Learning the wrong lessons from crisis

One of Australia’s leading progressive think tanks, Per Capita, are holding their annual conference in Brisbane this week. It’s on ‘market design’ – in other words when, where and how to use markets to help deliver government services. It comes at a really unfortunate time though as politicians of all colours scramble to find fault with ‘markets’. Take for example Sarkozy’s recent “laissez-faire capitalism is over” speech, or the line No. 10 pushed that Brown long ago warned us that markets fail.

It would help to distinguish between at least three broad types of markets: financial markets which trade risk; goods and service markets which trade products between businesses and to households; and public service markets which provide government funded services but are not necessarily managed by government agencies (and could for example be run for profit).

Even such a simple definition shows how silly the politics has already got. When Sarkozy talks of the end of capitalism he’s beginning to slide into the goods and services territory – and to industry protection and state support policy. Even more bizarrely, the recently-dug-up speech which Brown gave at the SMF in 2003 is very much focused on the use and limits of markets in public services and is not a general theory of markets. (Amusingly it also talks a lot about the problem of state failure replacing market failure, a risk probably rising in significance daily.)

This ‘contagion’ effect is unfortunate: the financial crisis has some very specific and technical causes and shouldn’t lead us to hasty conclusions about the operation of goods and service markets (and junking long established competition policy) nor about public service markets (and putting unnecessary brakes on bringing the benefits of markets into public services when and where they can add value). In so far as there are general lessons about markets to be found from the financial crisis it’s the importance of good information for them to work effectively and of careful ‘agent-design’ (e.g. that the bank knows who the ‘right’ people to lend to are, and there’s no third party ready to benefit from misselling). But we knew all this already and the three broad market types I described each have specific features and come with very detailed theory as well as evidence and practice in how they work.

Perhaps it’s a good example of how societies – and politicians – respond to crises:

• We have to find historical precedence: so the current economic crisis is rivalled only by the Great Depression of the 1930s. (Actually it’s a poor comparison: we remember the Great Depression for the one in three who became unemployed and the almost half pushed below the poverty line, a human consequence that the current problems will have nothing to compare to, and not the fall in stock values.)
  
  
• We must all somehow be affected: perhaps this is some sort of solidarity effect, or maybe that people are perversely jealous of the attention a crisis gets. But it’s amusing that almost everyone is trying to claim relevance to the credit crisis at the moment. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve recently heard policy makers say things like “in the current turbulent times [environment/ social/ education/ insert random policy area] is now more important than ever”. Why don’t we just let the macroeconomists have their moment in the limelight and acknowledge that constitutional reform or what’s in the school curriculum isn’t the most pressing issue right now?
  
  
• Something must be done: we have to find the general lessons and apply them in all forms and in all places. So we get an equal and opposite reaction with for example politicians getting lukewarm on markets in public services. This is also a particularly common response following disasters whether natural or man-made with disproportionate reactions like with health and safety measures that represent extremely poor levels of cost-effectiveness.
  
  
• Obfuscation and denial of the root cause: a sensible reaction would be to say something’s gone wrong with (parts of) financial markets therefore we need to (1) stop this from worsening (2) limit the consequences elsewhere (3) reduce the chance of this happening again. We’re close to doing (1) now and attention is beginning to shift to doing (2) and (3) through fiscal measures and regulatory and banking reform. This will expend enough political time and effort without trying to fix all other areas of life with some element of market in. Arguably, even talking about the failure of ‘financial markets’ is far too loose a description – it is only some elements we now have problems with that will require fixing (e.g. subprime mortgages, derivative swaps) and the rest is effect on rather than cause of.
  

Anyhow I’ll be listening closely at the conference to whether (and for how long) each speaker drones on in generalities about the financial crisis and attempts to make convoluted links to other areas. I suspect the politicians will be the worst offenders...

Achieving Culture Change

I gave a talk on ‘culture change’ today to the communities and indigenous policy parts of the Queensland Government. (The supporting slides are below – and are a slight excuse to test out a new Google PowerPoint embedding function).





My argument was in four parts:

• First, that people’s cultural influences really do matter for the choices they take in life – and in turn these are particularly driven by the influence of our family, peers, community, as well as the organisations we spend our time in.
  


