This presentation explores two findings arising out of my doctoral research into why and how successive Victorian premiers have renamed and restructured departments and agencies – their machinery of government or MoG – despite lack of evidence of benefits and in the face of voluminous advice on risks and harms.
Decisions and actions to restructure their bureaucratic architecture are the sole and unquestioned prerogative of first ministers in Westminster jurisdictions, alongside the allocation of ministerial portfolios. On the one hand my decentred, interpretivist research found these decisions are distinctive to the beliefs, context and contingencies of individual premiers and their inner circles; on the other, that they can be looked-through to provide insights into the beliefs and practices of the inner political elite. This raises the question of whether these insights can provide clues about ways in which the political addiction to MoG changes might be lessened and their harms reduced.
The first part of this presentation compares the earlier premiers in my study to the more recent ones. I argue that for the former, MoG changes are embedded in beliefs about the state, the machinery and the public service which are recognisably ideological and draw on ideas from the international public management ecosystem. But by the time we come to the later administrations, we appear to be in the realm of ‘MoGGing without party or theory’. I find that 2010 marks a distinct change in political context: political parties are hollowed out as sources of ideas and election campaigns focus on leaders and bite-sized, data-driven giveaways, with the consequence that they pay no attention to public administration. Arbitrary MoG changes are frequently embedded in the choreography of the ‘first 100 days’, designed by a small, secretive group receiving limited and frequently outdated advice and prone to acting on gossip about departments and officials. Two reforms to these circumstances are proposed: assist political actors to design plans for the first 100 days which do not involve MoGs; and bring transition planning for government out into the open.
The second part of the presentation identifies an alternative conceptualisation to two dominant strands in the MoG and practitioner literature: one which finds all reasons for restructuring are political in the narrowest, most pejorative sense of the word, the other distinguishing between political (normatively bad) and policy and administrative (normatively good) motivations for MoGGing. Drawing on the policy framing literature, I argue that MoGs are always political solutions to political problems, because both problems and solutions are framed by the relevant actors’ beliefs and values and by conflicting interpretations of external circumstances, the machinery and the public service. From this follows the proposition that exhorting political actors to cease implementing political solutions to political problems is both futile and unproductive. Instead, I canvass some different solutions to the political problems premiers and their inner circles currently believe can be solved through machinery changes.
