On politicisation of the public service

There is considerable concern about a proposal in the UK that is seen as politicising the public service (see here, from The Guardian).

The problem I have with that is that, in my opinion, public services have long been politicised - an opinion I first came across when it seemed to me that the Australian public service was refusing to carry out instructions from the Whitlam government to maintain the previous government’s policies of focusing on costs at the exclusion of delivery - i.e., claims that“we can’t afford it”. 

There are needs for professional skills - which means skills that go BEYOND accounting and cost cutting, but years of hiring by conservative governments in an atmosphere where almost all of society was blindly and uncritically following the dollars-are-all model of “thinking”, and the introduction of contracts, limited tenure, etc all went to create a public service that could not possibly give “frank and fearless” advice. 

On top of that, the APS gives strong indications to me of being infested with people who are either  bigots or, at the very least, subservient to extraordinary levels of unconscious bias, and possibly are anti-human rights (some are quite clearly in favour of human rights, but I fear their voices are being drowned out). Changing that is made worse by the arrogant self-importance and wilful blindness of the APS.

I've written about this before - see here. 

The public service has been politicised for decades or centuries in many nations - it is worst in the USA, probably, because so many of their officials are elected, but it has long been a problem in the UK, where for centuries the only voices heard came from the upper classes of society, and here in Australia, which has similar problems - and both have been crippled by the infestation of neoliberalism.

Start to politicise the public service? 

How about we start by stopping the current blind/unconscious politicisation, and then rethink what we do from the ground up? 

 

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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.