• Second, that the attitudes, values and norms we derive from these affect our behaviour in often quite unpredictable ways along with other factors like the legislation, information or rewards we face. So we might have a value of a university education being important because the people around us have reinforced this, but it’s only when we are provided with the information and financial support to actually go that it becomes a ‘behaviour’.
  


• Third, that government policy needs to get more sophisticated at understanding the different influences acting on different people. Sticking with the example, providing simple information about university options may be enough for some but others might not even value it in the first place. In which case policy needs to consider much more about how to promote different courses of action ‘upstream’, for example through thinking about the nature of relationships and relationship support.
  


• Fourth, following this approach seriously has some quite big implications for government: being able to develop the case to target different people with different types of support; using a range of disciplines and approaches to get better insight into how people make decisions (and not just economics); and being ready to invest in securing big change for the long term and not just looking for the quick wins (which the more punitive legislative approaches tend to provide). And all the while treading the ‘elastic band of public opinion’ carefully to avoid crossing the boundary into paternalism and the nanny state.
  

Whether any of this is relevant for communities and indigenous policy here is I think part yes and part no. Yes in that current policy like the Northern Territory intervention applies a very limited set of levers in a very intensive and indiscriminate manner. So it places the entire community under income management whereby an adviser decides how to spend your money (unlike the welfare reform pilots in Queensland which will use income management in a limited and targeted way). My view is that the Northern Territory intervention will only serve to reinforce negative signals about community development and personal responsibility. The culture change work is also relevant because of the broader messages about promoting strong families and positive role models, as well as provision of support and advisory services.

Yet the real missing piece is on the supply-side: namely that most indigenous communities are so remote and so lacking in real jobs that there’s little to practically aspire to. There are jobs in the mines, but these merely replace one form of passivity with another and don’t offer a diverse set of life courses.

To a certain extent it reminded me of a visit to Salford I made in writing the original longer discussion paper. What Salford has been doing quite effectively is integrating their community redevelopment policy with the local economy and businesses (not least helped by the BBC’s move up there) along with adopting some cultural and behavioural support policies. What this could mean in community policy speak would be shifting away from the intense place-based initiatives of the past to integrating policy on community assets and opportunities with policies on skills, capabilities, and with cultural capital and personal and mutual responsibility. All of which returns me to my conclusion from the Aurukun blog: that welfare reform and community development is only going to work once someone’s got a sustainable economic vision for these remote communities - which would let loose a whole virtuous circle of cultures, behaviours, and outcomes.

Income inequality

Interesting paper on income inequality out this week from the boffins at OECD. Particularly worth playing with the data in the graphical package Gapminder.

The main findings include:

• Income inequality rising since the 1980s in all countries along with increased social spending to offset it. This suggests if governments start to ‘let loose’, or fail to target poverty-reducing spending, income inequality will accelerate further.
  
  
• Income inequality rising since 2000 in countries like the US and Germany but falling in the UK and Australia. I tested this out on the historical data plotting poverty against social spending since the 1980s. Each bubble represents a year; I’ve added the green lines to highlight the change in most recent years. Of the four, the US has the highest rates of poverty, then Australia, Germany and the UK. Germany and the UK have traded places with a radical drop in poverty in the UK in recent years and coinciding rise in Germany. The UK’s cut appears to have cost an additional 3 percentage points of GDP on social spending; Germany’s rise has been while social spending has been pretty constant (presumably feedback from the structural and higher unemployment they’ve suffered in recent years).
  
  


• Getting more people in work is – unsurprisingly – found to be one of the major ways to reduce poverty, although capital inequality is now more significant in the past. This must be particularly so for those house buying, share-owning Anglo-Saxon economies.
  
  
• Growth and poverty is a more mixed story. The US and Australia have been growing but with rising inequality in recent years (albeit Australia from a much lower base). The UK has been growing but with sharply falling rates of inequality (albeit still higher than Australia).

Focusing solely on the Australian and UK trends for a second this does go some way to explaining in general terms where the two currently differ in political trends. The UK has cut poverty and inequality but the rising social spending this has cost is probably coming to an end and seems to have - for the present at least - maxed out taxpayers' willingness to spend. Meanwhile, Australia has had a long period of rapid growth, though the public now appear more willing to countenance higher spending on social security and public services to improve equity and fairness. I guess we'll find out what the US electorate think very soon...

End of the week...

Sorry for the gap in blogging this week – product of a mostly wasted week that culminated in a lesson why never to try doing a job interview by teleconference (or equally when in a different time zone).

