Australia’s governments over time have, rightly, believed that the commercialisation of innovation is the key to long term prosperity.
As a result, governments of all persuasions and at all levels dole out billions each year in all sorts of grants, subsidies, and parallel programs.
Then, on a regular basis we have enquiries by well meaning and usually highly qualified people that come up with similar conclusions that the previous few and often very expensive enquiries have delivered: we are crap at it.
In successive weeks, the PM and Treasurer presented their view of the challenges facing us at the National Press Club. Both were very impressive performances, and in particular the treasurer hooked his agenda firmly onto the ‘Productivity’ challenge.
The Treasurer outlined the principles of his agenda. However, he did not get into the weeds of the sources of the failure to date that see us struggling with productivity in the economy, the problem to be solved. He did however acknowledge that hard to measure services are increasingly dominating, and we are all getting older, making the productivity challenge that much greater.
Sensibly after repeating the same mistake numerous times, and ending up where we are now, we should be asking ourselves ‘Why’.
My take on ‘Why’.
Bureaucracies have two conflicting, irreconcilable imperatives:
- On the one hand, they want to be fair and treat everyone the same. This makes commercial in confidence often challenging. (perhaps I overemphasise this as a result of a very nasty incident in my commercial past that will never be forgotten)
- On the other hand, they want to exercise discretion and take account of individual circumstances and technical advances made by program participants engaged in the various programs.
There’s no way to easily optimise these conflicting objectives at the same time.
On top of those two drivers of bureaucratic fossilisation, you have two further impediments in the Australian context:
- The impact of personal ambition, turf protection, and management of public sector KPI’s that have nothing to do with outputs, but everything to do with inputs that hobbles public sector engagement.
- Our federated system drives fragmentation.
Published today is an excellent analysis of the way forward by John Howard (not that one) from the Action Institute that I hope is widely read and deeply considered by those who will be involved in the treasurers productivity roundtable in August.
