I was impressed by Dr Gordon de Brouwer as the first thing he said to a small group who met at Martin place this afternoon was ‘please call me Gordon.”
This is the way Vaclav Havel and John Hatton would start any small group discussions bringing everyone to the same egalitarian level …
After all, at its heart, the Australian Public Service Commission is about people. The people who work in the Australian Public Service around the nation – in policy, programs and service delivery – proudly demonstrating their spirit of service each day and the people of this nation who the APS serves.
And Sarah and Gordon requested Frank and Fearless discussion with stress on Chatham House rules …
Networking is not about just connecting people. It’s about connecting people with people, people with ideas, and people with opportunities.
Discussion points covered variety of topics from small and large organisations. This kind of gatherings go long way to break down silos
“My vision over the next five years will be to deliver a world-leading service, an APS that is a great place to work with rewarding careers for our people, and an unwavering focus on integrity and capability,” the APS commissioner said.
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An interview with Dr Gordon de Brouwer PSM
Without the HR profession, there won’t be a reform
Dr Gordon de Brouwer PSM was appointed as Secretary for Public Sector Reform in 2022. He has over 35 years’ experience in public policy, including as Secretary of the Department of the Environment and Energy and senior roles in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, ANU and the Reserve Bank of Australia. In 2019, he was a panel member of the Thodey Review, the Independent Review of the APS.
This made him a natural choice to head up the government’s ambitious new APS reform program which will build on the principles of the Thodey Review and aims to put people and businesses at the centre of everything.
At the heart of the reform are four themes, aiming to achieve an APS that:
- embodies integrity in everything it does
- puts people and business at the centre of policy and services
- is a model employer, and
- has the capability to do its job well.
We met with Dr de Brouwer to discuss how the reform program will strengthen the public sector, and the important role the HR profession will play. He explains, “When the new government came in, they knew they wanted to draw on the Thodey Review, they had election commitments, and they wanted to be ambitious. They said, we want to be ambitious about this, we want to be comprehensive, and we want to see a step change in the service.”
Thank you for speaking with us today, Dr de Brouwer. It’s been roughly six months since your appointment and you have a substantial agenda to work through, how do you plan on approaching it?
The first step is acknowledging the program will be a challenge and likely take a decade to achieve. Last year, the government articulated what its priorities are around the reform and this year we begin delivering on the elements of those four priorities.
Those elements might start off as high-level policies, before we move to the next level of standards, partnerships, and evaluation practices. Each action we achieve together will influence and lead to the next.
While the themes have been identified, the goal is to work with HR staff to develop and implement each quality deeply into the APS.
We recognise how much the profession matters; each individual HR staff member is going to play a role in ensuring the reform is delivered and reaches directly into the working lives of every public servant. We need to ensure staff feel the reform is not something foreign or external to them. It sounds like there's a lot to do, and it can be a bit daunting, but each step follows in sequence.
Integrity, people, performance capability, being a model employer, it seems HR is at the heart of each of the four themes. How do you see the Reform Office drawing on the HR professional stream to achieve your goals?
Put simply, without the HR profession, there won’t be a reform. The work HR professionals perform, and their function, is incredibly valuable in achieving each priority.
Integrity was the first theme Minister Katy Gallagher spoke of in her speech. We will need our HR teams to explain to the wider APS the meaning behind stewardship, what it means for every public servant and how it can help them do their job better.
People and business are at the centre of everything we do, so we need to examine how we currently engage with the public, businesses, community groups, and universities and look to how we want to engage with them.
We want to position the APS as a model employer, which looks beyond simply meeting diversity targets and a shift in mindset. For example, we have processes in place to increase First Nations people in the service, but we need to increase this across the board, including at senior levels. There is work underway, led by HR professionals, on bringing standards and conditions together across the service.
Finally, we need to ensure we’re not just building capability but also reviewing and evaluating it as we progress.
