The True History of the Bureaucracy Gang
Reflections on the decay of the public service in Australia and liberal democracies
Major inquiries in Australia in the last few years have devastated the limp reputation of the public service.
The ‘Robodebt’ Royal Commission has exposed serious failures by both Ministers and public servants, and some writers have claimed it has shown the Australian Public Service in “its most dismal hours”. Only a few years back, the Banking Royal Commission and the Pink Batts Royal Commission plumbed other dark nights of the public service soul.
In Victoria, where I worked in its public service for 33 years until late 2022, the Victorian Ombudsman is slowly conducting an inquiry into the politicisation of the public service. The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission reported last week on its investigation of “improper influence in procurement, involving Ministerial advisors.” But Operation Daintree found fault with the conduct and standards of both elected and unelected Victorian Government officials, including:
“the lack of oversight of advisors by ministers (and with it, the potential for plausible deniability, raising questions about the efficacy of the Westminster convention of individual ministerial responsibility as an accountability mechanism to parliament and, through it, the community)
the pliability of DHHS in delivering what it understood the minister wanted, in breach of its ethical obligations
a propensity by some advisors and public servants to avoid, ignore, bend or break rules to achieve soughtafter outcomes that are not in the public interest.”
While the Robodebt Royal Commission has inspired many journalists and progressive commentators to lambast former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and forget the fiascos of the Rudd/Gillard years, these critics have been muted on the failures in Victoria. But people like, me who worked in the Victorian public service for 33 years, are not surprised or shocked by either the revelations at the Robodebt Royal Commission or the coded criticisms by IBAC of the state of government in Victoria. We have witnessed this problem first-hand for decades.
Something very ill is afoot in the State of Victoria, and in the institutions of the public service at both state and national levels. The disease is political decay, and it affects the institutions of Western liberal democracy, in whatever nation or province or party or political affiliation or identity one belongs to.
In June 2021 (nearly two years ago) I reflected on the nature of this political decay and its impact on the quality of bureaucracy, government and democracy. I reflected on these issues on my podcast, speaking between the lines, since I was still a serving public servant, subject to fickle enforcement of speech code conventions. The reflections have a new urgency today.
I have edited that podcast talk into a chapter of my forthcoming book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. For paid-subscribers only, I am providing early access to this essay from my podcast transcript. Please enjoy, and please consider upgrading your subscription to support my work.
In episode 6 of The Burning Archive Podcast (released on 4 June 2021), I discuss the history of the bureaucracy in the UK, USA and Germany, and its relationship to political decay. And we ask, is the bureaucracy to blame for our republics in distress?
Introduction
Welcome to The Burning Archive, the podcast where the past is never dead, the past is not even past, and where, by thinking about the past, we try to live better in the present.
In this episode of The Burning Archive I am talking about one decaying political institution I know very well, the bureaucracy, civil service or public service. And I ask, is the bureaucracy to blame for our republics in distress, and can it act as a bulwark against political decay? So bureaucracy and political decay, and what is the true history of the bureaucracy game? That is the topic of today's episode of The Burning Archive.
I am Jeff Rich, I am a writer, historian and a very minor government official. Let me add this podcast is my own creative conceptual work, and not related to my official role. Let me just give a shout out to everyone who, like me, is living in Victoria and in lockdown, again. Hopefully, we'll survive this, and for those of you who might be listening to the podcast in weeks, years past, going back over old episodes, yes indeed, we are still in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, and, for one reason or another, we have been locked down in Melbourne. So very tight rules, but fortunately no rules against podcasting.
Before we get into the main topic of today, let me just add, you can read more of my writing at theburningarchive.com. If you go to theburningarchive.com at the moment, you'll see there's an announcement there about the publication of a book by me. The book is called Gathering Flowers of the Mind, Collected Poems 1996-2020. It is my collected poems. You can buy that as a print or ebook through all the major outlets. So do, if you wish, help us out and buy a copy of the book and enjoy the reading.
Fukuyama and Political Decay
Okay, today we're talking about the second of our topics under the little mini-theme of political decay. Last time we talked about the general concept of political decay, and today we're talking about one of the institutions that is caught up in this trend of political decay. It is an institution about which we rarely hear an authentic, unfiltered voice from the inside. You hear a lot of people speaking for or about the bureaucracy. They speak generally in not very favourable terms. But very few speak honestly from their own, let's say, lived experience of being a bureaucrat. Now that is what I'm going to do today, or at least I'm going to offer an insider's historical perspective on the institution of bureaucracy. What is its place in our political order? What current trends influence the institution? How do they illustrate the broad theme of political decay that I have been talking about in this podcast.