So finishing up the week here’s a pick and mix of recent themes of the blog:

• Public administration: my work on public service reform and helping set up a new Public Service Commission has come to end. Last task was writing a speech for the new Chair on priorities for the Queensland Public Service. Set in the context of the Premier’s new Q2 targets, it argues the Government will need to build higher performing organisations, get serious about leadership and skills, work more effectively across agencies and continue to build on some good public engagement work. Accompanying slides with my favourite age-grade chart here, and further comment on this in a previous blog.
  
  
• Welfare reform: looks like a big plank of the welfare reform pilots could be in doubt with legal questions being raised whether income management is in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act. While specifically about the ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territories this would no doubt have implications for the welfare reform pilots about to start in northern Queensland (although the Government don’t seem ready to concede as yet).
  
  
• Crocodiles: the croc believed responsible for killing Scot Arthur Booker is off for a breeding programme because it exceeds – by 30cm – the cut off for ‘iconic crocodile’ status. It’s one thing to keep it, but you’d think they could quietly shunt it off to a retirement facility rather than an active breeding programme.
  
  
• Bad policy: legislation in New South Wales ‘accidentally’ allows tobacco sponsorship of racing events following a supposed drafting error. Clearly no accident and a disappointingly mild reaction from Action on Smoking Health (Clive: a cousin of the British group?) who are said to be ‘disturbed’. This comes at the same time as revelations in the UK about Blair’s involvement in the F1 exemption debacle a decade ago.
  
  
• Crap politicians: more evidence of the low bar for Australian politicians – a probe into Andrew Stoner’s comments that Federal MP Alby Schultz’s should be ‘blindfolded and shot at dawn’, and a new Committee being set up to find ways to punish bad behaviour in Parliament. Ultimately, the Australian public don’t seem to sanction such raucous characters at the ballot box which would be the best quality-control measure. Meanwhile in Queensland revelations about Ministerial interests still developing – a not unusual story but surprising no code of conduct exist here to prevent such holdings or set down clear standards about disinvestment procedures.

Aurukun

Despite the Coen Negotiation Table being called off, the opportunity to see first hand an Indigenous community was too much to pass up and I managed to catch a flight to the Aurukun community instead. This is remote Australia with a capital R: high up on the Gulf of Carpentaria it’s a land of airstrips built by the US Army in the Second World War, hundreds of miles of nothing but red dust, and multi-day drives to the nearby towns.

Aurukun is one of the most extremely disadvantaged communities in Queensland. It became well known for bad reasons last year after nine residents were given suspended sentences for the rape of a ten year old girl because the judge thought she “probably agreed to have sex with all of you". There are a little over one thousand people in Aurukun: one hundred of which are (mostly white) government officials, health workers and teachers, and the remainder of which are the local Wik people. The Wik people live inside the town, the officials in mobile homes around the perimeter.

On landing, a police check inspects baggage for illicit alcohol or other drugs. Aurukun is part of the intervention policy that has strict controls on the sale of ‘grog’; the town’s tavern is to shut next month. Sadly there were few positive signs about the community. There are no jobs – the only businesses are the shop and tavern and these are both run by the government. There is employment in these - and in the government office - for locals under a work for welfare scheme known as the CDEP. But it’s a depressing form of employment and seems to often be nothing more than an excuse for both sides (e.g. a woman employed under CDEP in the government office apparently rarely shows up for work and when she did for a couple of hours while I was there she was just put in the corner to play computer solitaire).

There are some jobs in the regional mining companies, but these are a long drive away and mean leaving the town or returning irregularly. Those who do find such work are well paid, but theft of food and petty crime against them and their families is pretty rife.

There’s a palpable sense of aggression in the community. In the 24 hours while I was there one person went on a rampage with a spear and shovel through the town, another threw a strop around the government offices because her welfare payment hadn’t gone into her account. There are regular riots here, with two expected crunch points ahead: in the next month with the welfare reform pilots kicking in and again later in the year when some of the residents now working in the mine receive their first tax bill.

The idea of the welfare reform is to:

• First, to ‘rebuild norms’. A Family Responsibilities Commission has been set up to promote child wellbeing with sanctions to place people under ‘income management’ (i.e. to take control of people’s welfare payments) for breaches in regard to child welfare, school attendance and lawful behaviour.
  
