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The Sunshine Rail ‘Super Hub’ Debacle

As reported by Timna Jacks in The Age 11th April, after much hype by the State government to redevelop Sunshine Station as a “super hub” that would in the words of the Premier “include retail, housing, all sorts of different options .. that can create one of those brand new spaces — a real boom for this area from economic activity” –that would fuel an economic boom in the working-class suburb, state and federal governments have now removed references to Sunshine station being a “super hub” and councillors have been advised that Sunshine and Albion stations would be “relegated to secondary priority”.   

Council is most unhappy ofcourse as are developers who have called for more transparency on plans along the rail corridor, where nine major developments are being proposed, including nearly 2500 residential units, two hotels and $230 million in construction activity.  

So perhaps all the fantasy and hype was simply another dream without foundation based on business as usual projections, creating the illusion that government was getting on with the job. it is time to take a reality check and look at some of the lessons that should be learnt from all of this.   

There is little doubt the impact of Covid has been profound and will have lasting impact although the extent remains unclear and it has yet to run its course. In the short term we might expect some recovery but what are the prospects for the longer term? Despite government declarations that covid has been a one in a hundred year event, we must expect more events like this in an increasingly uncertain world, and that these will be driven increasingly by environmental change and the social and economic impacts that follow.  

It is critical that government planning reflect this otherwise we will see more and more examples like this in which local communities are deceived by grand plans that at best will be short lived, a waste of money and do little to enable communities to adapt to the changing world around us.  

Fortunately the Sunshine Hub is a relatively small project and is dwarfed by mega infrastructure projects in the government’s Big Build program, all of which assume business as usual to continue within current planning horizons. Few have a soundly based business case. A business case for airport rail has been under way since 2018 and was supposed to be released last year, but is not yet complete. The largest, the Suburban Rail Loop has yet to be accurately costed and no business case has been carried out for it, but this has not stopped this government committing to it and already committing hundreds of $millions to it. The financial risk associated with all these monumental projects is huge. It is time the business case for all projects in the Big Build program are properly evaluated at the outset before any commitment is made for them to proceed. Once approved, all projects must be subject to proper planning and development processes before undertaking any works. It seems proper process has been abandoned on these projects. 

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public transport service tram

Shortage of Tram Wheels Forces Cancellation of Some Melbourne Services

It was reported by the Herald Sun (April 13, 2021) that a global supply shortage (of wheels) has affected Melbourne’s trams and will force many services off the rails, with authorities “scrambling to source new wheels from abroad for the fleet”. According to the report, from this week, trams in need of replacements will be gradually taken off the network and could side-line up to 23 vehicles until shipments begin arriving at the end of the month. 

This problem would not have occurred had the wheels been made locally. It exposes the folly of relying extensively on foreign companies and supply chains for critical components that could and should be supplied locally. But why did it take Yarra Trams so long to identify this problem? It is a reminder of the importance of getting the basics right – of properly maintaining the existing system and having the systems in place to make sure it happens. 

It is also a reminder of the need to get our priorities right: to focus first on getting the existing system working as well as possible before embarking on glamorous new mega infrastructure projects. This includes many mundane and practical things that are critical for service delivery but do not provide opportunities for politicians’ names on brass plaques.

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advocacy best practice public transport service

Why is “Advocacy” so Important

Some might think our governments are elected to govern for all of us in the community interest and there is no need for community advocacy. The reality is governments tend not to lead but lag in response to community concerns etc and rely heavily on community feedback and respond to pressure from a wide range of interest groups. These interests range from genuine public interest – often for the “many” to naked rent seeking self interest of a few. It is an environment in which there is strong competition for ideas and too often it is the few who are winning.

This concern applies in all areas of government today and at all levels. It certainly applies in transport. Transport for Melbourne believes the starting point for effective advocacy is a thorough understanding of the issues – how the transport operates – as a system, reasonable expectations of it based on accepted standards of best practice, where it is failing, reasons for suboptimal performance, actions that can be taken to address this and actions to overcome forces blocking change.

