Transport mandarin would have advised a bus over Suburban Rail Loop

The nuanced findings of the Victorian ombudsman’s examination of politicisation across the state’s public service will test the resolve of many readers to grasp a problem both pervasive and elusive.

Deborah Glass did not discover evidence of rampant cronyism, nor a public service dominated by Labor Party operatives. This is not what this masthead found two years ago, when we published our investigation into the public service which in turn convinced the ombudsman to take a long, hard look. It was always more complicated than that.

Glass prefaced the tabling of her report on Wednesday with the observation that there are hundreds of thousands of dedicated public-sector workers who serve the public daily without fuss. “This report is not about them,” she said.

On the Bjelke-Petersen scale of public-sector corruption, Victoria remains a long way from the Moonlight State. Yet, Glass is disturbed by what she found and, perhaps more so, by what she didn’t.

Her investigation confirmed a proliferation of former ministerial advisers shifting into senior public service jobs, often by way of direct appointment, where no other candidates were considered. Her report described “rushed and shoddy recruitment processes, poor record keeping and opaque selection methods”, which together undermine confidence in how government jobs are filled and decisions made.

Focusing on the second term of the Andrews government, which ran between 2018 and 2022, she warned of a “creeping politicisation” of the public service and the “over-responsiveness” of bureaucrats to the political objectives of government ministers.

Perhaps her most troubling conclusion is that many current and former public servants, including those in executive positions, were too fearful of career repercussions to speak to her about what was going on, even when given an assurance of strict confidentiality.

If smart, capable public servants won’t co-operate with a statutory integrity agency for fear of upsetting their boss, what does it say about their preparedness to offer frank and fearless advice to government?

To understand where this departure from traditional public service values has led Victoria, consider what the report found about the largest and most expensive infrastructure project conceived in this state, the Suburban Rail Loop.

This masthead has previously revealed the unorthodox and highly secretive way in which the rail loop concept was developed before the 2018 state election, with some of the state’s most senior transport bureaucrats deliberately kept out of the loop, along with board members of Development Victoria, the government agency ostensibly given carriage of the project.

The ombudsman’s report confirmed all this and then some.

Its search of government records identified about 60 separate confidentiality deeds, some signed by public-sector employees and others by private consultants, all designed to prevent those with knowledge of the Suburban Rail Loop talking to anyone about it, including fellow public servants whose advice would normally be sought on major transport infrastructure projects.

It found the idea for the project was thought up in 2017 by Tom Considine, a former chief of staff to Treasurer Tim Pallas, after Considine was shoehorned into a $300,000 executive job by Development Victoria chairman James MacKenzie, who also championed the rail loop idea. It noted both MacKenzie and Considine were ALP members at the time.

One of Daniel Andrews’ most trusted bureaucrats, the then Department of Premier and Cabinet deputy secretary, Simon Phemister, was brought in to oversee the top-secret project. He told the ombudsman he was asked by his boss, Victoria’s former public service head Chris Eccles, to sign a confidentiality agreement.

A perverse outcome was that when Phemister needed $1.5 million in government funds to commission PwC consultants to develop a strategic business case for the Suburban Rail Loop, he wasn’t allowed to tell the financial officer responsible for managing the $508 million Premier’s Jobs and Investment Fund what the money was for. The financial officer allocated the funds anyway, on Phemister’s assurance.

The ombudsman concluded the development of the rail loop, a project the government remains committed to, “was subject to excessive secrecy ... proved up by consultants rather than developed by public servants”, and that its announcement “blindsided” Infrastructure Victoria, a government agency purportedly established to take politics out of infrastructure planning.

The first the agency learnt of it, along with Victoria’s most senior transport public servants, was when Andrews posted a video on Facebook three months before the state election spruiking “the biggest public transport project in history”.

Considine and MacKenzie defended the secrecy surrounding the project in their responses to the ombudsman, arguing it was necessary to prevent land speculation along the proposed Suburban Rail Loop route and had nothing to do with political considerations. The ombudsman is unconvinced. “The reasons for secrecy, in my view, do not stack up,” she said.

Richard Bolt, one of the state’s most experienced former public servants, also spoke to the ombudsman. He was running the government’s mega-department spanning transport, economic development and jobs at the time the rail loop idea, unbeknown to him, was being developed. He described the secrecy surrounding the project as a “breach of convention and public trust”.

Had the premier or any government ministers asked for Bolt’s opinion about the Suburban Rail Loop, he would have told them that for a fraction of the money required to build a 90-kilometre orbital rail link beneath low-density suburbs, you could achieve the same benefit by running more buses.

For those who have forgotten, this is what frank and fearless advice sounds like.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.