Malcolm Turnbull, the Abbott government's Communications Minister whose job it is to clean up the mess of Labor's national broadband network, lamented last week the brain drain from the federal bureaucracy as governments have turned increasingly to private consultants.

"There has been a practice for government to outsource what should be the legitimate work of the public service to consultants," Turnbull told The Australian Financial Review's National Infrastructure Summit in Sydney.

"So the public service departments just become, you know, mail boxes for sending out tenders and then receiving the reports and paying for them."

He is not the first to complain about this trend.

AFR Graphic

Expertise gone

Gary Banks, the former head of the Productivity Commission and now dean of the Australia New Zealand School of Government, warned the Rudd government that the bureaucracy no longer had the expertise to provide the evidence-based policy advice the prime minister was demanding.

Banks bemoaned the decline in the number of public servants with the necessary quantitative and analytical skills. He also warned about the varied quality and motives of the consultants involved in developing policy.


While there were highly professional consultancies, he said, there were also consultants who cut corners, provided superficial reports and second-guessed what ministers wanted to hear. Consultants had different motives to professional public servants, for obvious reasons.

If prime ministers wanted evidence-based advice, Banks said, they would have to invest in its production. That's a tall order for a prime minister who is as short of money as Tony Abbott.

So, how might the process of rebuilding proceed?

Probably out of necessity, and with a politician who enjoys wrestling with interesting problems and who would rather hear bad news than blarney.

Turnbull concluded quickly that one problem he had to wrestle with was the quality of advice coming from his department and the NBN.

Making managers accountable

He says he started by making his managers and public servants "absolutely accountable".

No doubt you would prefer that I let him tell his story, so here is an edited slice of Turnbull's off-the cuff remarks to the summit:


"I've got nothing against consultants – nothing at all. But there has been a practice for government in particular to outsource what should be the legitimate work of the public service to consultants.

"What we have to do in government in my view is stop panning public servants and do more to ensure that they do their job better. And one of the ways to do that is to make sure they do the work that is their core responsibility, as opposed to outsourcing everything.

"Of course, that will show up people who aren't any good too: clearly it's a lot easier just to send out a brief to McKinsey than it is to actually do the work yourself.

"There's no single answer to this but managing a talented workforce is very, very hard. You're in the talent business.

"The talent is the real asset of the Australian Public Service, so we have got to have a focus on the APS, a respect for the quality and seek to promote and improve the quality of that workforce all the time.

Respect the public service

"Most people work for the public service as much for the psychic wage as they do for the financial wage. Most of the very smart people in the APS could earn a lot more money somewhere else. One of the things we've got to do is respect the public service – respect it, expect more from it, and make sure that it has more challenging and interesting work to do."

Of course, it won't be easy to wean ministers off consultants who tell them what they want to hear. So, here is a suggestion from Gary Banks: require that consultants' work be subjected to peer review.

That would take some of the pleasure out of cabinet submissions, I would imagine.