Transport for Melbourne tends to focus on broader principles and strategic opportunities for change. If change is to occur it has to take place at this level and become embodied in government policy and strategic plans supported by appropriate funding. But this requires a change in government mindset. First priority must be to change this mindset. But this requires community pressure for change which in turn requires a change in the community mindset.

Successful advocacy therefore requires action at both levels and it needs people to champion its cause. To be effective It also needs to be conducted in a way that is understood by people from a wide range of backgrounds, recognizing there is no single simple message that makes sense for everyone. It also requires attention to detail on specific projects and a capacity to raise issues, communicate them in the public interest and provide a unified response by advocacy groups.

This is a role that has been taken up by Transport for Everyone (T4e). TfM was instrumental in T4e’s establishment in 2017. It is now an incorporated body with its own Charter and representatives from a number of advocacy groups including TfM. The list is growing with increased standing at a political level. Details of T4e are included on this web site under publications, and includes a link to its own blog. This will provide readers with a broader coverage of transport issues, typically at a more detailed level.

What are the prospects for success? History suggests a high level of success on important issues. Women’s rights, Same sex marriage, abortion, tobacco, early development child development and many more indicate there is every prospect for change if the community feels strongly enough and committed enough to force change it can happen. Our view is transport has such profound social, economic and environmental implications it is important to get it right. If this was sufficiently well understood communities throughout Australia will stand up and demand change.

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best practice models of excellence public transport service value for money

Zurich – a model of transport excellence

A model that provides valuable lessons that could be adapted and applied in Melbourne – if we had the mindset to do so.

Zurich is Switzerland’s largest city. The municipality has approximately 409,000 inhabitants, the urban agglomeration 1.315 million and the Zürich metropolitan area 1.83 million. Zurich is consistently ranked as one of the most liveable and sustainable cities in the world. Ranking criteria include life expectancy, safety, education, hygiene, health care, culture, energy consumption, greenhouse emissions, green space, recreation, political-economic stability, public transport and access to goods and services. The city is also recognised for a number of sustainable achievements in investment efficient and renewable energies, a sustainable public transport system and a willingness to increase public awareness of environmental issues.

Its public transport has been accepted as a model of excellence for many years. The population use public transport more than twice as much as the populations of most other cities – only Hong Kong has higher usage rates. The Zurich Transport Authority provides a public transport system that services the entire Canton not just within the city of Zurich itself but to outlying townships/villages within the Canton covering an area of 1840 sq km.

Zurich’ public transport system is serviced by train, trams, buses and ferries. It is structured around a set of radial rail and tram lines intersected by many bus routes which are generally circumferential providing a web for multidirectional transfers.

The network is clearly defined and designed for a wide range of travel needs – not just to and from work or school, it enables people to travel anywhere almost any time within the Canton including outlying villages. But whilst the design of the network is important it is the way it is operated that makes Zurich so outstanding.

A number of principles have been adopted that ensures its success.

It has a simple and stable interconnected network with a structure and timetable that is easy to learn and understand, that is quick and convenient to use, based on repeatable easily remembered service frequencies of 7.5’,15’ and 30’. This largely eliminates the need for timetables on most lines – although these are provided nonetheless.
High frequency services are provided throughout the day and evening which are quick and reliable.
These are important factors but the key principle is acceptance that many, indeed probably the majority of travelers will need to transfer between services to access their selected destination, so easy transfers and coordination of timetables are essential.

Two methods are used for coordinating transfers
high frequency connections
pulse or timed clock face times for lower frequency services – a Swiss innovation that probably provided a break-through in public transport thinking.

High and reliable travel speeds for all modes of travel are essential to compete with the car but they are critical to guarantee connections and provide a timetable for the network as a whole.

This is achieved by

  1. simplifying routes, making them as straight and direct as possible
  2. making transfers as easy as possible at the connection points and
  3. providing priority on roads to trams and buses, and it is this factor that really underpins its success.