You mentioned stewardship, can you describe what you think the role of stewardship looks like for a HR professional in the APS?
When you apply the concept of stewardship to HR professionals in the APS, the focus is on people and providing them with a service. To be effective, you don’t just need a good HR policy or functional recruitment policies or the ability to implement a performance management process. You need an overall system that works.
You need a system that delivers the outcomes you set out to achieve and exhibits the behaviours that you expect of people who work in the public sector, qualities like integrity, respect, impartiality, professionalism.
HR staff aren't just delivering a function, they're responsible for that function working well and developing ideas or suggestions to improve it. Ultimately, HR professionals are the stewards of the HR system and responsible for its delivery and success.
It’s nice to hear the concept model employer being used for the APS, how would you describe the terminology for the HR profession and what does it mean to be a model employer?
The Minister wants the public sector to be a leader as an employer, for us to be proud to be public servants, and to have the best workplaces in the country.
The reality is, it’s a competitive market and we need to attract good people to work in the public service. It’s a difficult job so we need a strong value proposition to attract people. This is especially important as appetites and views of work change, and what younger people want is also changing. We need to evolve into a contemporary modern workplace.
APS HR staff will play a leading role in shifting the overall mindset, how we present our workplaces as a leader and how to be proud of it.
Finally, we asked Dr de Brouwer how he felt about working with HR professionals.
I’m honoured and delighted to be able to engage with the HR workforce and I look forward to the opportunity to hear more from the profession about what it sees as areas for priority and what we can do to support you in your work.
How clean is your conscience? Gordon de Brouwer wants honour and pride in the APS to be hallmarks of his era as commissioner
By Melissa Coade
June 19, 2023
Integrity was the major theme of Dr Gordon de Brouwer’s first public address as APS commissioner, with a reminder to some of the country’s most powerful mandarins they are legally bound to abide by prescribed public service values.
Appealing to the beating heart of altruism and doers-of-good in the public service, de Brouwer has described the bureaucracy as full of “honourable people” with an “honourable mission”.
However, he has also alerted senior leaders that they are facing at least a decade of major reform to fix the systems, culture and processes needed to make the APS the best public service in the world.
“As part of APS reform, the government is exploring where it needs to hardwire a change in legislation to make change stick,” de Brouwer said.
“That means changing the law to make sure that the commitments and promises we make through APS reform are followed through. It’s part of strengthening systems.”
De Brouwer made his remarks at an event hosted by IPAA ACT — the professional organisation for public servants he once led as national president — on Friday.
The event concluded with an in-conversation Q&A with Attorney-General’s Department head Katherine Jones.
Other big hitters in attendance included Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo and the boss of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Andrew Metcalfe.
But de Brouwer’s message was not just intended for those powerbrokers pulling organisational levers at the highest echelons of the bureaucracy — or even necessarily an audience of policy boffins from Canberra.
The commissioner said 60% of the APS lived and worked outside of the ACT, performing important government service delivery, program management and other regulatory functions. It was this group de Brouwer said he wanted to engage and hear from directly, flagging his plans to take a road trip tour of government workplaces across the country.
“I frankly think the best way is to get out and speak to people, and go out and experience the different bits of the community, and see what people can see,” de Brouwer said.
The commissioner cited the occasions during his public service career when he had the chance to experience frontline service delivery — in Orange and Redfern in NSW – to understand what delivering for the public actually looked like.
Getting a taste for frontline service was eye-opening and “inspirational” for de Brouwer, who said it helped a policy expert like him shift his perspective. Public policy was no longer an abstract concept being discussed in a Treasury building but was a matter of people, flesh and blood, he said.
“When I was in PM&C — and this really had a big impact on me — I was a policy person working under prime minister Rudd,” de Brouwer said.
“Andrew [Metcalfe] was then secretary of the Department of Immigration and he had a program where he brought people from central agencies to experience the line [of service] upfront.
