PSst! Not so homely at Home Affairs

article-body

The Mandarin has been running a reader survey on the government office buildings bureaucrats love to hate. The topic has become a bit of a sticking point, with workplaces looking to lure employees back into the physical office.

A recent APSC report on diversity and inclusion in commonwealth government agencies found that 39% of public servants worked in the ACT, and 45.4% of flexible work arrangements taken up by workers were for ‘work away from the office’ or ‘work from home’.

While the policy boffins at the top of the APS hierarchy identified the benefits of flexible work as a boon for diversity and inclusion, a whopping 64% of agencies reported several barriers to facilitating more flexible to work.

Agencies said that among the top-three challenges preventing government workplaces from offering more flexible arrangements were critical functions required onsite, the availability of IT assets, and access to classified materials.

This, despite the pros of flexible work having been distilled into the following six organisational benefits for APS workplace:

• Increasing productivity and engagement,
• Lifting EVP,
• Boosting recruitment of talent by widening the hiring pool,
• Increasing workforce mobility and agility, attracting more skilled and diverse workers, and
• Enabling inclusion to flourish.

So you can imagine our dismay when reading one survey response about the conditions at the Department of Home Affairs office in Belconnen.

“There is no foyer space to sit and drink coffee/read or circulate,” one public servant said, explaining opportunities to meet and interact with other public servants across the department was hampered.

“I used to love running into people in the general foyer of my office building,” they added.

The office building on 6 Chan St is a far cry from the swanky digs of the Attorney-General’s Department on the other side of the bridge, with dedicated collaboration spaces, deliberately executed light design and a meditation space to encourage staff to lean into more mindfulness in the office.

Hey, Home Affairs: time to reconfigure the working environment for your homies? Food for thought is a dish best served with some honesty.

These distinctions will matter more as the jobs market hots up and competition for talent sees departments battling it out with one another on the front of a welcoming and hospitable environment.

You can share your hot takes on the worst government buildings to work (and why) with us here.

What matters more to public servants — natural light, connectivity or building aesthetics? And how important is accessibility to coffee vendors and food venues to your working experience? https://t.co/mxzBdm3V9X

— The Mandarin (@TheMandarinAU) October 17, 2022

ANAO staff driven spare with overwork

Spare a thought for the hardworking public servants at the National Audit Office, who are at their wits’ end keeping up with the deluge of work they are responsible for in keeping other government agencies accountable.

We’ve had a few tip-offs that the ANAO’s 376 members of staff, who contributed to the tabling of 46 audits in 2021–22, have been slammed with an unrelenting workload. Across professional streams — from commerce, accounting, finance, economics, public policy, law, social sciences, and information technology — people are flagging and risk burnout. Several are looking to jump across to other government agencies out of sheer desperation.

The purpose of the ANAO is to support accountability and transparency in the Australian government sector and contribute to improved public sector performance.

According to an audit quality report, the agency released in September, which is essentially a scorecard on its own performance against legal standards and regulatory requirements, the office produced 245 opinions on mandated financial statements audits, conducted a further 40 audits by arrangement, and three performance statements audit opinions in 2021-22. That’s a prolific body of forensic output for one financial year.

On the human resources benchmark, ANAO’s performance last financial year fell below standard on both the engagement executive and manager workload and staff workload.

“Staff turnover and workload measures remain as risk areas to audit quality. It is through our high-quality, high-performing people that the ANAO produces quality audits and delivers on its purpose to the parliament,” the audit found.

“Maintaining resourcing requirements is a critical area of focus for the ANAO in building our workforce capability and is a focus area in the ANAO Corporate Plan 2022–23 and the ANAO Workforce Plan 2022–25.”

We hope for the sake of the ANAO team and the wider public sector at large the auditor-general finds a fix lickety-split!

Finance secretary not a fan of the grey cardigan quip

It takes a discerning fashion eye to figure out what the crème de la crème of Canberra’s mandarins are sporting on all matters suiting. The key is to find a designer whose cut and colour elevates what can be a drab turn-style of slate, navy and black jackets Monday to Friday.

For women at the top of the bureaucracy, the quality of an Anna Thomas blazer with a complementary tweed skirt is hard to go by. Its appeal sits at the intersection between form-fitting but not too stuffy or pretentious.