Ernst Joos, former Deputy Director Zurich Transport Authority provides three messages concerning Zurich’s transport policy.

First message

If you ask the inhabitants of a town which transport policy should be followed, the citizens will not choose the car. They are much more intelligent than politicians and other opinion leaders would believe and have higher values than merely standing still in a traffic jam.

Second message

The future of urban transport policy lies not in expansion but in the intelligent use of the existing traffic areas. The objective of ensuring mobility for people when travelling in work and shopping and during leisure time requires imaginative urban traffic management based on modern information technology.

Third message

With regard to urban transport policy, economy and ecology are by no means contradictory. Zurich is living proof of the fact that a transport policy which promotes public transport at the expense of private motor transport results in considerable economic development of the city.

On the Zurich Model Joos writes

“Readers will no doubt expect a representative from well-to-do Switzerland to present a solid and correspondingly expensive answer to city traffic problems. However I am going to disappoint you. Zurich’s transport policy is worthy of attention because:

  • It is not spectacular but efficient
  • It costs little and protects the environment
  • It imposes self-restraint on politicians but the population accepts and participates in it.”
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best practice models of excellence public transport service value for money

Transport models of excellence

Transport models of excellence

What are they and why don’t we learn from them?

This is a question I asked frequently when I worked for the Public Transport Corporation many years ago. There are number of cities we could learn from. Many of these have been confronted with similar problems to Melbourne and achieved far better transport outcomes in the process. Some are now accepted as models of best practice.

These cities vary in population, size/area, and structure, support people with different cultures and can be seen in most continents of the world. Principles and practices used by these cities are well understood. Many attempts have been made to introduce transport experts from them to policy makers in Melbourne but have consistently failed – mainly for political reasons. Whilst these cities now have to cope with disruption and longer- term impacts of covid and will also have to adapt in restructured carbon neutral economy they are better placed than most to do so and will continue to provide valuable lessons that can be applied in Melbourne. I will discuss some of these cities over the coming weeks.

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governance public transport service value for money

Public Transport – Considerable Scope for service improvement

If we are serious about running a train service why do we replace them so often with buses?   

There was a time when ensuring train services never failed their passengers was top priority. Sadly that is not the case today. Too often passengers wait forlornly for trains that arrive late or never show up. Often the service is replaced with a bus. If that is not bad enough, customer advice provided for stranded passengers on such occasions is frequently poor or even misleading so it is too late to make alternative arrangements.  

Too bad if you are an elderly person for whom toilet facilities and refreshments and the need to stretch your legs periodically during the course of the journey are important, particularly for long country journeys which become considerably longer if they are replaced by a bus. Too bad for other passengers who use their bike as a link mode for suburban or country journeys and cannot carry them on the bus – leaving them stranded in the middle of their journey. Too bad if the delays result in a missed appointment or missed connections at the other end. And the list goes on and on. Little wonder our trains and public transport system generally is regarded by many as irrelevant or as a poor man’s service and why so many people prefer to travel by car – or even by bike these days.    

There is no good reason why this should be the case. It is a mindset issue. Successful businesses understand if they want to stay in business in a competitive environment the customer must be “king”.  Whilst it is true that public transport is classified, and rightly so as an essential community service it is a service that exists in a very competitive travel market and there is no reason why it should treat its passengers so poorly. Poor service also has serious financial implications. If the government wants to improve the financial bottom line it must increase revenue from the fare box but that will not happen unless passengers are treated far better than they are today.  

Whilst it is true that much of the problem stems from antiquated infrastructure and equipment  in need of upgrading or replacement, the result of neglect and underfunding, it also stems from changed attitudes and works practices, and in some cases even lack of expertise. The system needs to be maintained to a standard where breakdowns don’t occur but carried out in a way that does not affect passenger service.  

