The respected senior public servant entrusted by the Albanese government to reform the culture and behaviour of the Australian Public Service has personally apologised for the harm and misery the bureaucracy meted out under robodebt, ahead of the findings of the royal commission into the illegal government-debt invention racket.

As rumblings increase that strong workplace sanctions against senior and mid-ranking public servants are coming to weed out a culture of bypassing or circumventing legal requirements, the first of many collective admissions of legal and ethical wrongdoing has come from the top.

“I am personally deeply sorry for what the public service did to them,” APS secretary for public sector reform Gordon de Brouwer said of the scheme’s victims during an Institute of Public Administration Australia podcast.

His apology sets a bar for other senior public servants, especially those involved in robodebt, to acknowledge the harm they caused before corrective action is taken.

The royal commission has already put the bureaucracy on notice that some of those hauled before it should seek legal counsel to ensure due process, given the possibility that adverse findings against public servants will be made, potentially putting their APS jobs on the line.

Truth or dare

Taking a swipe at more ambitious elements of APS culture that allowed robodebt to fester for years before the toxic program finally popped, deBrouwer urged public servants to be honest about what happened in order to learn from the disaster.

“When it comes to things like integrity, it’s not a woke concept, it’s actually just the law. It’s a basic legal requirement on you doing your job,” the APS reform chief said.

de Brouwer also flagged that cultural change and improvement at the top of the APS needed to address performance management across the service to ensure outcomes are achieved with integrity and transparency.

“We’ll need to reflect on how we discharged our legal and ethical responsibilities under the law, including in our leadership,” de Brouwer said.

“We’ll need to examine [that] and act to strengthen our systems, including training and performance management across the service to ensure that what we have seen so far isn’t repeated.”

Managing up, managing out

In terms of changing the structure and drivers of APS executive behaviour, de Brouwer was frank about why culture outlasted any single programmatic result, and why this needed to be managed to weed out rule benders.

“The way you perform with both your delivery, and the behaviours you exhibit matter to your position in the service and your promotion and actually whether you stay in the service,” de Brouwer said.

“You build it in structurally and in career development.

“Most people — if the culture says delivery and behaviours matter [then] the vast majority of people — will respond very enthusiastically to that, and that’s the starting point.

“But you also need a performance-management system that fully assesses that, and screens people out who can’t engage with that.”

Rust never sleeps

The reform chief said  that “to some degree, parts of the service at times has lost its soul, lost its focus on people, its empathy for people.”

However, de Brouwer pushed back against the notion that the robodebt scheme was a symptom of a wider systemic failure and cultural breakdown within the APS.

“I’m quite reluctant to say it’s an intrinsic problem because a lot of public servants act with integrity,” de Brouwer said. “And a lot of people take that really seriously, so it’s an existential thing.”

“The things that define a public servant, that differentiate them, they are deeply driven by public value, public purpose and they do that with integrity,” he said.

Part of robodebt’s integrity problem was that bearers of bad news or contesting views, especially those pertaining to the legality of the program’s operation under the Social Security Act, were shut down or managed out of the agency.

It was written

Notably, de Brouwer said he was “very struck” after being appointed a departmental secretary by how previous prime minister Tony Abbott “called the secretaries together and said ‘I want you to give me your full and frank advice, because frankly you are useless to me if you don’t’,” quipping Abbott held little store in “yes” people.

“My experience is that most ministers do appreciate the advice. They do want it in private and they don’t want you advertising your differences or disagreements,” de Brouwer said of the counsel of public servants.

There was also a strong case for advice being put in writing, especially if the public service was later challenged.

“You have to put your advice in writing. If your advice is not in writing when it comes down to the crunch, it’s arguable to say it never really existed. That’s one of the abiding lessons for the service,” de Brouwer said.

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Gordon de Brouwer: Getting on with public sector reform