End prosecution of ATO whistleblower, Dreyfus urged
Legal groups and former senator Rex Patrick have renewed calls for Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to stop the prosecution of Tax Office whistleblower Richard Boyle.
Mr Boyle, a former public servant, spoke publicly in 2018 about aggressive practices by the Australian Taxation Office, including hardline use of so-called garnishee notices, used to claw back tax debts from individuals and business.
ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle is facing 24 charges. Ben Searcy
He was charged with offences related to the misuse of sensitive information, telephone tapping and recording of conversations without consent. The case will be the first time a provision under the federal whistleblower law, the Public Interest Disclosure Act, is tested in a criminal case.
The Human Rights Law Centre this week called on Mr Dreyfus to discontinue the prosecution, following his move to end the case against lawyer and whistleblower Bernard Collaery.
“Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished. There is no public interest in this prosecution going ahead,” Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Kieran Pender said. “Richard Boyle did the right thing – he spoke up about wrongdoing taking place within a powerful government agency.
“Boyle has been vindicated by three independent inquiries, which collectively found that the ATO had misused its debt recovery powers, and that the ATO’s internal investigation of Boyle’s whistleblowing was superficial. Yet, he finds himself on trial for telling the truth.”
Earlier this month, legal groups and whistleblower advocates commended Mr Dreyfus for ordering the end of the prosecution of Mr Collaery over national security leaks, ending a four-year saga sparked by Australia’s efforts to spy on the government of East Timor.
The former ACT attorney-general was charged in 2018 with offences under the National Security Information Act for allegedly seeking to help his client, the intelligence operative known as Witness K.
The former Morrison government spent almost $6 million on the prosecution of Mr Boyle, and the Collaery case, according to figures released earlier this year.
“Like the Collaery case, the prosecution of Richard Boyle is unjust and will have a chilling effect on prospective whistleblowers,” Mr Pender said.
“This case warrants the Attorney-General’s intervention to end it.”
Mr Boyle’s case is being heard in the District Court of South Australia and is expected to last at least two weeks. If he is unsuccessful, a full trial before a jury is expected in October. It was due to start on Tuesday but has been delayed due to COVID-19.
A spokesman for Mr Dreyfus said the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions was responsible for decisions about the commencement of prosecutions independently of government, and he would not comment on cases before the court.
“The Attorney-General’s decision to intervene in the prosecution of Mr Collaery was exceptional.
“The government is committed to ensuring appropriate protections are in place to support whistleblowers. This includes acting on the recommendations of the 2016 independent review of Public Interest Disclosure Act by Philip Moss.”
Mr Patrick, whose Senate term ended on July 1, said Tuesday’s hearing would be the most significant test of public service whistleblower protections since they were created in 2013.
“I know Mark Dreyfus and I know he cares about these things. Indeed, he and I had held discussion on Richard while he was in opposition,” he said.
“Well after he’s left the Parliament, he’ll reflect on his decision not to intervene in this case, and will suffer deep regret.”
10 ways the public service can make life better for citizens
For well over a decade, we have been investing in transformation, reinventing government for the internet era, almost from the ground up.
This is fundamentally changing the how, what and why of government, and the decisions politicians and public servants make that affect our lives every day.
Despite these profound changes, it’s a topic that gets relatively little airtime, even though the government is directly responsible for over a quarter of GDP. The importance of public sector reform for productivity and service improvement is expected to be a major theme at the Financial Review Government Services Summit this Tuesday in Canberra.
Attendees at the Financial Review Government Services Summit can put themselves in the shoes of Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and other government ministers. Alex Ellinghausen
The redesign of services around citizens and customers is fundamentally resetting the relationship that public entities have with their users and stakeholders.
In the face of new digital methods and modes of economic production and value creation, governments are searching for new sources of competence and legitimacy for governing while learning to direct and oversee digital economy and society.
British writer James Plunkett persuasively argues that we are not going to do the deep and transformative work of reshaping government and the public sector properly unless we accept this constitutes a fundamental reset of the way government and policy work.