  
• Second, ‘reform incentives’. This is seeking to transfer people off welfare into jobs and provide skills and training. In the future it will be much harder to get onto CDEP, and payments will be reduced in size.
  
  
• Third, ‘normalise housing’. On top of welfare payments, most housing is rented out at low or no cost. In the future the idea is to promote home ownership and increase rental levels to market rates (though I’m not clear what ‘market rates’ means here as there is no market, nor equivalent to base rents from).
  
  
• Fourth, reduce the scope of government. In Aurukun the government sector completely crowds out any potential for private or not-for-profit sector jobs. It makes no sense for the government to own and run all towns like Aurukun and only increases the dependency culture. So the idea is to slowly transition some of these jobs out of government and develop more new ones.
  

At this stage the pilots are only beginning to roll out after a lengthy effort to get the details right with the community. It will be interesting to see how successful they are. To be honest my visit didn’t leave me with much optimism. Aurukun feels completely artificial: aside from the mines there’s no sustainable economy here and it’s difficult to see how it could be stimulated. If Aurukun wasn’t already here, people clearly wouldn’t move here.

Welfare reform will only work if people have a sustainable economy to transition into, or if such an economy can be envisaged and developed, and, sadly, I didn't get the sense that's the case.

Some photos I took below...

More Aurukun photos...

Australia's $10.6bn rescue package

Kevin Rudd this evening addressed the nation to give details of his $10.6bn ‘rescue package’. It is basically a massive fiscal stimulus package:

• $4.8 billion for an immediate down payment on long term pension reform;
  
• $3.9 billion in support payments for low and middle income families;
  
• $1.5 billion investment to help first home buyers buy a home;
  
• $187 million to create 56,000 new training places in 2008-09 (comment: small beer relative to the other items); and
  
• Acceleration of the implementation of the government's three nation building funds (education, health, infrastructure).
  

Benefits will start coming on line from early December with single pensioners receiving a lump sum payment of $1,400, pensioner couples receiving $2,100, and people receiving the carers allowance $1,000 for each eligible person in their care.

The rescue package comes on top of the guarantee over the weekend for 100% of bank deposits and is sourced from the c.$20bn surplus in the recent budget.

A good way to blow $10bn?

If a surplus ever was going to be drawn down now is probably the right time. What’s currently a credit crisis is soon going to become a nasty and lingering business recession here and elsewhere so an early inoculation against the downturn may be a good idea. IMF forecasts for Australia are for an economic slowing, although notably not the zero per cent growth facing many other OECD countries. Australia's well regulated banks also are generally in good shape so the landing is going to softer here than at home and this package may help ensure that's even softer and for worse off groups. $10bn is also not a huge amount of money in the scheme of things (c.1% of GDP) so it could be seen as a sort of insurance policy in uncertain times.

On the other hand there should be a few questions asked:

• Is it the right time to try and target a fiscal package? We’re in the eye of the storm of a credit crunch at the moment. Sure, the ‘real’ effects will land in due course in a business recession but what would be the cost of waiting another week or so to have a better idea of where markets are heading? The key to fiscal packages is ensuring they land at the right time and we'd have a better idea of when that might be in even a few days' time. Of course the timing is more about the politics but they'd be other ways to manage this (e.g. signal the size of the package but announce the timing in the next few weeks).
  
  
• Has there been sufficient time to fully think through? Perhaps they’ve been thinking about this for a long while and there's been some rigorous analysis. But I suspect not: and spending $10bn warrants serious examination to get it right.
  
  
• Is it appropriate targeted? The package is partially targeted but not completely – for example to all pensioners. If Australia’s income distribution is anything like the UK’s this is not a good way to tackle the potential poverty effects that Rudd says it is designed to – pensioners have the highest levels of income variance of any group.
  
  
• Some bad spending items in there. $1.5bn for first time buyers is more good money after bad.

Meanwhile, over in Blighty, Gordon seems to be getting some good headlines e.g. 'Gordon Brown has saved the world's financial system, says economics Nobel Prize winner' from today's Daily Mail as both Europeans and Americans copy elements of the British plan.

Death

I was due to visit a welfare reform project up in the Cape York region this week. It would have been an interesting trip on several counts. The project operates in a (mostly) indigenous town called Coen in the northern tip of Queensland, which being over 2,500km from Brisbane is somewhat off the beaten track (see below).

