Ben Barnett, ‘The Democratisation of Democracy’ [Australian Fabians Inc]


		National Aust Capital Territory New South Wales Queensland South Aust Tasmania Victoria West Australia
		Home Resources Event Papers 2009 Ben Barnett, ‘The Democratisation of Democracy’ Former British parliamentarian, Baron Douglas Jay, once argued that “the gentleman in Whitehall” – the administrative heart of the British state – “really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves”. Though Baron Jay eventually shifted his position after (one suspects) a merciless hammering from the British Tories, his comments are a potent reminder of a pre-War period when many in the political class viewed the state as necessarily paternalistic and all-knowing of citizenry needs and wants. Of course, if we fast-forward about a half-century later, we would expect Baron Jay’s comments to sit even more uncomfortably with most, if not all, Australian folk. Rising levels of educational attainment, greater prosperity across the western world and steep changes in the flow of people, ideas and culture have made it near impossible for the state to be across all our needs. It would seem the archetypal bureaucratic approach – that any complex problem can be broken into manageable segments and dealt with through centralised, functional departments of expert administrators – has reached the end of its use. But, notwithstanding this emerging complexity to our lives, the Australian state is still curiously organised in a way that is all too similar to when Baron Jay was banging the benches as a politician himself. Functional structures, strict lines of management and siloed, disconnected policy responses still, quite perversely, dominate the landscape of public policy delivery. And so, the obvious question that follows is what can we do to improve, just a little, the way our state delivers democracy in the 21st century? Beginning with structure, the obvious development since the golden days of the bureaucratic welfare state model has been the realisation that social and economic problems do not occur in isolation. We now know, for example, that outcomes in primary school drive our capacity to gain a decent job later in life, and that preventing criminals from reoffending is more about counselling than putting extra police on the beat. Our own lives have become more interconnected, meaning that government solutions must do the same. With this in mind, the state must take an unambiguously holistic, whole-of¬government perspective to all policy matters, and its respective structures must represent this approach. Early on, Tony Blair’s British Government created a Strategy Unit to tackle interrelated and long-term policy problems like entrenched disadvantage, and a similar body is required here in Australia. While the transition to a whole-of-government approach is given occasional lip service by senior bureaucrats, there is certainly further scope to mandate structural linkages between each of the federal departments. Over time, a Strategy Unit would also play a critical role in shaping each of the federal departments to ensure government resources better align with the life journey of a citizen ‘from cradle to grave’. These changes would replace our current organising structure, which is best described as an accidental medley of age-, geographical-, lifestyle-and policy-based departmental categories. Each federal department would have a citizen-facing office – co-located with the other departments – in the major metropolitan and regional hubs of Australia. This would facilitate a greater personalisation of services and the seamless interaction between state and citizen. Of course, taking a more citizen-focused approach to organising federal departments alone doesn’t break the state free of its ‘government knows best’ shackles. However, it does create the necessary conditions for more effective policy implementation, namely through a genuine commitment to policy co-production. Co-production, where both the state and citizens are actively involved in the production and achievement of policy outcomes, starts from the premise that government services are less effective if they do not engage the people they are trying to help. Rather than separating out the production and consumption of government services, co-production promotes the sharing of policy risks and outcomes to enhance the overall public value derived from the service provision. One example to highlight the strength of policy co-production is in public housing, and how the state might go about improving accommodation facilities and tackling mounting incidences of crime on an estate. The ‘traditional’ method for solving this policy problem goes something like this: bureaucrats sit in their departmental ivory tower, develop a list of urgent repairs based on limited advice, allocate budget for outsourced security, and then (passively) hand out enough dollars for the changes to be implemented Yet, a genuine commitment to co-production yields a radically different way of solving this policy problem. A new approach would be to work hand-in-glove with the residents’ association on the estate, who could serve as a trusted intermediary between the state and individual residents. Working with the government, residents could decide the most effective way of spending the allocated resources to upgrade their housing facilities. They might also find ways of being able to lend a hand in the repairs, developing a sense of pride in their surroundings. The residents’ association could also facilitate a number of community forums to discuss the causes of crime on the estate (such as limited civic activities), and to then develop a series of estate-based programs funded by the government but implemented by the residents themselves. The point being that co-production is not merely to consult more, but to actually involve users in the ongoing implementation of the policy. By involving the users themselves, we don’t just understand their problems and solutions but we allow them to contribute to the policy goals through their everyday behaviours and choices. And when we blend this approach with a whole-of-government commitment that brings the right departments into the tent, we see that co-production can be a powerful way to achieve policy outcomes. Of course, if we return to the paternalistic views of Baron Jay, it is clear that times have changed. While making the state more citizen-centric is far from the silver bullet, we see that we can improve the way we deliver democracy by allowing form to follow function when we think about government. And, in doing so, we may just realise that democracy is far too important to outsource along the way.