Last week I introduced the theme of political decay and the work of Francis Fukuyama on political order and political decay. I discussed Fukuyama’s idea of political decay, and how it relates to political institutions and political culture. It might be worth mentioning here, since we are talking about the topic of political decay, that the artwork for my podcast, which is also featured on my blog, is a painting by Joseph Turner of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in London in England in the 1830s. It is a representation of a catastrophic fire in the Palace of Westminster in London in October 1834 that largely destroyed the Parliament and required their rapid rebuilding. So perhaps, it is a perfect symbol of a set of political institutions facing a grim future, and also the opportunity for renewal, which I guess fire does provide.
So last week I explained how Fukuyama had, in his work Political Order and Political Decay, presented this tension between basic behaviours of human sociability or basic human social behaviours. Examples are looking after your own kin and doing favours for others in exchange for favours they do for you so. Fukuyama used the terms kinship affiliation and reciprocal altruism. Kinship affiliation can be broadened out from direct blood relatives to include people similar in kind, however you might define that. So there is a tension between those basic drives of human sociability and the formal impartial rules of a capable political state. That tension really is the underlying sociological, even perhaps cultural-biological, process that underlies the process of political decay. It underlies how political systems oscillate between stable regimes of political order, and states of disorder, even if the swings are slow. When systems fall into disorder, they require rebuilding and reconstitution in different ways.
This tension is shown in how politics and governments use patronage, which, of course, is a very important political phenomenon of kinship affiliation and reciprocal affiliation. There is a tension between patronage, as a fundamental tool of politcs, and the institution of a professional impartial public service. Of course, the whole concept of a politically neutral professional public service is at the heart of a well-functioning government, especially a well-functioning democratic government. It is really crucial to its role, and yet the whole issue of political appointments (‘jobs for the boys’, ‘jobs for mates’) wears away at that.
The Importance of Bureaucracy to Political Order
The tension between having a professional impartial merit-based public service, where there are not political appointments, favorites or cliques, is at the heart of a well-functioning political system. But to maintain that kind of institution requires political systems constantly to work against that basic human drive of sociability. Impartiality grates with the drive to look after your own and to do favors for others in exchange for the favors they do for you. Consequently. a professional impartial public service, when established as a good quality institution, needs to have guardrails against the very natural social behaviors that go on within any culture.
In Francis Fukuyama’s story of the development of political order, the development of a professionalized public service or a strong capable bureaucracy really plays a quite central role. It is unusual, given most accounts of politics do not focus on the central role of the bureaucracy. But Fukuyama provides a central role to the development of a strong bureaucracy, a strong, capable, professional, independent, impartial bureaucracy. He does not use the exact term of ‘independent’, but I will get back to that. A strong capable bureaucracy is totally fundamental to his story. Indeed, he commented that the big historical mystery that has to be solved is not, why does political patronage exist? It is, rather, why did modern political systems come to outlaw patronage and to replace basic sociability drives with by impartial codes and impersonal organization? Now, ‘impersonal’ might seem a negative term, in some ways it is. But Fukuyama uses this term to mean that an organization functions by clear and objective rules that are fair or neutral to all, rather than being driven by kinship affiliation and favors.
If, as Fukuyama says, it is a quite an achievement to create bureaucratic institutions that resist those processes of affiliation and altruism, then it is not a surprise that we are always putting our finger in the dike to hold back political decay and the decay of the bureaucracy. It is actually a social achievement that is hard to create, and easy to break down. So, it is not surprising that we contunually over time, with peaks and troughs, discussion concerns with political appointments to the public service - ‘jobs for the boys’, ‘jobs for the girls’, jobs that are ‘not based on merit’ or real achievements, appointments that made, in fact, to secure and consolidate the party in power.
It is not a particularly political thing to say that the process of political decay affects the bureaucracy. It is more a general principle drawn out from Fukuyama's description of political order and political decay. This fundamental institution, the public service, is subjected to these same processes, that strain against instinctive sociability. It goes through this same dynamic. Its instiutions cycle through phases when they form strong objective rules for behavior, and phases when those guardrails are worn away and broken down. Sometimes, leaders of institutions jump over whole Chesterton fences. There are phases of elite capture, when a close knit gang at the top are sociable to themselves alone. There are phases when officials, high and low, reconstitute rules in response to competition and other social changes.
