The head of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA), Alison Frame, has frankly called out the tangible load the persistently traumatic three-year Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide has brought to bear on her agency’s morale, saying staff need to feel supported to do their job better — even when under intense interrogation.
As ministers, the top brass of Defence and the supporting bureaucracy are all put through the wringer over years of systemic failures that have snowballed into the set of circumstances the royal commission is now examining, Frame this week made it plain the government needs to help existing DVA staff do their jobs a lot better and that the system often outlasts the people in it.
As far as royal commissions of inquiry go, the issue of suicide compounded or caused by institutional parameters is probably the toughest brief around. It’s about people who are prepared to give their life or to take another’s life for their country who then take their own life (or try to) after what they endured in the service of their nation.
Then comes the huge number of people carrying lifetime injuries that are physical and/or mental and are then socially reliant (although not always) on a different welfare system where the staff cycle is quicker and the clients last longer.
And then there’s senator Jacqui Lambie, an instigator of the royal commission, with her own lived experience of the limitations of military service and its aftercare who openly told the royal commission of her decade-long journey and the price it extracted from her children.
Alison Frame is at the bottom of that cliff, and she’s chosen to be there, but she’s not in denial about the human cost her department’s clients or staff are paying. She spoke at the APSC’s roadshow this week.
“I think there’s a particular challenge when you’re subject to a royal commission, for example, that is ongoing for a few years. That’s very relentless scrutiny day after day. And the stories that they feature, obviously, are not the positive ones,” Frame spelled out.
“There are very negative experiences, and the royal commission exists for a very tragic reason as well. But I think that brings a really specific challenge around keeping morale high when staff feel that every day their efforts are being diminished, or … you know, focused on those aspects that are not as successful.”
Frame said that this inherently created a challenge “for us in leading and continuing to support staff” that ultimately came back to recognising and reaffirming the efforts of people who were putting in the hard yards with the best intentions.
Frame refrained from making quantification, which is a prudent move when a commission of inquiry is in play. But she did call out why messaging of support from the very top matters when agency performance is under the microscope.
“That comes back to the message that I had at the beginning about supporting staff to do their jobs, reminding them of how much their efforts are appreciated. Messages from the public service commissioner and from the minister and prime minister,” Frame said.
“All those messages that do come through make a difference as well, and to just remind staff that the reality of the situation means there is ongoing public scrutiny. We always want to improve, but that doesn’t mean that their efforts aren’t massively appreciated and that we want to keep responding to what they tell us [so they can] do their job better as well.”
Even so, Frame conceded that trust within the client base, the “constituency”, would not automatically be achieved without independent analysis, especially if internally generated.
“I think we’ll have a lot more traction with the community [if] it’s not only about making those managers accountable, it’s also recognising that they were … putting in enormous efforts and doing a job that wasn’t being recognised that was constantly being perceived as not achieving a cultural shift.”
“I think you have to think a bit creatively sometimes, about how can we support the managers who were trying to do that work and demonstrate that it takes something additional [to] just an internal assessment to say no — no, we are scrutinising ourselves,” Frame said.
“We are making ourselves accountable. We are independently assessing culture and identifying if there are issues that need to be remedied.”
Patrick Gorman noted that some good bureaucrats worked on robodebt and that a key finding of that royal commission was that key people were put on the frontline to understand the impact of policy decisions.
Nobody has been sacked yet.
“There is wrongdoing in [the robodebt] report. But some people are doing the right thing,” Gorman said.
“And I always, whenever we talk about these difficult areas, try and point out that actually, there’s a lot of things to be proud of in how the public service collectively conducts itself. Even where there are also things that [we] seriously need to address.”
Not that anyone is watching the clock.
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