The Complete Idiot's Guide to Restructures

New and Improved Public Service Edition

If you’re reading this, chances are you were recently made Minister of your first Department. If so, congratulations! Another possibility is that you’re a seasoned veteran of many departments and are looking to brush up on the essentials and find out the latest trends in government restructuring. You’ve come to the right place for that too! Or perhaps you’re an up and coming Departmental Secretary, looking to understand what the boss is up to and maybe even impress them with your gusto for restructures. Wise move! Whoever you are, you can rest assured that after reading this book, you’ll know all there is to know about the important business of restructures.

California Governor Jerry Brown in 2014, on the need for restructures to help address climate change (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Why restructure?

Because you can! No really, this is one of the main reasons for restructuring your department. It is your department, to do with as you please. The people voted you in, you have your mandate, and those uppity bureaucrats need to get out of the way and let you execute your executive powers. This is an important point, because there is some confusion about the role of public servants and government departments. Let’s take a closer look, before we return to the other reasons for having restructures.

Frank and fearless advice vs the will of the people

Some hold to the ideal that bureaucrats, especially senior ones in direct contact with the Minister, should not kowtow or tell the minister only what they think they want to hear. No, it is their duty to deliver the truth regardless of how unpalatable it may be to the government of the day. This is a wonderful ideal and must be encouraged at all costs while your party is out of government. Once you assume power, it is critical that from the top down, public servants are reminded that they are part of the executive branch of government and must therefore do exactly what the top of that branch (i.e. the Minister) tells them to do. There is no room for conscientious objectors or backtalk. As Minister you are merely a vessel for the will of the people. The Department is an extension of you and thus must focus squarely on carrying out the will of the people (i.e. doing what you tell them to do). Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get back to our reasons for restructuring.

So why restructure, again?

1. Because you can. See above.

2. Demonstrate power. Public servants lead busy lives these days, delivering services (more on that later), carrying out policy, managing stakeholders and so on. It is important that they are occasionally reminded that their working lives are under the complete control of the Minister. Restructures serve this purpose nicely. Managing a team of six were you? Not anymore! Handing out business cards? Hold on, the Departmental name’s changed! Enjoying the security and stability of a permanent position? Not so fast, your position’s been deleted, re-created and now you have to re-apply for it!

3. Foster insecurity. This is really a paraphrase of the first point about demonstrating power. By showing them who’s boss (literally!), they’ll be under no illusions that they exert any control over their position and the work they do within it. Of course there are some who do well out of restructures, and thus technically become more secure, but this is a short term phenomenon and the second or third restructure down the line provides an opportunity to set things right with these people too.

4. Breed loyalty. This point only applies to Secretaries, senior management and climbers. Restructures are a wonderful opportunity for these folks to demonstrate their loyalty, selling the message of the restructure to the rest of the department and advertising their loyalty to the Minister.

5. Create the appearance of action. Radically changing a department – its name, its focus, its management hierarchy – is bold and signals the seriousness of the Minister at achieving real change for the public good. Root and branch, no stone unturned! There are no half measures here, just decisive, sweeping action. Even better, all of this is just appearance. No real action is actually necessary! In fact, as we’ll shortly see, we might like to remind people that throughout the restructure it will be business as usual, and there’ll be no disruptions to the important business of government. Of course a key corollary of this point is that restructures provide the misdirection that allows Ministers and powerbrokers to get on with whatever business they really want to, without the hassle of unwanted attention.

6. Because no one will hold you to account. At the time this book went to press, there had been 234 restructures across State, Territory and Federal Departments, and not a single one required any accountability whatsoever. Restructures do not involve objectives or deliverables (outside the actual carrying out of the restructure) and so cannot be evaluated, even if we wanted to! There are no reports or inquiries, independent or otherwise, into the outcomes of restructures, into their efficiency or effectiveness. This is obviously terribly convenient for the Minister and Government generally. When restructures are announced, it can be counted on that no one will ask why the previous seven restructures did not achieve what this one will.

Talking about restructures

The less said about restructures, the better (this book excepted, obviously!). Don’t get us wrong, you’ll need to make some public statements that explain why the restructure is happening and set expectations for employees within the department. But too much talk and people might start asking questions. Best to announce it and then move on. Here are some things to say about why a restructure is needed at this time.

1. It will achieve synergies (plural). By merging two or more units, sections or departments, you can safely get rid of a whole lot of auxiliary staff without any effect on work.

2. It will improve service delivery. See point 6 under Why Restructure, above. Similar reasons include greater focus, better decision-making and more streamlined processes.

3. It will bust bureaucratic congestion. This one can be used for both cycles of restructure i.e. the joining up of smaller departments and the breaking up of bigger ones.

4. It’s not a restructure. It may occasionally be useful to call the restructure something else, such as a realignment, reorganisation, repurposing or ‘an opportunity to put our change management learnings into practice’.

5. It will clear dead wood. This of course is never part of any official justification for a restructure, but it is an important concept that is widely promulgated by yes men and lackeys (see point 6 under Why Restructure, above). Dead wood of course refers to any employees that have enough corporate knowledge to be dangerously independent. In practice it refers to those who have been around too long and aren’t doing what they ought to – a definition flexible enough that almost anyone can agree with the rationale.