Although capable bureucracy is a social achievement that is hard to create and easy to break down, it is important to note that, when it does break down, its loss threatens the stability of political order. So, it is not a trivial thing to find that one's state institutions are not working effectively as a impersonal organization, to use Fukuyama's term, but rather becoming ‘repatrimonialized’, as he described the resurgence of patronage system and subjection of government institutions to these patronage systems.
Foundations of Political Order and Bureacracy
Here it might be worth just saying that Fukuyama's concept of political order has a three-legged foundation. So for him political order, or a well-functioning political system, has three fundamental elements. One is this capable state. Another is the rule of law. In well-ordered polities there is not just fickle monarchical decisions or tyrannical decisions, but there is a rule of law that governs how disputes within the society are resolved. The third leg is accountability. Mechanisms of accountability include parliament, even if it does burn down every now and then, as in Joseph Turner’s paiting that I referred to at the start of the show, his depiction of the fire in the Palace of Westminster in 1834. A parliament is a crucial form of democratic accountability that supports political orders. The people who make big political decisions or decisions affecting the society have some sort of accountability to those who are affected by those institutions. Now that can take many different forms, because it has been expressed in a sociological, neutral way. But that is it.
But the third crucial one is the capable state. And what is interesting about Fukuyama's political order and political decay is he really focusses on state capacity, in contrast to a very strong American political libertarian neoliberal tradition. His argument then is in contrast to the elite or econocratic thinking of the last 30 years that very much overvalues markets over governments. Fukuyama argued that you can not just have law, you can not just have accountability mechanisms, scrutiny and so on. You actually need a government, a state, that can do things, and that can do them effectively and well. Its capacity to do things is fundamental to the authority, legitimacy and stability, that is required in political order. So what matters is not primarily the size of government. What matters is not big government versus small government, or questions of whether government has a role in this industry or that industry. What matters is most is the effectiveness of government, rather than its size.
In a way, Francis Fukuyama is putting a view that is shared by a sociologist who has ventured into the world of politics and political order, Stein Ringen. He is a Norwegian sociologist, who largely writes in English, and he wrote a book called A Nation of Devils. The title is a fantastic description of government. It describes the democratic problem of maintaining authority with an uppity citizenry. So Fukuyama and Stein Ringen both bbserve like many others the loss of trust in democracy, loss of faith in democracy, and loss of confidence in the performance of democracies that appears in opinion polls and surveys. But they argue these losses are not caused by fickle citizens, but largely by failing performance by governments and elites.
These losses also relate to the theme of political decay. In spaking of my theme of political decay, I am not commenting on whether I like who is in government or who is the leader now. It is more a commentary on this declining sense of trust, declining sense of authority, declining sense of legitimacy and declining sense of performance by government elites. These declines create their own dilemmas. If there is less confidence that your society is being governed well and governed in a rightful sort of way, there is a kind of vicious circle of declining trust and authority.
On Principals and Agents in Bureaucracy
For Fukuyama, then, a critical institution to a well-functioning state is the bureaucracy. Importantly, he made the point that the bureaucracy is not just one single organisation; it is a collection of government organisations or institutions, a networked collection of government organisations and institutions. How well those institutions function is fundamental to state capacity or the capable state. It keeps standing one of the three legs of a stable political order. Fukuyama wrote that governments are collections of complex organisations. How well they perform depends on how they are organised, and the human and material resources at their disposal.
Certainly, from an insider's point of view, without talking specifics, government is a very complicated network of organisations. Most of what you see reported in the media, and even a lot of academic commentary, on how governments function is very shallow in its understanding. This commentary often just calls the political horse race. There are a couple of celebrity political figures, who set the course and whose news conferences one follows constantly, and it is all just one big show. From the inside perspective, from the experience of someone who has lived in this habitat for thirty years, government looks like a very complicated ecosystem of these different institutions. They all have their own patterns, lives and ways of organisation. None work perfectly. None interact together perfectly as well.
But for a complex political network of organisations, the bureaucracy, to work well, it needs to work through and have a nice balanced arrangement between two principles. Balance is difficult because there is significant tension between these principles that spills out into the organisations.
