Most public servants get through their careers without coming to the attention of the public. That’s the way they and their political masters like it. But some have the misfortune not just to attract some limelight at Senate estimates but to find themselves on a bigger stage.
Take Jason McNamara, a Band 2 SES officer at Services Australia, who gave evidence yesterday to the robodebt royal commission.
McNamara was heavily involved in the robodebt scandal, and can be found boasting of the success of the scheme back in 2019, proudly telling a Senate committee “our last 12 months, in terms of volume, has been the largest in the program”.
Within two months the government had admitted the whole scheme was unlawful.
McNamara’s evidence yesterday has drawn attention because of his role in seeking to influence the report of the Commonwealth ombudsman into the scheme, with the suggestion there was something untoward in the fact that Services Australia was providing text to the ombudsman.
In fact, as McNamara noted, this is perfectly standard in the Australian Public Service (APS). It is a giant distribution mechanism for approved words and slabs of text being exchanged within and between departments. Each word and sentence is carefully crafted to be as anodyne, uninformative and unhelpful as possible, with all possible meaning, nuance and utility ironed out until not a skerrick of potential for distress, embarrassment or even mild concern — to the government — is left.
The resulting pabulum can then be used over and over for ministerial correspondence, departmental submissions, government responses to inquiries, media releases — anything that will see the light of day.
That Services Australia took up a request to provide “standard words” to the ombudsman is neither here nor there. As McNamara noted, the ombudsman could always reject any or all of the provided text, and did so.
Nor is it especially noteworthy that McNamara used this as evidence of his skills in a later job application. To be an SES officer in the APS you have to be able to “communicate with influence”. Ideally that’s being able to marshal facts, logic and strategic thinking in a persuasive manner that convinces others. But sending standard words to another department will do at a pinch. Again, nothing to see here.
But other elements of McNamara’s evidence confirm some unpleasant stereotypes about the public service. One was McNamara lamenting the impact of robodebt on staff who had to take hostile phone calls from the public, who had to endure criticism of the program at weekend BBQs, and who had to read negative press about it.
Those who actually had to endure robodebt, or the families of those who took their lives or who suffered real health consequences over the scheme, might be forgiven for having zero sympathy for the poor bureaucrats forced to endure criticism over a Sunday barbie.
McNamara also complained that the negative press coverage of the scheme harmed the reputation of the department and the government.
But where McNamara really demonstrated how out of touch he and his Services Australia colleagues were was in his lament that people were too stupid to understand robodebt. Having to design a flyer describing the concept of averaging prompted McNamara to complain:
It told me there’s a fundamental problem with the Australian education system where people can’t understand averaging. It’s pretty poor that people can’t understand … But that’s where we’re at as a society. So I’ve still got to communicate with those people.
Averaging, it turned out, was an unlawful way to estimate income, something the government was forced to admit after being taken to court. McNamara is complaining about having to explain a method of estimation that was not merely wildly inaccurate in the case of a large proportion of robodebt victims, but unlawful to the uneducated idiots he’s forced to deal with.
Between having to communicate with “those people” and criticism over the barbie, his life must have been a misery.
Despite being the very image of an out-of-touch bureaucrat, McNamara’s lament doesn’t even make sense within the context of the APS. When bureaucrats design marketing and communication campaigns, the audience is central to the design from the start. Lots of money is spent on marketing and communications consultants to make sure the right audience is being reached and reached effectively, in a campaign. Except, apparently, at the very department where this should have been most important of all.