In earlier times capital infrastructure and much of the essential permanent way maintenance works were carried out at night after the last train and before the first train the following morning.  Works gangs became very skilled at working in these situations. Too often these days train lines or line sections are routinely shut down – often for extended periods of time to carry out this work and buses used to replace trains. Not only does this degrade the service for passengers on the line but it destroys the networking functioning of the system as a whole and the ability to travel by making connections with other trains, trams or buses.  

It is difficult to imagine a shop owner putting up a notice in the shop window to advise customers the shop is closed during the trading period for shop repairs or maintenance. The shop owner would be out of business in no time. Melbournians pay for our public transport and have every right to demand better service. There are no easy solutions but there are opportunities to improve the service quickly and cost effectively simply by changing attitudes and work practices.

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governance public transport service value for money

Understanding Transport – it is about service

One of the reasons transport outcomes have been so poor in Melbourne is a fundamental misunderstanding about transport itself, particularly amongst politicians who tend to think of transport and solutions necessary to improve transport outcomes in terms of infrastructure.

Transport is a service industry and transport choices are made by businesses and people on the basis of service and options available to travel or move goods and services in a competitive market. People’s travel needs are diverse. In this sense there are many market segments but for the most part these needs can be defined in terms of convenience, safety, timeliness, comfort, journey time and for some in terms of cost/price and efficiency.

Most Melburnians drive their car by force of habit or lack of choice but many will walk, cycle or use public transport if these alternatives are attractive enough to meet their needs. In many situations these alternatives could be viable travel options for many more trips. They certainly are in many other cities, and will become increasingly important as people look for more travel options in a post covid world.

But as we have already seen the covid world is not business as usual and some of these options are also under pressure and present new challenges for government, particularly for public transport. Travel cost will become increasingly important if we enter an extended period of recession or depression. Depressed conditions also have implications for government as traditional sources of funding such as fuel excise, GST etc and even parking revenue come under pressure forcing State and local governments to look at new ways to fund transport services, infrastructure maintenance and renewal works which will inevitably be passed on to travelers and the broader community.

If politicians are serious about creating more travel options ie to compete with the car for more trips they need to approach this with a service focus. There are no simple or single fixes however. It will require a comprehensive service strategy and investment plan to match. Some service issues require infrastructure investment but many won’t. In situations where infrastructure investment is required it must be well targeted to ensure it supports the service plan.

Unfortunately much of the investment in Melbourne’s transport today, particularly for personal travel is on infrastructure without any reference to people’s service needs and invariably without a proper plan. Most of it is on monumental infrastructure projects that are focused more on creating jobs than addressing service needs and promoted for political purposes or by others with a vested interest in the outcomes. If we want to improve transport outcomes this thinking will need to change.

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best practice governance models of excellence service

A question of governance

The quality of Governance ultimately defines who we are and it is failing us

This was the subject Transport for Melbourne addressed in our annual forum in 2017, the proceedings of which can be viewed on our website under forums. It was also the subject of an earlier blog of mine. Our president Nick Low has discussed this in more detail in his short paper below. Nick writes “My purpose in this paper is to shift the debate from the superficial to the underlying nature of governance today. Dispute how we will, but for God’s sake let’s have the debate. ” This is an important paper and deserves to be read by a wide audience.

A question of governance

To bring about change in a democracy such as Australia’s we like to believe that progress is achievable through political processes. We believe that the acts of joining community groups, joining political parties – or forming them – protesting in the media, in the streets, and of course voting are sufficient to bring about beneficial social change.

We may also believe that, even though the public service is depleted, as I argued in my speech at the launch for TfM, it has the power to bring about beneficial change, if only it would remember how to plan.

The daily political turmoil that the press and social media report at high volume and great length is, I argue, a distraction from the underlying problem of democratic governance which is powerful because invisible, like the corona virus. It also inhabits bodies and minds.

From my most recent research reported in my book Being a Planner in Society, the on-line Appendix to the book, and my blogs on Edward Elgar’s website I now believe that the problem with the model of governance in Australia, and probably in many other ‘liberal’ countries, goes much deeper. In fact it appears that governance under the malign influence of neoliberalism has destroyed all possibility of planning and, with, it all possibility of democratic change by the normal means.

