Public servants have complained about rude and unprofessional senators, bullying, burnout, low morale, uncompetitive pay and a lack of specialist skills that have led to expensive program failures and outsourcing.
The blunt feedback was delivered to department bosses during a staff engagement session in Canberra, which allowed managers to confront concerns as they seek to rebuild the capacity of the federal bureaucracy.
“We’ve got to hold our feet to the fire on this,” the public service commissioner, Gordon de Brouwer, said in reference to staff feedback and efforts to improve culture and accountability.
The complaints do not always reflect the majority of views within the public service, but do align with opinions expressed in an annual survey of staff published by the commission each year.
One anonymous public servant asked: “When will ministers be held accountable to Australian public service values? Behaviour during Senate estimates [hearings] is often unprofessional and rude.”
According to the Australian Public Service Commission website, those values require public servants to “respect all people, including their rights and their heritage”.
The assistant public service minister, Patrick Gorman, who took part in the feedback session, said it would be a mistake to conflate the role of bureaucrats with democratically elected ministers responsible for holding departments to account.
“That separation is really important,” Gorman said. “I don’t want us to go down a path where everything applies in exactly the same way because we’ve got to recognise that one comes with a democratic mandate.”
About 10% of public servants who took part the latest workplace survey said they had experienced some form of bullying or harassment. That rate has fallen in recent years, but leaders acknowledge it is still too high.
“Bullying and harassment in the workforce are completely unacceptable behaviours,” De Brouwer said. “There is zero tolerance for it.”
Public servants raised concerns about “a brain drain” of talented colleagues quitting to take higher-paying jobs in the private sector. One possible solution was ensuring staff are not permanently based in Canberra.
“I would not have taken this job if it was completely in Canberra,” said the executive director of the Office for Women, Padma Raman, who was on the feedback panel.
The health department’s first assistant secretary, Rachel Balmanno, who moderated the session, said “we do struggle to compete on a pay basis with the private sector in terms of a lot of these technical capabilities”.
De Brouwer also acknowledged concerns that specialist staff believe their careers cannot progress unless they become generalist managers.
Other questions focused on what managers were doing to lift morale in departments and agencies. In some large agencies, the number of staff satisfied with their job has dropped to about 65% in recent years.
The veterans’ affairs department secretary, Alison Frame, said keeping staff morale high was a challenge given the intense scrutiny of an ongoing royal commission into veteran suicides.
“I think that brings a really specific challenge around keeping morale high when staff feel that every day their efforts [are] being diminished,” Frame said.
“There is this ongoing public scrutiny and we always want to improve but that doesn’t mean that their efforts aren’t massively appreciated.”
Balmanno referenced questions on burnout within departments, including her own, which came under considerable strain during the height of the pandemic.
“Certainly, there are always different parts of the service that are under enormous pressure,” she said.
Gorman said the government was aware of burnout and it was one reason why it had increased the size of the public service.
“In the last financial year, we grew the public service by 6.9%. That’s 11,000 additional staff in the public service,” he said. “We knew this was a problem and that on the other side of that burnout, the public were not getting the services they needed.”