The so called Welfare Reform Trials have had a lot of attention because they set out strong conditionalities in return for welfare payments (e.g. sending children to school and meeting certain tenancy conditions) and an emphasis on family responsibilities. What I was going along to was the ‘Negotiation Table’ which brings together commonwealth, state and local government officials with local leaders and community organisations to discuss issues facing the indigenous community and specifically this time how the welfare reforms were working.

Unfortunately however one of the elders died this weekend and so the whole thing has been called off. I don’t know much about the community in question nor exactly what the meetings would have been like (and unfortunately now won’t) but it did surprise me a little that it’s been called off - and called off indefinitely as the community is entering a mourning period of up to a month. It’s a clear example of cultural differences – in the UK we’d likely go ahead, perhaps doing a minute’s silence or something similar to mark the passing. But we’d go ahead because we’d weigh it up against the now unavoidable costs of chartered flights for officials from Canberra and Brisbane, months of pre-conference work, and potential risk of disruption to the project. I’m not saying one decision is better than the other, but we’d say that the person would have wanted it that way because they loved the community and wanted to see it continue to strive or something similar.

So I decided to find out a little more about what death means in Aboriginal society. For Aborigines, death represents a return of the spirit to the Dreaming and the eternal life-stream. Upon death the spirit returns to its source to await reincarnation. Death rituals vary between Aboriginal groups but I was struck by a few points, some which I’ve seen in other societies and others not:

• It is forbidden in Aboriginal culture to refer in any way to the deceased. Instead the news is passed on indirectly in forms like “X has become one” (where X is the wife/husband). This was evident in e-mails and phone calls earlier where it was unclear who exactly had died.
  
  
• Ritual mourning and burying rituals have to be fully carried out to assist the spirit into the afterlife; without this the spirit will be caught between death and future life. Again this helps explain why it’s unclear if/ when the conference will now happen – with up to one month of mourning being planned everything else is disrupted.
  
  
• The mourning is supposed to be accompanied by high levels of agitation and (sometimes) self-harm like burning oneself with coals or gashing of the forehead. I’ve see a bit of this Hindu society in Nepal, though it was more agitation through intense wailing than active self harm.
  
  
• Relatives, and particularly widows, have to experience food taboos and isolation from the community for up to one year. This seems a particularly harsh feature, although may not be as customary these days.
  
  
• There are a range of burial approaches from burying under rocks to cremation. I presume these days everybody has to be cremated or buried in an official spot though perhaps not in these more remote areas.
  

Clearly then death in Aboriginal society is an intensely mystical, complex and tabooed ritual. Apparently Aborigines also don’t particularly fear for death which if right is a very positive feature of their culture - compared for example with the Catholic faith with its both rather elaborate rituals and instillation of life-long dread and apprehension of death. The psychology (and sociology) of grief and mouring is an interesting topic. From a purest perspective many of the Aboriginal customs wouldn't seem to help the emotional process of grieving and moving on from the death of a loved one - take for instance not being able to name the dead person or having to live in isolation to mourn. Perhaps though when rituals get deeply rooted in culture then the process of following the rules whether or not they 'make sense' itself helps one to move on because you are just doing what everyone else does.

Subprime explained...

Bit off topic for the blog but in lieu of a regular article here's a highly amusing primer to the subprime market I saw today.

Iconic Queensland

Next year Queensland celebrates its 150th year of independence from New South Wales. As part of the 'Q150' events the Premier today invited nominations for icons that define Queensland’s identify. I’m not sure whether my vote counts but here it is anyway:

People...

• State-shapers: My slightly odd choice would be Kevin Rudd. Not because he’s now PM but because he ran the Queensland public service in the early 90s under the first Labor Government for over twenty years. Before this Queensland really was a banana republic having long been governed by a fascist Liberal government under Joh Bjelke-Peterson (e.g. public protests and street marches were banned in the 1970s and 1980s). So Rudd was an important figure in helping modernise the state (and no doubt will continue to have a role in shaping the state).
  


• Influencing artists: I’m going to go for the author Nick Earls as I’ve got to know him a bit and I think he’s a strong and effective ambassador for Queensland and of those soft influencers in life who often have much the more impact.



• Sports legends: Cathy Freeman. Obvious choice really – her victory in the Sydney Olympics 400m was a massive moment for Australia’s Indigenous population and arguably up there with the greatest sporting moments of all time.