The Australian fashion house was a favourite of former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. Minister for the public service Katy Gallagher has also got a few smart Anna Thomas ensembles on high rotation.

So it was with admiration we clocked Finance secretary Jenny Wilkinson sporting what looked to be an Anna Thomas ensemble at the dinner event of the IPAA national conference this week, and chuckled with amusement when she cocked an eyebrow as a guest speaker made a quip about grey cardigan-clad bureaucrats.  “I’m not wearing grey!” she mouthed.

Facts are facts — some mandarins lead the fashion pack and the boss of Finance is in fine form.

Check against delivery

The Teals may have been screaming light aquamarine murder over the decision to axe some of their staffer positions, but is doing more with less wreaking a bit of bother in the PMO? Typos gone live on the PM’s website are raising the odd eyebrow.

Our favourite so far was Albo’s “Address to NSW Labor Cnference” that surfaced over the weekend that we hear left coffee on monitors from insensitive chortling.

People can be so very immature.

A short clarification on Optus from Mike Pezzullo (featuring kittens)

Home Affairs’ head ‘Iron’ Mike Pezzullo has never been afraid of talking-up the seriousness of all things cyber, geopolitical and cultural, but does the nation’s great domestic protector-in-chief possess a superpower for managing-up ministers when they dig themselves into a hole?

With DFAT now apparently OK with Optus victims travelling on passports without replacing them, Pezzullo used a speech to Australian Cyber Security Conference last week to clear-up a few opacities that may prompted contemplation after the Cabinet rounded on Optus.

“Let me just pull it together in terms of the directions in which the Commonwealth Government is going. Clare O’Neil is my Minister, the Minister for Home Affairs. She’s also a specified, titled Minister for Cyber Security, the first time we’ve had a specified, titled Minister for Cyber Security at the Cabinet level. We’ve had other Ministers with cyber responsibility, but not at the Cabinet level,” Pezzullo said.

“She’s made it very clear in her directions to the Department, which means her directions to me, and through me to my Department—and she’s said this in part of some of the public comments she’s made around the Optus issue, which I’m not going to canvass; I’m just going to go to the directions that she’s given me, and that she’s also expressed publicly—that in her judgement, as the national Cyber Security Minister, we’re about a decade behind in terms of some of the ancillary, important strategy areas around consumer data protection, around privacy, and some of the consequential policy areas that are adjunct to the very technical areas that IT security specialists tend to focus on. We’re about a decade behind,” he continued.

But wait, there’s more.

“And she as the lead Minister within the Government, along with her colleague the Attorney-General, the Treasurer and other ministers who have got responsibilities across those general areas have said that that catch-up is going to occur under this Government’s watch. She’s made it very clear the Government is determined—and this is not just in relation to the Optus matter, she has used the Optus matter to speak about this generally—to bring together into more closer policy alignment those ancillary and related areas of digital identity, consumer data protection, privacy protections et cetera. Responsibilities of various different Ministers and it is her job, working with her ministerial colleagues, to marshal all of that,”

Do we smell a Budget allocation coming on? Keep reading.

“More centrally, in the more technical area of cybersecurity, in her judgement, she said this publicly, we’re about five years behind where we should really be. She’s paid due regard to the work done by the previous Parliament, the 46th Parliament, to pass certain laws that have dealt with certain parts of this problem. So, the critical infrastructure legislation passed the Parliament in March, for instance, gives us some world-leading authorities in terms of dealing with cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. The hack of Optus was not that.”

So what was it then? Mike’s got a fair idea.

“I don’t want to in any way diminish or downplay the significance either of that incident itself or the consequences that that has for people at the level of their only personal identity security and, therefore, their own anxiety about their security, and the prospect there for fraud. I don’t want to downplay that at all. But in terms of the risks that we’re trying to manage there are regrettably, I have to say, more catastrophic, more consequential and darker scenarios that can very easily be painted that could well unfold. I hope I’m not proven right tonight.”

Ouch. Mike cautions it’s time to respect the awesome power of the internet and not degrade it with furry friends.

“Now, some of that has been devoted to our obsession with viewing cat videos and looking at the other rubbish that we scroll through on our social media. I don’t know why humanity would have devoted so much effort just for that purpose.”