I am not advocating violent revolution. But unless the governance model changes, benign social change is out of reach. The governance model can still evolve. But first it must be recognised and fully understood.

In what follows I’m going to be ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. Yes, in every ideology there are some worthwhile ideas along with the bad ones. But in a short address there is no room for babies. Someone will no doubt quite properly point them out. My concern here is the filthy poo-sodden bathwater. If you want a more nuanced critique please read my book

The governance model

The model is rooted in the ideology of utilitarianism, modified by neoliberalism and further transformed by the resilience of parliamentary democracy into what I call ‘crony capitalism’ – or to give it its more polite name ‘clientelism’.

Utilitarianism

This is the philosophy made famous by Jeremy Bentham who said that the idea of natural human rights was ‘nonsense on stilts’. All that counted was the existence of pain and pleasure (or happiness). Public policy should aim to produce the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’, the utilitarian principle. Law based on the utilitarian principle was the only rational basis of rights. Law was to enshrine the rational principle of market exchange.

How do you measure ‘pleasure’? Well, you don’t bother. You just assume that there is a simple linear relationship between the amount of pleasure a person has and the amount of goods and services that person consumes. So if there is still pain suffered by some in society, it is offset by the greater pleasure experienced by others. It doesn’t matter that the many suffer ‘pain’, because the few experience immense amounts of ‘pleasure’. Conversely if a few suffer death it is offset by the economic pleasure of the many. This pernicious idea is false. If utilitarianism assumptions were correct James Packer on his giga-yacht would be among the happiest people alive.

You may have noticed a philosophical debate going on in the opinion pages of The Age. This is between utilitarians like Peter Singer and Duncan Maskell and human rights supporters contributing to the letters page. The ostensible debate is about whether old people should be sacrificed for the greater good represented by young lives and ‘business’.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, or economic rationalism as it is sometimes called (it is no more and no less rational than any other ideology) began with two aristocratic Austrian philosophers, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society to discuss and disseminate his gospel. Basically the gospel says that only free market exchange would deliver societies from the slavery of socialism. Free markets had to be protected by a regime of elite ‘elders’.

Law, Hayek said, should precede and override legislation. ‘Law’, governing the behaviour of the market economy, would be determined by a legislative assembly consisting of wise elders (over 45 years old) serving electoral terms of fifteen years. Their election would not be subject to universal suffrage, and anyone receiving any benefits from the state (pensions, unemployment benefits, government salaries) would be automatically excluded from voting. Hayek’s plan was to set up a governing authority beyond political control to prevent elected politicians interfering with the market. Hayek’s position was reinforced by other disciples such as Milton and Rose Friedman (‘the Chicago School’) and the ‘public choice theorists’[1].

Hayek, presciently, advocated a network of what he called ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’ to promote his gospel. We would call them neoliberal think tanks with a mission to return societies from post-war egalitarianism to the proper order of things, namely economic domination by the wealthy, or as they themselves call it, ‘meritocracy’. I prefer the term plutonomy[2]. Helped by corporate donations, these ‘second-hand dealers’ have been so overwhelmingly successful in transforming the governance model that few today really notice that governance has been transformed.

Occasionally, when governments look like asserting themselves, the libertarian think tanks finance campaigns to sow doubt in the public mind. Thus, we have seen international campaigns against government action on tobacco smoking, on climate change, and most recently on Covid19 (e.g. ‘The Great Barrington Declaration’). Because scientific knowledge is, and should always be, debatable, the campaigns enrol a few scientists who dispute the current consensus and add on a mass of libertarian supporters to forge a sceptical mass. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway described this process in their book, Merchants of Doubt.

Further readings providing empirical support for the above are the vast volumes by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century and Capital and Ideology.

