiding the cupboard under the stairs next to the Thylacine skin and bones.
Was the public, who voted as you, say told beforehand that Robodebt was an illegal scam to extort billions in payments from vulnerable Australians and drive some number of them to suicide? Was this public shown video of the offshore refugee camps in operation and did they hear directly from the refugees incarcerated there indefinitely about the conditions? Or was a great deal of effort expended to keep the public in the dark and to tell lies about what was really happening?
The public was deliberately misinformed – the above article includes examples. You might wish the public made more effort to see through the lies, I certainly do, but that’s besides the point. The ministers and the bureaucrats did know what they were doing, and they are responsible.
You make fair points, except that McNamara was a true believer, and I doubt that he had (or has) any idea of the evil of his actions. There’s a difference between reluctantly doing your job and enthusiastically promoting and justifying evil.
Bernard makes a good point when he generalises this to the rot that has set into our Westminster system. I worked at professional level at the coal face in public hospitals for nearly 40 years, and I saw first-hand how our bureaucratic managers changed from independent thinkers to sycophantic idiots who would slavishly extol each new hare-brained scheme from above – even when it was the opposite to the one they were sycophantically extolling the year before. Any attempt to discuss the implications or disadvantages of the latest trendy policy risked one being branded a trouble-maker and could lead to being disciplined on some trumped-up triviality. It became quite toxic.
frank, fearless and fair …. such a pity these attitudes and practice of them has been forced out of the APS
The egregiously appalling toady Peter Shergold, as CoS to the Rodent & PM&C office, proudly told the Press Club (after siccing the AFP onto the Customs w/b in 2005 and anyone else unfortunate enough to hear him for years afterwards at the ANU) that “Public Servants do not,I repeat DO NOT, have the right to act according to their conscience“.
He didn’t add “Nuremberg be buggered” but that was understood.
Also no less evil than the intentions of the politicians who endorsed and enforced these evil acts.
Obviously. Nobody ever argued that the actions of Eichman and fellow bureaucrats were worse than those who devised and ordered the Final Solution.
Rick Morton’s done a good piece on this too.
Predatory practices – by a government and it’s “PS” (politicised and all too willing to do whatever, to please their political masters) that looked down on the most vulnerable in society and thought they could abuse and screw them over, for whatever they thought they get away with for as long as they could – ‘because they were less fortunate and poor’?
Carried on while knowing it was more than likely illegal – not stopping to find out if it was or not?.
If ‘demanding money with menaces’ is a crime punishable with gaol, for ordinary criminals : why isn’t it for the upper echelons of government and their slobbering PS lap-dogs?
There’s something wrong at heart with a public service (or at least the heads of that PS) that can’t see anything unethical or morally reprehensible or bankrupt, with carrying on like they did. A heart sickened by politicisation with appointments to head departments, of those inclined and like-minded to their ruthless, judgmental “whatever it takes” political masters.
The “heads” of that department that choose to hide behind the ‘negative’ blow-back on those below, administering that sort of amoral judgement, at the coal face, dealing with that sort of “clientele” trauma; especially when it’s a sure bet they wouldn’t want to trade places with underlings, to deliver, on their own craven policies.
“McNamara the Great Communicator”?
A system built to be so awkward, convoluted, vague, and cumbersome, where the proof of innocence rules paramount; engineered to be impenetrable to the custom, it was created for (more a trap than a solution) : so as to discourage that audience from pursuing equity – McNamara wants to lament the obtuse nature of his audience, to a system that was unlawful, that he was aware of legal opinion to that end?
Surely any “communicator” worth their salt can communicate with the audience at hand – not the other way around? Looks more like a sign of his arrogance, inflexibility and capacity to adapt to any situation – and unsuitability to that job.
Sounds like the eugenics of class or the pecking order? Kicking out the middle rungs of a slippery ladder with the upper rungs looking down from on high to those are not meant to rise.
Related, one is aware that DFAT recruitment of mostly white Anglo males into diplomatic training had been using (a decade+ ago) the discredited IQ test and applying aspects of Charles Murray’s ‘bell curve’ to select from the top 2%; eugenics.
so, when will he and the others who implemented this illegal programme, be charged?
A terrible bunch of people who attained high positions in the Public Service.
Complaining about the people who they service being too stupid to understand a stupid policy.
The people being ‘serviced’ DID understand that income was supposed to be specifically attached to a specific time period (usually a fortnight). No rational numerate person could understand how any person with basic numeracy skills could publicly promote ‘averaging on an annual basis ‘ as the correct way to apply the law. McNamara’s active approach to promoting this illegal farce should see him in front of the new Integrity Commission.
Or charge him with extortion and lock him up.
Absolutely correct. And that is why the politicians who finally approved and drove this process must have known it to be inaccurate and unreliable. One is left wondering how much the entire process was driven by the prosperity religion dogma that the gods only love the rich and successful.
When I first heard about RoboDebt I said to my husband that the scheme was illegal and could be described as demanding money with menaces.
Can we now jail the people who designed and implemented it??
Words fail me in my outrage at this smug arrogant cretin who clearly has no self or even situational awareness.
thats a modern day ‘influencer’