Places…

• Locations: Brisbane's South Bank. It really is a fantastic stretch of well designed architecture – stretching from the Gallery of Modern Art at one end to the Kangaroo Point Cliffs at the other which much in between.



• Natural attractions: Great Barrier Reef. No contender here surely?
  


• Structures and engineering feats: the Kuranda railway in northern Queensland. Seriously impressive railway built by hand (mostly by Irish labour) in the 1880s through the rainforest, originally to serve the mines and now a spectacular scenic railway.

Stories…

• Defining moments: Expo ’88. This renovated large parts of Brisbane, particularly around the river. More to the point it was also a defining moment in that it put Brisbane (and Queensland) out to the world.



• Inventions and innovations: the cervical cancer vaccine developed at the University of Queensland.
  


• Events and festivals: has to be the Ekka.
  


• “Typically Queensland”: tough choice this one. Close contenders were XXXX beer and Queenslander houses. In the end, given that three-quarters of Queenslanders live along the coast I had to go for a beach theme… so invoking fully the laid back and relaxed beach lifestyle of the state the 'Boardie Short' wins this category for me.

The Brisbane outpost in the early 1860s:

The Courier Mail: A Feral Newspaper

I was reminded today of a brilliant quote from 'Yes, Prime Minister' about British newspapers and their readers:

Sir Humphrey: The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.

Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the Press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.

Apart from just being very funny this does point to the remarkable diversity of Britain’s daily newspapers. In Queensland there is unfortunately only one daily newspaper called the Courier Mail. (One can of course get other national newspapers - which aren’t much better - but it’s only the Courier that focuses on the Queensland Government).

Disappointing then that it’s a complete rag. One case in point was a neither funny nor smart article at the weekend. It was supposed to be a satirical account of a bedroom conversation between Premier Anna Bligh and her husband Greg Withers (a senior public servant and Head of the Office for Climate Change). In the print version they had a double page spread with photo-shopped pictures of them in bed. Even if one thought that acceptable coverage for some public figures, it’s really a very crass way to attack the Premier and serves nothing but to undermine and discredit the office. And yes the Courier Mail is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation - so it is very much a regular ad hominem attack.

I’m a strong supporter of the Reithian market failure approach to broadcasting and the media. What does this argue?

• That there are various positive externalities to community and society from having breadth and depth in media, such as improved debate and dialogue in society and hence greater ability to hold governments to account and improve the policy making and legislative process.
  
  


• That the value individuals gain from being informed or educated is never fully captured in market prices, and therefore that we tend to get an under-supply of good quality public information.
  
  


• That given there are increasing returns to scale in media, an unregulated market is likely to become dominated by a small number of providers (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) who then have power to exploit market price or can dump low quality products on the market.
  
  


• That there are informational deficiencies in media – e.g. that consumers may be unable to detect better or worse quality without experiencing the full spectrum of choices.

Which points to a couple of things. First, the importance of regulation and management of the media sector to avoid monopoly and market abuse. Second, that consumers are key. If they don’t demand better quality it won’t be supplied. (And unfortunately there isn’t really a culture of intellectual rigour or scrutiny in Queensland to trigger new entry). Third, there’s a strong argument for public support and subsidy. Mind due I'm not sure any of these arguments apply that well to the case of the Courier Mail.

Still, annoying to be stuck with no alternatives...

The worth of charts

People say a picture is worth a thousand words; so too a good chart. Here’s an age-grade profile of the Queensland Public Service using data from the former Office for Public Service Commissioner. It plots the 10,200 public servants working in Queensland’s management roles – from junior level up to the most senior executives.


What is it showing?

• An aged workforce: the average age of managers in the public service is around 50, and the median higher again.
  


• Huge concentration of people in the latter phase of their careers: 75% of all people in management grades are between 45 and 60 years old. 0.9% are under the age of 30.
  


• Some odd skews: for example middle managers are on average older than senior executives.

Cause for concern?

Of course one would need to supplement with other data but there are some potentially worrying things in this. For example:

• Succession planning: if you were running this show you might have genuine cause for concern about where your next cadre of leaders are going to come from. Especially if – like many other public services around the world – you want to increase the scale and scope of leadership roles.
  