“The whole range of services delivered, there are very different activities that the government does input with the public — you just get a sense of that, and I found that it really changed my attitude and perspective,” he said.
Much has happened in the APS reform space since de Brouwer took up his new role last month, although the new gig is hardly unfamiliar terrain for the former secretary and economist who was serving a two-year term with overlapping mandates to the APSC under the new Albanese Labor government.
De Brouwer’s mission as secretary for public sector reform, based in PM&C, exactly one year ago was to support the government’s commitment to building a stronger public service. Public service minister Katy Gallagher said she wanted to see de Brouwer play a leading role in building an APS that delivered better outcomes for the community, acted as a model employer and contributed to building a fairer and more inclusive Australia.
Some of the fruits of that reform work have come to bear, with the introduction of the Public Service Amendment Bill 2023 in parliament last week, and the new independent National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) days away from becoming operational.
The amendments to the Public Service Actinclude seven substantive changes, de Brouwer explained, including adding stewardship as a value of the APS.
In a public consultation, his office received about 1,500 submissions comprising responses from around 90% of government employees, who indicated they saw themselves as stewards in the workplace and welcomed the idea that it would be stitched into the legislated values of the APS.
“Stewardship captures the notion of responsibility for institution, both in how it performs now and how it remains effective for the future,” de Brouwer said.
“Stewardship is currently in the Public Service Act, but only as a responsibility for secretaries and secretaries board.
“We each have responsibility for our bit of the system, to ensure that our bit of the institution, our workplace, is as effective as it can be, and to leave our workplaces and the things we work on better when we move on to something else,” he said.
The reforms have also required the creation of a new purpose statement, which sets out a vision for the APS for the next five years — a recommendation of the 2019 ‘Our public service, our future’ Thodey review. A deliberative committee, which de Brouwer referred to as a “public service citizens’ jury” has now set about working on developing the statement to help draw APS together and achieve more.
“Inspire, to aspire. Purpose matters to most people, and it’s a primary motivation for public servants and to people in public life in general,” de Brouwer said.
“[The deliberative committee have] come up with eight options [for the purpose statement] that they’re now testing with staff and the public. These are available on the APS reform website for you to give feedback and rank and say which ones you prefer or not,” he said.
An APS-wide vote on three final options will be held in August, to create what the commissioner said would be part of the toolkit guiding departments and agencies into the future.
Jones told the IPAA ACT audience that she doubted few in the room had not been deeply reflecting on integrity, and what it meant in their day-to-day roles, not least because of the robodebt royal commission, which is expecting the commissioner to deliver her report on July 7.
All in the public service are watching to see just how far the adverse findings included in that report will come down on key players involved in the illegal scheme, and which mandarins are facing the equivalent of the professional guillotine once it lands.
In response to a question from Jones about what his top priorities were in terms of promoting integrity in the APS, de Brouwer said capability and workplace conditions were major components of the effort to lift integrity.
“On integrity, it’s really that people own it, and including leaders, that they see that as actually a core part of their work,” the commissioner said.
“These things aren’t optional. You have to, by law, go about these things with a clean conscience — [ensure] that you’re doing things the right way, that you’re proud of your own conduct in the way you engage as a public servant.
“That really matters, and if you don’t have that, well frankly, you become an empty shell,” he said.
Intense APS reform focus will also be directed at governance, accountability and transparency measures, with the commissioner noting periodic capability reviews would become part and parcel of ensuring government workplaces were committed to modernisation.
“They are a device by which public servants can see and contribute to their work, how their workplaces modernise and how they improve – it’s participatory,” de Brouwer said.
“[And work] for the secretaries board to commission regular long term insights reports to explore medium and long term issues, trends and risks and opportunities [will be] a tool to build up forward-looking strategic insight, and one of the series of devices to strengthen public service outreach and understanding of the community,” he added.
APS Commissioner Dr Gordon de Brouwer speech at IPAA Secretary Series