And there you have it – the whys and wherefores of restructures. In the chapters that follow, we’ll go into greater detail on each of these points, giving examples and spelling out keywords and definitions. Finally, we’ll bring it all together in Chapter 10, where you get to plan and carry out your very own restructure.

Are you ready to restructure?

We thought so, let’s go!

~~~

The above piece is a product of my writing mentorship with Stephen Pyne. He offered some kind words before reminding me I hadn’t actually answered the question that he’d set, which was about Ideas and Institutions. One of these days, I’m ’a return to those exercises and do them properly.

As fortune would have it, I’m most of the way through a restructure as I write, probably about my third in the seven years I’ve been in academia. They are a different beast to government restructures, but I suspect there just may be a similarity here or there.

I was perhaps overly hasty in my remark that nothing has been written about government restructures. My colleague Tom Fairman recently passed along a report from the Victorian Department of Parliamentary Services by Brian Coffey, Towards good governance? Assessing the evolution of Victoria’s environment portfolio. The conclusion is worth quoting

“Part of the problem is that the frequent restructuring of the portfolio and machinery of government, and lack of coherent strategy, limits the possibilities for achieving more integrated environmental governance. In particular, over-reliance on departmental machinery of government reform to achieve integrated environmental governance is unlikely to be successful. A more systematic approach is required to put Victoria onto a more sustainable trajectory.

Two ways in which a more systematic approach could be pursued include: (1) making sustainable development the conceptual and practical focus of government; and (2) embedding consideration of environmental issues into all areas of governmental decision making.”

While trying to retrieve Coffey’s report from my computer, I stumbled upon a folder titled “govtrestructures” (most of my stuff is in “documents/references/fire references/”. My climate science stuff is in “documents/references/general references/”. This stuff was in “documents/references/no, even more general than that/”). Lo and behold, I had previously collected (over the span of 17 minutes, if the Date modified field is to be believed) 13 references on this very topic. Allow me to present them to you, without further comment (if any tickle your fancy, feel free to hit me up for a copy).

• Inquiry into machinery of government changes. Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Victorian Legislative Council, circa 2016, 144p.

• Do state sector restructures deliver? Michael Di Francesco from the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington, 2010, 3p. (Includes a helpful short list of references including the tantalisingly titled “Restructuring as Gratification”)

• How to survive a restructure in the public sector. Skye Veivers from Davidson Corporate, 2015, 1-2p. (I saved it as an html so it’s hard to tell how many pages it is)

• Public sector restructuring on balance. Rose Northcott, Public Sector [appears to be some kind of magazine or journal], 2012, 5p. (Another Kiwi entry - punching above their weight, as usual)

• Politicising the Australian Public Service? (not my question mark) Richard Mulgan, Australian Parliamentary Library Research Paper, 1998, quite a lot of pages (again an html)

• Restructuring: it’s (nearly) all in the planning. (Their brackets, not mine) Not sure where this is from, it’s another html and the article didn’t save so I can’t actually read it. It was filed in the HR Management > HR Strategy > News section, so it’s probably no great loss.

• Understanding change and change management processes: a case study. Carlo D’Ortenzio, PhD Thesis, University of Canberra, 2012, 332p. (Focus is the South Australian Tourism Commission, this was a six year study with lots of formal and informal interviews. The author concludes the abstract by stressing the need for public sector employees to have a ‘voice’ - I wonder what Peter Dutton would think about that.)

• The Australian experience of public sector reform. Australian Public Service Commission, 2003, 174p. (word search for restructure only returns four hits)

• Restructuring - the New Zealand experience from an Australian perspective. Richard Mulgan, ANU Public Policy Program Discussion Paper, 1997, 31p. (Hooray for New Zealand - includes this contents entry: “Reasons for New Zealand’s radicalism”. I really need to move over there)

• Item 14: Checklist for restructures. Author unknown, publisher unknown, date unknown but is some time after 2013, 3p. (Cropping up on page 145 of some larger document somewhat unhelpfully titled “Toolkit”, this one begins with “From time to time, the government makes administrative changes, resulting in changes to the functions of public sector entities.” Hang on this might be from the Idiot’s Guide book!)

• New Public Management and Convergence in Public Administrative Systems: A Comparison between Australia and the Republic of Korea. Brian Dollery and Chang Won Lee, Working Paper from University of New England School of Economics, 2003, 15p.

• Australian Public Service reform. Nicholas Horne, Politics and Public Administration Section, Australian Parliamentary Library, 2010?, about 2p. (This one’s pretty damn empty, making me wonder why the heck it was published - the same could possibly be said for some of my substack posts)

• Another Government restructure? Here’s five ways to help. Alun Probert, GovCom Group, 2015, about 3 p. (Seems to be another HR-oriented How To style blog)

Needless to say, there has probably been major movement in the field of inquiry, scholarly or otherwise, into government restructures since my furtive information gathering back in 2016. Hopefully a few snazzy graphics, concept figures and comic strips have emerged in that time. Feel free to share your favourite reference in the comments section.