• New ideas: okay so you don’t want all your vital services run by teeny boppers but with less than one in a hundred managers aged under 30 you might worry about whether there are enough fresh ideas and challenging of the status quo. Indeed it’s another three grades below the junior management level where the under 30s start appearing in numbers.
  


• What’s happening with entry and exit: the data looks suspiciously uniform almost like there’s a lot of grade creep going on with people moving up based on age profile. And if that’s the case one might being worried about whether there’s sufficient entry and exit going on and if your managers are actually any good (another clue to this is that less than 1 in 20 senior executives are recruited from outside the public service – and I imagine the existing stock much lower still).
  

What should it lead one to investigate?

Further questions to ask, like…

• What exactly do these roles entail and what skills are needed to fill them? I’m always suspicious of the line that public servants uniquely need vast amounts of experience. Many business leaders are in their 30s and early 40s; national leaders often not much older again. Indeed, Queensland’s Treasurer Andrew Fraser is himself a mere 32 years old (it must be an odd experience for him to very rarely if ever meet people of his own generation working in his department).
  


• What is the pitch and proposition to attract new talent? Have agencies thought about, or better still got, policies for succession planning?
  


• Should there be more recruitment from outside the public service and if so how do you get these people? Pay flexibilities? Stronger brand promotion?
  


• What are the barriers to external recruitment and how can you tackle them? Targets? Cultural change?
  


• What are the implications more generally of an ageing workforce? How do you motivate and retain the good ones and exit the poor performers?
  


• How can you effectively talent manage the workforce? Mentoring and staff development? Talent pools?
  

Anyhow like all good charts if poses as many questions as it does answers (although I fear my word count a little short of the 1,000 mark)...

When crocs attack

An unpleasant end for Scot Arthur Brooker who was this week eaten by a giant crocodile in northern Queensland. An Australian resident and Vietnam veteran, Arthur was checking his crab pots while on a caravanning holiday when he disappeared. So far investigators have found his wrist watch, sandals, camcorder as well as some ominously large crocodile slide marks.

(A second sad crocodile story also this week was a seven year old boy who broke into a zoo in Alice Springs and fed over $6,000 worth of rare reptiles to 'Terry' the salt water crocodile.)

Anyhow, it's sparked a debate about whether Queensland should again start culling crocodiles, which it last did in the 1950s. (Which incidentally almost wiped out valuable Barramundi fish stocks due to an explosion in Catfish stocks). According to local MP Bob Katter "nature is completely out of whack... there has to be culling, human beings are dying here".

To Bob it's all quite clear: "The only way I'd like to see that croc is through the tip of the foresight and the shoulders of the rear sight of my rifle... and if there is any doubt as to which crocodile it is, they should shoot every crocodile in that area ... take out the lot."

In a similar vein, Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald intervened with "if human beings are congregating in an area then all crocodiles should be removed".

It's a pity Steve Irwin isn't around to give some perspective any more. It's clearly a very horrendous time for Arthur's family but perhaps some of these gung-ho MPs should reflect that maybe it is humans that are out of whack with nature.

After all humans might take a little more care about where they congregate. Final word courtesy of Terry of Lindfield: "Shooting the crocs seems a bit unfair... why not just feed them the members of the New South Wales Government?"

Implementing Government Priorities

I’m doing a talk today on ‘Implementing Government Priorities’ at Griffith University.

The context is the recent launch of Queensland’s targets and policy ambitions for the future – called 'Toward Q2: Tomorrow’s Queensland'. It’s essentially a set of targets that will go alongside a new performance management approach to drive public services here. It is in many ways quite similar to the UK’s ‘Public Service Agreements’.

I’ve been fairly involved in producing this, and am generally supportive despite having a few quibbles. Anyhow my argumentation today is that:

• Priority setting and performance management can be an effective model to drive public services – both politically and pragmatically
  
  
• But there have been a number of drawbacks with over reliance on the model – e.g. too one size fits all, risks disenfranchising front-line professionals
  
  
• Therefore need to refine how we use it – more devolution, proportionate intervention models, more engagement with citizens in its design and delivery
  
  
• But also we need to drive public services through other approaches – including use of public service information and transparency; user choice and voice; service devolution and autonomy; customer transformation; markets and contestability; and the public value and co-production model. Critically drawing on the most effective lever for each area.
  

This isn’t new stuff as such in the UK but certainly something not on the agenda here as yet.