Crony capitalism

Also unnoticed, in the hands of the second hand dealers the pure neoliberalism of Hayek became transformed into something close to its opposite; crony capitalism. The problem for the neoliberals is that electoral politics refused to go away, for the simple reason that people value universal suffrage that holds governments to account.

The political class therefore continued to hold power even while they paid lip service to neoliberalism. So, the governance system we have today is a hybrid between corporate economic power supported by antidemocratic neoliberal ideology and political power supported by universal suffrage: that is crony capitalism. This result was what Hayek regarded as ‘the worst of both worlds’: deals between political leaders and private corporations. At its worst, as the philosopher John Rawlston Saul pointed out twenty years ago[3], crony capitalism leads to fascism (he cites Mussolini) – via populism (Trump and Johnson) as we see in the USA and Britain today.

The neoliberal ‘hollowing out of the state’ has been supported by a theoretical spawn of neoliberalism called ‘New Public Management’. The ideology of NPM can be interpreted in different ways. It provided a salutary critique of sclerotic bureaucracies that had become distanced from the publics they served, hence ‘customer service’ became a byword for NPM but that admirable goal covered something more sinister. The scope and ambition of NPM is breathtaking;

New Public Management (NPM) is part of the managerial revolution that has gone around the world, affecting all countries, though to considerably different degrees. … The theoretical background of NPM is to be found in the strong criticism of a large public sector, to be found in the public choice school as well as Chicago School Economics, both attacking since the mid-1960s prevailing notions about public sector governance (Lane, 2000: 3)[4].

The essentials of NPM are these: the use of quasi-market structures for delivery of services, contracting out of government functions to private firms, setting performance targets, continual monitoring of performance, and installing management experts in senior executive positions. Professionals relevant to the government function of departments (e.g. transport planning, public health, environmental conservation, city planning, building regulation) were replaced in senior positions by generalists trained in ‘management’. These managers were often recruited from private sector firms or consultancies. What this management training in fact amounts to is in-depth indoctrination in neoliberal ideology.

The unintended consequences

It is easy enough to overlook the structural failure which gives rise to events because we look for culprits in politics and business management.

The corruption of urban and regional planning in which deals are done between developers and governments to enrich the latter at the stroke of a pen.
The absence of a transport and land use plan forming a context for investment in hugely costly infrastructure projects.
Failures of building regulation, outsourced to private firms, resulting in hundreds of tower blocks being covered in flammable cladding.
The scarcely regulated private recycling industry resulting in flammable material stored in huge warehouses, catching fire and belching toxic smoke over residential areas.
The absence of a viable national plan to reduce carbon emissions to safe levels while ensuring affordable and reliable electricity supply. Climate change is always tomorrow, never today!
Today, in front of our mask-clad noses is Covid19. The Victorian second wave has claimed 800 lives, and counting. Aged care failure nationally has claimed more than 600 lives. As I write (October 2020) there is a manhunt underway led by the eminent jurist Jennifer Coate to determine who is to blame. Even before finalising its report, the manhunt has claimed two scalps: the Minister of Health, Jenny Mikakos, and the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Chris Eccles. But the most telling result of multiple interrogations has been that nobody knows who is to blame. That’s because no body is to blame.

Andrews is not to blame. Mikakos and Eccles are scapegoats. Brett Sutton may be next. The governance system is to blame, but you cannot punish a system. This is the real conclusion of many judicial inquiries into governance failures over recent years: e.g. into banks, the superannuation industry, aged care, disability.

The example of Victoria’s second wave

It has been established by genomic tracing that all of the Victorian second wave of infection originated from two quarantine hotels, spread by hotel security guards who were insufficiently protected from the virus.

There has been no lack of planning for pandemic infection. In recent years planning began with the report by Dr Rosemary Lester published in 2014[5]. Lester is a highly qualified public health and epidemiology expert. Her report was delivered to the emergency management authority (Emergency Management Victoria)[6]. The epidemiological expertise shines through the report. The report was shelved.

