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Catherine Althaus …Utopia … | What should be the purpose of public service?
Living And Uncovering the public service purpose
SPOILER alerts ahead. Living is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru, or To Live. The movie Living featuring Bill Nighy is a poignant drama that should be watched by every public servant. It confronts the imperative question: should public servants play an active role in directly serving the community or should they only be passive implementation agents of the government of the day?
Nighy plays Rodney Williams, the quintessential umbrella-wielding, pin-striped, bowler hat-wearing British public servant who catches the train every morning with relentless predictability to serve the post- war London County council.
Rodney undertakes his duties alongside a range of office subordinates, including youthful optimist Miss Margaret Harris and public servant newbie Mr Peter Wakeling. The rules-based order of a mainstream interpretation of bureaucracy dominates the first scenes.
Grey and beige dominate the palette, just as quiet and orderly paper shuffling overwhelms the soundscape.
Heading to Kafka’s Mittleurope via flooded Slovenia … but the Alps are out of this world while Hogans are invading Pilbersek’s landscapes as well this week …
Then the big blow hits.
Rodney receives news from his doctor that he has terminal cancer and nine months to live.
The private world he has built around himself crumbles immediately. He confronts his mortality and challenges his own status quo. Rodney transforms his view of his world and what time he has left in it. He connects with people and with the world and allows himself to become inspired by the beauty and joy of his childhood. He remembers the power of play and his mum's refrain each evening to come back inside after frolicking around his local community.
At the close of the film, we see the results of Rodney's self-provocation. He eventually goes back to work, but this time, he sets himself a mission. He helps a group of dedicated, persistent local women achieve their quest to convert a World War II bomb site to a local community playground. Rodney dies during the film and we witness the powerful questions that his final public service to help these women cut through formidable red tape to build the playground generates in his co-workers. They reflect on his shift in motivation and actions, his style and energy, the outcomes he achieves and the sacrifice he is willing to undergo.
And it makes them question their system, their processes and their purpose. Why are they doing what they are doing? Will his transformed achievements inspire any change in the system? Living is powerful because nowhere do we connect with the elected official, that all important minister who is the elected representative of the people. We don't see them or hear from them. They are an omniscient figure who undoubtedly is there, but they are not involved in this particular drama
as an active figure. Don't get me wrong, elected reps and ministers are super critical in our system of governance. But in Living, a very real scenario is played out. Street level bureaucracy is at play. The drama lies in the discretionary relationship between the public and public servants.
Instead of the senior echelons of policy making at the apex of ministerial offices, senior public officials and ministers, we interact in Living with the relationship of Rodney with a group of active women citizens. What's fascinating is Rodney's relationship with them. For the first half of the movie, he is involved almost in a game of defiance with them.
Using rules, he, and the system he participates in and helps shape, propels them from one agency to another, sending them on a wild goose chase through complicated webs of bureaucracy. The hope, of course, is that they will give up. But they don't. They hold onto their purpose.
Meanwhile, our protagonist Rodney has gone through a metamorphosis and a road to Damascus intervention through his cancer diagnosis. From being a mastermind of stalling tactics, he realises that he shares a common purpose with the local playground activists.
At the centre of Living, sits a foundation challenge to the doctrines of responsible and representative government that lie at the heart of our Westminster system. Professor Richard Mulgan eloquently presents these doctrines in their nuanced perspectives.
In our Westminster system, we believe that ministerial responsibility means that it is the minister who is the elected accountable representative. Public servants have to serve the minister, and in so doing they serve the public. Does this make them stooges or lackies, as Peter Shergold framed it? They can certainly interact effectively, personally even, with communities, and bring back the voices and wishes of the people to the minister and seek out the min- ister's decision to make something happen. This is legitimate and the wise course of action in the Westminster tradition.
But does it always happen this way? Do public servants feel empowered to go out and actively seek community sentiments and engage with them? In the absence of such active community interaction, public policy can be influenced more greatly by those with greater access to ministers and decision makers.
In Living, we see powerfully this choice lived out on the screen. Rodney, before his cancer diagnosis is actively taking a position of red tape until he hears otherwise from his political masters that a playground is di- rected to him to make happen. He is part of a technical machine. But after his terminal prognosis, Rodney takes an active role to seek out community sentiment and make it happen - effectively, ethically, compassion- ately, respectfully, lawfully. He is still part of a machine, but he has given it personalised community driven purpose.
Over Australian public administration history, we know that politicians have sometimes felt that the bureaucracy was too big for its boots and knew better than its masters. At other times, the bureaucracy has been hauled over the coals for its learned helplessness.
Either extreme seems terrifying and a misapplication of Westminster. Surely there is a place for a bureaucracy to step confidently into its place as part of the fabric of Australian democracy?
As we engage in important times of APS reform at this point in our history, we have the ability to challenge our existing systems of governance and see if they are still fit for purpose. Just like Rodney, Australia is experiencing its very own life changing situation. We have the opportunity to question our purpose and the legacy we want to create. Pivoting and clarifying our ideas of responsible and representative government to meet modern challenges seems like it is pretty important if we're going to leverage the best of Australian values and update our democracy, including the purpose of public services in it.
■ Professor Catherine Althaus is ANZSOG chair of Public Service Leadership and Reform at UNSW Canberra.