The first principle is what is often referred to as the principal-agent dilemma. If bureaucracies are to be politically and democratically accountable, they do not get to set their own agenda entirely. They need to do things that someone, who has a mandate, authority or democratic accountability, wants them to do. That person or persons – let us call them the Minister or the Premier or the Government, the elected officials – they are the principal. The agents are the actual bureaucrats in the institution. This dilemma is commonly referred to as an economic problem. How does the principal get the agent to do what they want them to do? How does the principal do this when they have limited information? How do they do this when they are just one person or a small band of people who are trying to coerce a large group of agents, the big bad bureaucracy with thousands of people (all lazy, wearing cardigans, and working from home) to do what they are meant to do?
So that is the principal-agent dilemma which is fundamental. There is a lot of discussion of this dilemma. There have been a lot of interventions over the years to make sure the bureaucracy works well with the principal-agent dilemma. Governments have implemented, for example, reforms to establish clear missions, to have business plans and to establish performance objectives for senior bureaucrats or even Ministers with Premiers. The whole system of Westminster parliamentary accountability deals with this dilemma. The Minister will tell the bureaucrats what to do, not the other way around. So there are an awful lot of systems around that.
Relative Autonomy in Bureaucracy
What is interesting about Fukuyama's discussion is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the other design principle of making the institution work well, which is relative autonomy. So, an institution will not be effective if it is really just acting as a cat's paw for someone else's ideas. It needs to be able to, if you like, come up with its own ideas, turn them into reality, and make them work. There is clearly a tension the principles of principal-agent and relative autonomy. You could compare it to the tensions in a family as children grow up and become adults. You want the bureaucracy to be the loyal child to the parent of the Minister. But at another level you actually want the bureaucracy to be the grown-up independent adults who are making their own decisions. So trying to get those two things to work effectively together is a real, fundamental dilemma.
This dilemma returns us to the tension between patronage and state capacity. If you are a political agent (a Minister, Premier or Cabinet), you can assert control of the bureaucracy through two broad strategies. You can appoint your own, who you know will do what you want. Or, you can try persuasive influence over established people, who will change their position to agree to do what you want. If you assert control the first way, you undermine the relative autonomy and effectiveness of the institution. If you assert control the second way, you maintain the relative autonomy of the institution but at the risk of people not being persuaded to do what you want.
The choice of strategy is made more complex by the fact that no political principal is ever completely happy with how a bureaucracy is performing, so there is always reason to restrict its relative autonomy. And no political principal is ever the perfect persuader, so there are always reasons to appoint people you do not have to argue with. So you see this dilemma with bureaucracy over the history of government. How do you get the bureaucracy to do the things you want it to do? Number one is, well, we will just appoint our own people to run it and then we will run it, as we like, through our proxies. The other way is to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the institution, and principals might even take on board some ideas of the existing bureaucracy about how they can most effectively help the principals to achieve their goals.
This tension is fundamental to how bureaucracies are managed, and indeed to the history of bureaucracies. It is fundamental to the whole institution of a merit-based, impartial, public service that is capable, and, in some ways, independent or relatively autonomous. In my view, one piece of evidence that our polities are in political decay, is the falling away over the last 30 or 40 years of a merit-based, impartial public service, that is capable and independent. I will not say a lot about this now, because I am still a serving public servant and do not want to infringe any speech code rules, but that is my view of the governments that I am aware of, and probably broadly within Western or Anglophone liberal democratic societies.
This view is also actually one of Fukuyama's key points. It is one reasons he feels that we are in this process of political decay. The way in which Fukuyama tells the story is he talks about the forest service in America. The forest service was established in the late 19th century or maybe early 20th century in America. It became an incredibly capable and effective institution in terms of managing the the forests of America, both preventing fires, distributing the timber, and protecting the nature in the forest, the animals, trees and all that stuff. But Fukuyama really tells the story of how it has become much much less effective, and, in some ways, has lost its way as an institution in recent years. Without going into all the details, I am sure listeners can probably think of their own cases of major bureaucratic institutions, that have featured in press stories, wherever they might live in recent years. Your cases similarly may have not performed so well. I do not really want to get into any particulars of any current institutions that may have not performed their mission well; or have been seen to have followed influential leaders; or pursued ‘creeping assumptions’ that they they thought were the right thing to do.i These institutions have done what people wanted them to do. They have not acted, in Fukuyama’s terms as a ‘relatively autonomous’ institution that has a strong sense of its own identity, mission, purpose and systems for ensuring the right sort of talent rises to the top. People can find examples within their own experience of those kind of institutions.