Under the name of the Minister for Health, a second planning report was published in March this year (2020) authored by managers of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The authors plainly did not have a public health or epidemiological background. It is a managerial document focusing mainly on the (then) three stages of governmental response. It draws heavily on the similarly managerial report from the federal Department of Health.

In June an ‘operation’ was devised by DHHS named ‘Soteria’ (after the Greek goddess of rescue) designed to manage quarantine of returned overseas travellers. This operation is quite mysterious[7]. The DHHS has nothing on its website about the operation, who devised it or what its aims were. At the public inquiry headed by Justice Coate a sheet of instructions to ‘hotel security staff’ emerged: ‘OPERATION SOTERIA, PPE Advice to Hotel Security Staff and AO’s (sic) in Contact with Quarantined Individuals’. It advised that personal protective equipment was not required to be worn by security staff at any point of contact. The latter include the hotel lobby, the quarantine floor, and at doorways to clients’ hotel rooms. Only hand hygiene and surgical masks were ‘recommended’. Hotel quarantine clients (guests) were recommended to wear surgical masks ‘if tolerated’.

It is obvious that this operation did not benefit from epidemiological advice. In evidence to the Coate Inquiry, Professor Lindsay Grayson (Director of the Austin Hospital’s infectious disease department) said that, as well as training on the proper use of masks, security guards at any point of contact with hotel guests should have been dressed in full personal protective equipment (PPE) to the same standard as health workers.[8] It is also common sense. Epidemiological advice should not even have been needed. Everyone who reads a daily newspaper or receives a digital news feed would already have known how infectious this disease was.

The report by Rosemary Lester states:

‘The use of appropriate PPE is recommended in all healthcare settings, including primary care and health services. … Where the use of appropriate PPE is recommended the equipment must be suitable and maintained. Appropriate training must be provided to the individual using PPE at a time prior to the pandemic to ensure they become competent and proficient in its use’ (p.48).

The planners of Operation Soteria did not see that the situation of hotel quarantine was[9] a ‘health care setting’. Instead they talked about ‘security’. They followed the normal, easy solution of contracting out peripheral health work to private companies, without first ensuring that the workers were properly trained in the use of protective equipment and suitably supplied. The Health Department leader of the Covid 19 response allegedly decided to spread responsibility for the operation among government bureaucrats including police and emergency services. None of them were health professionals.

Lester’s report states, ‘The Chief Health Officer or delegate would assume the role of State Controller and liaise closely with the Emergency Management Commission’. He did not assume that role. It is easy to see that the linguistic slippage from ‘health care’ to ‘security’ masked what was most necessary in the looking after the needs of those quarantined in hotels.

The private companies sub-contracted the work to labour supply companies employing casual workers. Many of these workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’ had several different jobs on the go. Unprotected from the virus, they contracted disease from returned travellers (or allegedly from a night manager of one of the hotels), and, before they began showing symptoms, spread the virus to their families and to colleagues in other work settings, who in turn became infected and spread the virus further through the community.

The hotel quarantine planning debacle has had ramifying effects. Failure of quarantine has meant that the federal and State governments have imposed draconian controls on people returning to Australia from overseas, in breach of their human rights. And because governments believe they are unable to operate effective quarantine control for returning travellers, Australians are now banned from leaving the country.

Yes, the particular features of the Sars Cov 2 infection are ‘unprecedented’ as everyone now says. But thinking outside the box, thinking with imagination, does not depend on precedent. That, as Saul states, is an elementary human skill which seems to have been turned off by managerial ideology.

Professor Jan Carter, former head of policy and research at the Brotherhood of St Lawrence, writes in The Age (07/10/2020, p. 21)[10]:

In subsequent years, the assumptions of NPM took hold, claiming content-free management in general (and MBA holders in particular) were superior heads of divisions. Now, DHHS seems to the outsider to be an inward-looking oligarchy, devoted to replacing its own with its own and keeping potential executive managers such as Sutton at bay and under control.