“Running an internet-era state doesn’t mean just that the government has a good website or that it lets you pay your taxes online,” says Plunkett.
“It means that the state’s methods, mindsets and deepest ways of working are configured to make the most of internet-era technologies.”
To Plunkett, digital transformation means a government must play a fundamentally different role to its post World War II persona
“The new state that is emerging today doesn’t pull big levers, fix rigid plans, issue directives through a hierarchy, or prize discretion as if it’s an admirable professional quality.”
“It sets common standards, invests in networks and peer groups, builds shared components, and works in the open by default.
“It pursues social outcomes that are measured transparently with live data, and it delivers those outcomes by handing over power to autonomous institutions and teams,” Plunkett posits.
This shift to a type of collaborative accountability is a profoundly different approach to the traditional government-knows-best assumption our parents grew up with.
But rather than being crushed by the enormity of the task, we should be motivated by the sheer scale of what’s possible and necessary.
So put yourself now in the shoes of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; Finance and Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher; Government Services Minister Bill Shorten; the new head of the Australian Public Service, Prime Minister & Cabinet Secretary Glyn Davis; and those state leaders providing a raft of front-line services.
What should they do? These are some ideas we’d suggest should be in the mix.
1. Strategy
Frame the task at its largest and most encompassing to give this next phase of government and public sector reform its true setting.
Government is being inevitably virtualised; its rules, sanctions and entitlements are literally being programmed into software. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and smart public and private applications will increasingly feed off the enormous data sets governments generate, creating platforms that citizens can engage with.
But rather than citizens having to navigate the digital plumbing of government, the vision is that public services are wrapped around citizens, fuelling deep personalisation through a web of joined-up services across the federation.
Properly secured and with solid modern privacy protections, this customisation will breed new sources of trust and confidence in government, policymaking and the public service. These pieces should become fused into a single “transformational transition” agenda, driven by the national cabinet.
2. Simple, not shiny
It’s easy to be distracted by the bright and buzzy (and justified) interest in AI, quantum computing, blockchain and now web 3.0 in the ceaseless cycle of technology invention.
However, there are huge gains to be made by being more efficient and getting the simple stuff right: don’t ask for unnecessary information, get rid of duplicate, confusing or long forgotten web pages and sites, and clean up the litter of apps long past their use by date.
Just make things easier for citizens and businesses. There’s progress, in some places, some of the time, but it has to go further and faster.
3. Services, not silos
We’ve called this Service 4.0, or “government without portfolios”, recognising how little people know or care about different parts of government. They just want simple, easy and reliable access to services. It’s happening, but it has to go further and faster.
New shared platforms common to integrated service systems offer a powerful alternative. Service Australia’s multi-billion dollar investment in a modern payments platform is a case in point, being used by multiple jurisdictions to quickly get pandemic payments to those who need it.
The point here is relevance and access, not whose badge is on the increasingly common digital front door. Even better if this actually covers three tiers of government, so the bewildered user isn’t forced to remember who does what.
4. Supercharge infrastructure
The beginning of this election cycle is a good time for a multi-year and focused approach to fulfil the digital infrastructure inventory. We can take a leaf out of the way governments have been tackling major physical infrastructure planning and delivery. It’s time for a dedicated national public digital infrastructure agency, with a 20-year horizon and the ability to mobilise investments in digital and cybersecurity assets and capability.
The NSW Government’s Digital Restart Fund, now emulated in WA, inspired changes to investment processes. Both offer good examples of rethinking traditional budgetary approaches for investing in cross-government services. The point is not to fund transformation for transformation’s sake, but to have the enabling capabilities to deliver the priorities people want and that governments need to deliver.
5. Squeeze the lemon
More and more of the digital infrastructure assets on which governments rely (including replaced “legacy” systems) should be common and shared. In the “platform” world, the asset can be built once and used many times, generating a wealth of useful data about what works and what doesn’t. So, just one platform for grants, websites and payments, for example.