The Comparative History of the Bureaucracy
Since I am a serving public servant, I am not free to talk so much about the present, but I am going to present a historical perspective. I will relay Fukuyama's story of how a merit-based, professional, impartial, capable bureaucracy has developed in three different countries. The three countries are the United States, Britain, and Germany. In each case, bureaucracy developed in relationship to other democratic institutions. The sequence of that development was really instrumental to the extent to which those bureaucracies were subjected to these processes of patronage and political decay. It is useful to look back at these stories because, in my experience, people in the bureaucracy, often very senior people in the bureaucracy, do not know enough about the history of their institutions. They often know little history of their specific local institution nor the broader history of political institutions that is outlined in Fukuyama's work. They tend to operate in response to very immediate pressures around them, bobble around in the turbulence, and operate with these very perfunctory understandings. They might tell the story something like this. Oh well, you know, there was a Northcote-Trevelyan report in the 19th century that established a merit-based system and the merit principle has been fundamental to bureaucracy ever since.
We all operate within the Westminster system; but often our understanding of those institutions, rules and cultures, what they are really about and what they are really capable of, is limited to much more recent, immediate experiences. The management of the principal-agent dilemma becomes just satisfying the minister’s most recent request, and removing an immediate problem, without thinking about the longer term pattern of behaviour. Fukuyama's story then is a pretty valuable corrective to these simplified understandings of bureaucracy.
His story begins with perhaps the earliest cases of the formation of a highly professionalised bureaucracy in Europe, and that is Germany. In other parts of his book he discusses other traditions of government and forms of merit-based bureaucracy in China, India, Persia and other countries many years before. But for our purposes we are zeroing in the discussion on this formative century or so between the mid-19th century and mid-20th century, which fashioned the political institutions that we still live with today. So Germany has this tradition or institution called the Rechtsstaat which refers a constitional state in which the exercise of governmental power is constrained by the law, and more broadly to a well-organised legally based system of public law and bureaucracy. It is established in the late 18th century, when the German state's principalities, including especially Prussia, are run autocratically. They are not democracies at this point. They are not parliamentary democracies, but autocracies that have a strong institutional bureaucracy with a foundation in law. This Rechtsstaat provides forms of accountability, rule of law, and a capable state. It provides Fukuyama’s three-legged foudnation of a sensible political order. Fukuyama highlighted how Germany had a long history of this highly capable state, with a strong institutional bureaucracy, and with a strong system of public law. It was rooted in the traditions of Holy Roman Empire and, to some extent, the Napoleonic Code, which came with the expansion of the French Empire across Europe in the early 19th century. These developments all happened prior to the extension of the democratic franchise.
Fukuyama made the point that a key driver in the dynamic of political decay in institutions of the state is when and how they happen? When and how do each of the three foundations get established? How does capable state relate to rule of law and to democratic accountability. In Germany's case there is a strong well-developed bureaucracy that is established before party systems get off the ground and before a widespread democratic franchise. The widened franchise brings with it the tendency to enlarge patronage systems so that political leaders can reward political supporters. Fukuyama noted that the German state institutions went through lots of changes but fundamentally survived multiple regimes. Some regimes and events tested the state’s breaking point – the two World Wars, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and post-war reconstruction. But throughout those strains, Fukuyama argued, the bureaucracy “retains an esprit de corps and most important political support for its autonomy.”ii This German bureaucracy of Rechtsstaat is the very model and conceptual basis for Max Weber's famous definition of one form of political authority, the legal-rational form. So that is story number one. In Germany, a strong system of bureaucracy that values public law, merit, capability and effectiveness gets established. It adapts to different political regimes, but, because of its relative autonomy, it maintains a relationship with political actors or the political elite, that supports its autonomy. Its effectiveness is vital to being a well-functioning institution. It does not succumb to being a place where lots of supporters of the current regime are appointed.
The second case is the USA, and it is the at the other extreme of the spectrum. In the USA, the democratic franchise comes a lot earlier in the early 19th century. With the wider franchise, there comes an extensive system of party-based appointments to government posts, which is generally known as the ‘spoils system’. Even today, when the President gets elected, a huge draft of appointments are made. They are often party appointments. They are often people who have displayed personal loyalty to the leader. These appointments include Cabinet Ministers of the state, who unlike Australia are not directly elected, and many posts in the bureaucracy. They are direct appointees of the President, although some posts need to be endorsed by Congress. This creates a large patronage system. In the 19th century, even minor post positions were party-based appointments, including clerical roles in post offices and similar kind of work.
