Local recovery effort will avoid another pink batts fiasco, warns ex-public service chief Terry Moran

Local government control will ease the risk of a pink batts-style disaster in the COVID-19 recovery, says Terry Moran, our top bureaucrat during the Global Financial Crisis.

Former Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Terry Moran.

Australia must avoid pink batts-style disasters in its COVID recovery effort by giving more control to local government — not the federal bureaucracy — says ex-Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet chief Terry Moran.

Mr Moran, the nation’s most senior bureaucrat during much of the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath, told The Australian lessons from that period should be applied in dealing with jobs, skills and other crises sparked by COVID-19.

“Pink batts should have been devolved down to the local level to administer and not rested in an administrative process operated out of Canberra,” said Mr Moran, DPM&C secretary from 2008 to 2011.

“If you’d used the states or local government to do it, you’d have people who were accustomed to keeping an eye on the contractors.

“We have too much bureaucratic centralisation that often misses the real points. The only way to solve it is … by getting responsible people at the local level to take on the task of getting services delivered, within agreed budgets and to an agreed standard.”

Mr Moran, who chairs the Centre for Policy Development, said the scale of the job crisis sparked by coronavirus required new approaches.

These should include linking job-ready applicants to employers directly via online apps and giving local government a key role in assisting job seekers requiring upskilling or other specialist help.

He is among the key speakers at an online summit on Wednesday organised by Australia Together, an alliance of local service providers and community leaders calling for the post-COVID economic recovery to be grassroots-led.

Mr Moran said Australia could follow Britain in recognising a far greater role for local authorities in a wide range of service provision, from job placement, to education and training and transport, as it searches for a new federalism post-COVID-19.

With 927,600 people jobless, Mr Moran said employment agencies were not cutting it and tailored local approaches were needed.

He cited his experience conducting a 2018 review of TAFE South Australia, when his review panel discovered a local job-finding service set up in Elizabeth in the wake of Holden plant closures.

“Over a 10-year period, simply by talking to people and introducing them to locals whom they knew, they found jobs for 10,000 people,” he said.

“This was not a monolithic bureaucratic effort from Canberra. This was just on a few guys who thought they could do something about a problem, got some (money) … from the state government and did it.”

Australia Together co-convener Matthew Cox said the group wanted to extend the kind of local-led recovery and service-provision model seen in the wake of natural disasters to the COVID recovery and beyond.

“We’ve seen fantastic reforms in how we get things done through National Cabinet but how do we keep that going and deal in local communities, to tackle some big problems and opportunities?” he said.

The 2009-10 pink batts home insulation scheme, part of a suite of GFC stimulus measures introduced by the Rudd government, was marred by faulty installation, fires and the death of four workers.