This will reduce the time to learn and adapt, generating potential savings from suppliers and public servants, and drive product and service innovation. This should also allow agencies to focus on constantly improving the consistency of services and interactions with citizens and communities.
We’re making a start. The delivery of the National Death Notification Service, the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse and the forthcoming National Digital Birth Certificateare all good exemplars. The latter, according to NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital Victor Dominello, is an example of where this work should be led by a sponsoring agency, regardless of whether that is as the federal or state level.
6. Scale at all levels
Responding to the rhythms and requirements of digital implies scale and new ways to lead. This is about making the government, society and the economy digitally fit and capable. That merits a high and regular place on the cabinet agenda. For example, at the federal level this would be with joint leadership from the Digital Transformation Agency, Finance, the Australian Public Service Commission and Prime Minister and Cabinet, all working very closely with the big service agencies and their platforms.
A focus at the top table requires dedicated delivery. For example, that could involve a dedicated chief operating officer with the status and mandate to build and mobilise at the right scale. That has to be matched in every state and territory, and come together as a national leadership and mobilisation capability.
7. Skills and systems
The skill base for government needs to grow urgently through recruitment, training and new models of rapid learning to give public servants the confidence they need in digital and transformation.
We’ve argued before that digital leadershipdemands a focus on policy and service design, delivering digital services and understanding new ways of working, while emphasising trust, safety, security and effective engagement with communities and citizens.
Digital teams should be set up to do the digital delivery work, and not just to aspire to its modish label. If the digital world’s instincts are for speed and connectedness, internal systems – HR, procurement, budgeting, evaluation and monitoring – have to line up with digital rhythms of work and performance.
Singapore’s focus on all public servants, especially senior ones, having digital skills is a model to learn from.
None of these challenges is unique to the public sector, of course. But the crisis of skills and talent, and of requisite leadership – and the consequent revolution of learning and capability development that is working its way through the entire economy – has to be confronted in government and the public service too.
Ministers and secretaries, the prime minister and the Prime Minister’s Office need to stand behind this movement and put their own digital leadership and capability into the mix.
8. Learn from successes
Australian governments fare comparatively well on assessments of digital government and the quality of the public service. Despite that, there are few voices, barring those ministers with “digital” in their title, let alone senior public servants, talking about the fruits of transformation.
Telehealth, the use of data analytics to inform economic interventions, vaccine rollouts powered by digital bookings and the integrating of federal vaccine certificates into state service wallets are all pandemic dividends.
Taking a functional improvement such as telehealth and aggressively deploying it for better management of high touch services such as responses to domestic violence and even homelessness is the obvious next step.
9. ESG considerations
The steady transformations of policy, practice and delivery that digital is forcing have to be sustainable for the environment and for national economic and budgetary policy. Amid a pandemic that is not going away it needs to recognise the mental health and wellbeing of the public servants, community providers and others tasked with the work.
10. System incentives
Many of these elements have been talked about, and some implemented. As the pandemic, bushfires and floods have shown, the demands for high-quality, easy-to-use public services is increasing. We have to ramp up the pace and scale of the changes to meet these increasing needs.
Continuing limits to progress and sometimes outright resistance breeds impatience and frustration, inside government as well as outside. But remaking our governing institutions and practices in the image of digital is becoming more urgent.
Government has built up a long list of procedures and processes, ranging from procurement to recruiting, from budgeting to bonuses, that need to reviewed to enable the more urgent, open and collaborative way that digital change demands.
More deeply, there is a need to overcome the natural inclination of government to “play it safe”. Many of the traditional controls of government – such as auditing reviews, public accounts committees and ministerial approvals – remain largely unaltered, despite changing requirements for agile and collaborative leadership.
As Plunkett and others have observed, a 21st-century government will be simpler, flatter, and more open and trusting.
No longer authoritarian, it will seek to genuinely work with empowered citizens and communities. That’s how adaptive leadership works. If you want to change the way people dance, change the music.