This spoils system created an extensive system of patronage and ‘clientelism’, which is a word Fukuyama uses. In some ways, this system is positive. Those people are being helped out by those appointments; but they are, if you like, clients of the party. In response to the system, there is ,through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a long, difficult process of reforms to public administration. Woodrow Wilson, later President of the United States, is associated with these reforms, and the very concept of public administration is, to some degree, an outgrowth of that. Reforms are slowly implemented, but never wholly successful so America to this day remains very much a a state of ‘courts and parties’. This commonly used term describes the system of two oligarchic parties wuth power to make many political appointments to courts, and, through the enormous spoil system, to the bureaucracy. All of this means that the institutions of bureaucracy are more subjected to patronage and political decay, and more exposed to the behaviour of kinship affiliation and reciprocal altruism. As a result of the spoils system, bureaucratic institutions just do not have the same relative autonomy. Political leaders control these institutions by appointing proxies, rather than through rightful persuasion.
The final example is Britain. In a way, this national case study is most familiar to Australia. We have our kinship with Westminster traditions, and the Australian bureaucracy has, more than all others, absorbed the Westminster mental models of how an independent public service was formed and fashioned. So what happened in the UK was really quite interesting. We should recall that the German states, especially Prussia, had a highly effective bureaucracy by the early 19th century. By contrast, Fukuyama wrote, Britain began the 19th century with an unreformed and patronage-ridden civil service. It began to clean up its bureaucracy in the middle decades of the century. Those changes laid the foundations for a modern civil service. One has to really understand that in the 19th century, England is really run by an aristocracy. The exclusive dominance of the aristocracy has been challenged by the industrial and commercial middle class, but throughout Britain there is this tight aristocracy. If you read the Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope, they provide a brilliant depiction of the social patterns of the political elites in 19th century Britain. Indeed, Trollope himself was actually a bureaucrat in the post office, and his novels are brilliant pieces of observation from within the bureaucracy. He showed how all these aristocrats, who have tightly knit connections, are running patronage systems. Nonetheless, this same social group aspired to the ideas of liberal reform that are associated with a more merit-based bureaucracy.
The big changes begin in the 1850s with the Northcote-Trevelyan report, which is frequently referred to dumbed down managerialist interpretations of the history of the bureaucracy. These accounts claim the idea of a merit-based bureaucracy, including competitive selection by exams, came into being with this report. These simplified versions of history do not acknowledge how the report was specific to Britain, or how they adapted practices from the Indian civil service. Nor do they clarify how Northcote and Trevelyan were responding to an institutional problem that Fukuyama described. Britain did not have a capable bureaucracy like Prussia. It had a collection of well-connected office holders of questionable competence and often non-existent training. There was no real way to climb to the top of the the institution, if you like, without that patronage. Moreover, the people who wrote the famous report, Northcote and Trevelyan, were themselves. In fact, aristocrats and highly connected people. They owed their positions to that same patronage system. Yet they also tried to rebuild the institution, in some ways, without totally surrendering aristocratic control.
Again, in part, the Northcote-Trevelyan civil service reforms were provoked by the failures of that bureaucratic system that were evident in military and other incompetence during the Crimean war in the 1850s. The reforms were in part a response to imperial failures in that war. However, it took another 20 years before the ideas that were set out in the Northcote-Trevelyan report were actually implemented by British Governments. It took a series of Prime Ministers, Gladstone, Disraeli and others, but it was ultimately done. Again these reforms were largely done in England before the most significant extension of the democratic franchise. They were done before the really strong formation of political parties, which would later operate different American-style patronage or clientelistic systems in Britain. Those electoral reforms did not really happen until the 1870s or 1880s, or later with the emergence of highly organised political parties. It was during those 20 years or so, after the 1850s Crimean War to the early 1880s, that the civil service was slowly rebuilt.
There were, of course, later, continuing reforms to the public service obviously, ever since, but in some fundamental ways the basic institutions and ideas of Westminster bureaucracy were formed in this period. Again, it is decivie that these reforms were done a little bit free of the forces of popular patronage and clientelism, that were associated with the extension the democratic franchise in America. This context was fundamental to the creation of a strong institution that had some relative autonomy and some genuine capability as well.
