-- Conference coverage for the The Mandarin | Lessons from the trenches: Humble public servants made to walk a trust tightrope
Dr Todd Fernando says pragmatic public service means knowing that not all battles can be won at once and that some “trade-offs” are inevitable when trying to reach the best possible outcomes.
Speaking at The Mandarin‘s trust and integrity conference in Melbourne, Fernando observed that deft public servants knew how to navigate system failures and stay mindful of the political climate.
When the neo-Nazis showed up on the steps of Parliament in Victoria in 2021, Fernando said, the government had been briefed by police about the likelihood of the clash six weeks before it happened and there was a conundrum about what pre-emptive posture should be taken.
“In the moment where we had to make a decision as to whether we go out and start to minimise the impact of anti-equality demonstrations [Editor’s Note: the event was a Let Women Speak rally]. Do we start to kind of [warn] trans communities and LGBT communities, to kind of not give it airtime and not give fuel to the fire, or do we kind of let it play out and see what happens?” said the former Victorian commissioner for LBGTQIA+ communities.
“Obviously, we let it play out. Things happened. There was a clash that that came to bear. Harm was done to communities, both visceral and physical because of those interactions and those altercations.”
Ultimately, while the decision not to do anything before the protests caused harm, the political climate of the day allowed officials to provide $2 million in surge capacity funding for community organisations and supported marginalised interest groups who were the target of the attacks.
“If we didn’t let it happen, that community organisation, which was struggling to run off the smell of an oily rag, wouldn’t have gotten that injection of funding. These are the kind of trade-offs that you make as people within the public service — are we going to cause harm to a small group of people for the greater good, or not? And that’s a really tough integrity and trust conversation,” he said.
Fernando went on to say that public servants who understood what it took to “deliver at the speed of trust” had some sense of the nuance of underpromising and over-delivering.
This was especially the case where external factors out of the government’s control risked derailing plans and put bureaucrats in a position where they had to revise their commitments and explain to stakeholders why timelines needed to change, he said.
“It’s easy for us to go into communities and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this, and absolutely we’re going to do that’,” Fernando said.
“But then we get back and we open up the spreadsheet and realise we don’t actually have enough money for [all of those promises] for this quarter. Or we can’t do that until eight months’ time — and then all of a sudden, a pandemic or something hits, and that speed of trust slows incredibly.”
If done poorly, Fernando explained that the conversations that followed a revision of commitments or back-pedalling could negatively impact public trust in government.
In Victoria, where the fiscal constraints on government were acute, articulating why programs were being slowed was challenging when consultation may have gone so well and expectations had been set high.
“It’s a tough conversation to have with community members, after going in and saying ‘Thanks for your trauma story, and now we’re going to do something, but actually it’s going to be three years [to deliver]’,” Fernando said.
“What we’re seeing now with the Victorian government is that where the coffers of slowly being turned off where we are, we’re experiencing a slow period of kind of change, but that’s hard to translate to communities who have such high expectations about the work that we do.”
Pointing to Victoria’s scuppered 2026 Commonwealth Games proposal, which the state government backed- out of, citing estimated cost blow-outs from $2.6 billion to beyond $6 billion, Fernando said it was a shame that also took away a platform to celebrate things like the mooted mascot, Pally, the non-binary platypus.
“Pally … would have been great, but obviously it didn’t transpire,” he said.
Other recent examples of the government failing Australian community groups, which in turn threatened attitudes about trust, included the engagement after October’s failed referendum for a Voice to Parliament.
Fernando said failing to address big national questions about social cohesion and vulnerable groups in society of the ‘What next?’ kind, when decades of research and advocacy show the situation is urgent and dire was a form of damage by omission.
“When things like that at that national level, or even at state levels fail, communities are left in the wings, waiting to do something,” Fernando said.
“What we’re seeing transpire when things don’t go to plan, particularly on the Voice, is something that I think is deeply felt — that sentiment around ‘What does it mean for me to be able to contribute to my community or to the spaces in which I’m operating in?’
“Without strategy, without leadership, without kind of commitments, it’s hard to know where to go. That comes back to this notion of trust and integrity, but also the work that we’re all doing together to try and move spaces forward or sideways, or whichever way that we want to take it.”
On the same day as The Mandarin Live panel, a rapid review report was handed to the government after three months of exploring targeted, evidence-based approaches to strengthen prevention measures for violence against women [VAW] and children. Fernando was one of six experts to contribute to the work. He shared that understanding system failures fundamentally meant understanding the different ways people were unable to navigate them.
Fernando said that in order to make institutional systems more accessible and responsive to the needs of its users, bureaucrats needed to think about the many ways people accessed support services.
“We often think of systems as just this one big, gigantic thing, but when we actually break it down, the entry into the system is so difficult for so many different people,” Fernando said.
“For any system, the door into it doesn’t look the same for everybody so that means that we’ve got to look at the approaches of what that means for when you’re entering and once you’re inside the actual room.
“Because there are little doorways, and there’s a little slide that somebody can easily come down, and there’s a fire pole over there — there’s so many different approaches to accessing the system.”
Across government agencies and departments, this meant leveraging the knowledge of people at all levels and openly asking for advice and expertise about what needed to change to make things better.
Building a network of what Fernando called “peer navigators” to work through the system was also key, he said.
“When we ask these questions in consultations and in surveys, and in different ways, a prime minister is going to hear things differently to what it is that an average Australian who’s accessed that system, or who’s been through that situation is going to do,” he added.
“If you ask people questions about their lives, they’re going to tell you, and once they tell you, where do you take them from there? It’s what we do as peer navigators to help people navigate that system.”
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