She continues, ‘It is too early to say whether the tide has turned again, but in the final deliberations of the Coate inquiry, the reasons for the banishment of specialist managers in the DHHS and the twin assumptions that contracting out and content-free management are always the best, need close examination’.

The question of governance goes far beyond the Coate Inquiry and Covid 19. To ‘turn the tide’ we need an inquiry into the management of, and within, the public service, an inquiry of the scope of the Royal Commission Government Administration conducted by Coombs for the Whitlam Government.

Tentative conclusions

Utilitarianism can be a useful and progressive philosophy, but it does not supplant human rights or correct social injustice. Some forms of neoliberalism have merit (for example the German variant). Public sector management is a field of study as profound and extensive as that of any other profession[11]. I do not believe that NPM is completely flawed.

But managerial concepts can be employed, and have been employed, for purposes ranging from the humane and compassionate to community suppression and genocide. In Australia NPM is being employed for the purpose of class struggle, for the strong and wealthy against the weak and poor. We have to get used to calling out class struggle where it occurs even though the classes in question are quite different from those of Marx’s day (I address the class issue in my book). In the process good governance suffers, across the social services: transport, public health, education, social welfare.

Having said that the problem we have is ‘structural’, it is also true that governance models or ‘structures’ are only ever powerful when they become embodied in the minds and activities of persons. Thus, in looking for the effects of NPM, we need to expose the ideology which shapes the advice to politicians. The aim is not to apportion individual blame but to seek out the structural assumptions that individuals embody.

We have to find a way of integrating a variety of professionals in public health, city planning, land use and transport planning, social welfare and housing into the most senior management positions in the public service. That should not mean doing away with sensible public sector management reforms which have been undertaken in the last twenty years. We need a broad review into public sector management to build on reforms that were explored in the 1970s and 1980s under the proposition that public services are not the same as ‘commercial enterprises’ as the CEO of Australia Post recently claimed. Unfortunately Christine Holgate is right when she says that Australia Post is a commercial enterprise. Under NPM, that is what it, and so many of our public services, have become.

My purpose in this paper is to shift the debate from the superficial to the underlying nature of governance today. Dispute how we will, but for God’s sake let’s have the debate.


 

[1] Though not by all the members of the Mont Pelerin Society as I point out in my book.

[2] Plutonomy is a system in which economic oligarchies have accumulated sufficient wealth to free themselves from national constraints, a global economic system, delinked from national economies, serving the very particular demands for goods and services of the ultra-rich.

[3] Saul, J. R. (2002) On Equilibrium, Penguin Books Australia, p. 36.

[4] Lane, J-E. (2000) New Public Management, London and New York: Routledge.

[5] file:///C:/Users/npl/Downloads/VHMPPI%20Final%20version%20-%20PDF.pdf (downloaded 20/08/2020)

[6] An organisation mostly designed for bushfire management.

[7] Transcript of proceedings of the Inquiry into the Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Program, Day 3 p. 23 (17/08/2020). ‘Various iterations of Operation Soteria had many different moving parts involving different agencies with separate roles. An issue will be whether it was too fragmented to work efficiently, especially given the need for quick coordinated action that is proposed in the emergency environment.’ https://www.quarantineinquiry.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-08/Transcript%20of%2017%20August%202020_0.pdf (accessed 21/08/2020)

[8] Transcript of proceedings of the Inquiry into the Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Program (17/08/2020) pages 48 and 51.

[9] Cunnigham, C., Mills, T. and Dow, A. (2020) ‘Bureaucrats blocked plan for Sutton to lead crisis’, The Age, Melbourne, 11/09/2020, p. 1.

[10] Professor Carter has undertaken a number of reviews and projects for the DHSS, including for the Cain, Kennett and Bracks governments. She is a professor at Melbourne and Deakin Universities.

[11] As is evident from the scholarly survey of the field by Shafritz et al. (2017), now in its ninth edition. Shafritz, J.M., Russell, E.W., Borick, C.P. and Hyde, A.C. (2017 Introducing Public Administration, Routledge: London and New York.