The True History of the Bureaucracy Gang in Victoria and Australia
Now, the story of the development of the public service or bureaucracy in Australia and Victoria is different again. I will not fully sketch this history. Our bureaucracies have obviously been strongly shaped, as ex-British colonies, by the British experience, culturally, legally and institutionally. They have taken on many aspects of that experience, but also had some different characteristics that are important to note. The state in mid-19th century Australia had, in some ways, a much larger role in society than the British state at home. It had extensive roles to settle areas, to distribute land, to build all the infrastructure, and to set up all the the institutions of the newly established colonial society. It did these functions, certainly in Victoria, at broadly the same time as the extension of the democratic franchise, wider and earlier than in Britain. But these states were limited in another way. Until 1900, they were still colonies. After the federalist movement and 1900, these relatively strong government institutions expand further. Social observers commented on the large state experiments in Australia and New Zealand, such as electricity, water, gas and fuel, and transport corporations.
This large role for the state influences the history of bureaucracy in Australia. It has some broad similarities to the English story, but also definite differences. I only want to sketch the history of the last 30 to 40 years, without getting too direct about current organisations, given my role as a current public servant. But over the last 30 to 40 years, I have observed significant change in society and political systems that have created new pressures on the institution of bureaucracy, and made it more difficult to hold back the strong forces of political patronage. The role of the private sector has grown through contracts, commercial arrangements and partnerships with private sector organisations. The professionalisation of political parties has occurred. There has been a professionalisation of politics. Numbers of professional political advisors have increased significantly. The phenomenon of ‘spin doctors’ or political marketing has become much more pronounced. There are overlapping networks between political professionals and media journalists. Many journalists have become political advisors and political advisors have become journalists. They move in and out of roles as communications professionals or political advisors or, in some cases, bureaucrats, including in very senior roles. As well as that, there has been a conscious effort over time to improve the responsiveness of
the bureaucracy to political direction. Political control of the bureaucracy is, of course, but the efforts to increased responsiveness to political direction have upset the balance between responsiveness and relative autonomy.
The growing demand for responsiveness and the growing forces of political patronage have probably undermined the capability and relative autonomy of the bureaucracy in Australia. As a result, Australian bureaucracies have come to operate much more of a spoils system, much closer to the American model of courts, parties and spoils. Australia has certainly moved further from the German system of a strong relatively autonomous institution that has a strong esprit de corps and a fundamental sense of being rooted in public law. We have taken our own detour through a new form of clientelism. These trends have had a big impact on institutions losing relative autonomy. Leaders of institutions are more prone to follow ‘creeping assumptions’ rather than to strike out in clear strong directions.
This is, I think, the true history of the bureaucracy gang. It is a story of political decay. I can only comment from my own experience, but I suspect similar patterns have occurred in other countries. Ultimately, how these patterns play out in other countries is an empirical question that I cannot answer. I can only share my honest observation from three decades of experience in these institutions. What I see around me is a less capable state, that is served by less relatively autonomous institutions, and that is more prone to those political processes that Fukuyama described as fundamental to political. So I think it is a good little case study of my theme of political decay. Of course, those institutions could be rebuilt around a strong sense of Rechtsstaat, fundamental purpose and relative autonomy. But that is a job to be done, I guess, rather than something that is happening now. Hopefully that will happen.
Conclusion
So that is where we'll end the podcast for this week. Next week I am going to speak perhaps on somewhat safer ground. I hope some of the slightly indirect ways in which I've had to express things, given that I am a current public servant, has not been too annoying this time. Hopefully, I have not said anything too spicy. Next week I will talk on the third topic of political decay, the issue of culture. Institutions can be a bulwark of against political decay if they are strong relatively autonomous institutions. They can use their sense of Rechtsstaat and purpose to resist processes that degrade their capability. But there is also a sense in which culture can resist decay. Culture can be a form of regeneration against this pattern of political decay. Culture is the spirit in people's hearts and minds, the ideas that they hold dear, and the virtues that they practice. Next week, I want to talk about what you can call the ‘ordinary virtues of governing well’, and how they are a source of hope to deal with this structural process of political decay. We are all wrestling with that process of decay, which is closely linked to other themes of the podcast. So you have been listening to the Burning Archive podcast where the past is never dead the past is not even past and we're by thinking about the past we learn or try to live better in the present.