Caroline Spencer on playing watchdog to a mega-government and the career she almost had
Caroline Spencer playfully gestures to the window behind her, as she clocks our photographer taking his position: “Have we got some iron ore in the background?”
It’s been six years since Spencer left Canberra to run the ruler over Western Australia’s royalty-rich books as the 19th auditor general after penning the watchdog’s first statutory review.
WA Auditor General, Caroline Spencer, during an interview with Jesinta Burton at The Shoe.Credit: Ross Swanborough.
“I remember saying, rather cheekily, to my counterparts around the table at The Australasian Council of Auditors-General that I thought I had inherited the best office in the country, and I intended to keep it that way,” she tells me, as we settle in for our lunch at The Shoe Bar and Cafe, owned and run by her former neighbours in Mount Lawley, Paul and Jo Higgins.
As the first female to hold the role, the appointment was history-defining for the state.
Although it didn’t necessarily feel significant to her, it’s evident to those wandering the halls of her Albert Facey House office, which is lined with the portraits of her predecessors.
“People often see [the portraits] and say ‘and then there’s you, the only one in a skirt’,” she laughs.
Having pored over the archives of the 195-year-old agency, Spencer is reluctant to address herself as anything more than a temporary custodian.
But her time at the helm of the state’s oldest integrity institution has been punctuated by unique challenges — from a once-in-a-century pandemic to a government with unprecedented power and coffers lined by mining royalties.
The agency’s workload has also doubled to audit 312 public entities annually.
Spencer insists it’s not where she envisaged herself while being raised between Sydney and her parents’ beef and cattle property in New South Wales’ Northern Rivers region.
WA Auditor General, Caroline Spencer, during an interview with Jesinta Burton at The Shoe.Credit: Ross Swanborough.
Spencer says her mother, having been left to run the family business and raise all four children solo after the death of her father, encouraged them to gain the financial and practical skills she would have been lost without.
Spencer had her heart set on a career in human resources until a chance encounter with an accounting student on her first day at the University of Technology Sydney changed her trajectory.
Having seen what her mother endured and the boom and recession of the 1980s, Spencer was acutely aware of the need for job security.
She switched to accounting with the intention to work in the private sector until a decade-long stint at a major firm took her to the Australian Capital Territory.
It was there Spencer says she experienced a reflective period, which has repeated every five to seven years since, and decided she wanted more from life than to move between an air-conditioned house and office.
“I thought it was a quarter-life crisis and that I would have to do wholesale change,” she says, as lunch arrives — Mediterranean freekeh salad for me, her usual Mediterranean freekeh salad with Scotch fillet for her.
“I guess that’s the folly of youth — you don’t find meaning in work, we need connection.”
Spencer and her now-husband embraced rural living, purchasing 120 acres in the Southern Tablelands of NSW and lending her professional skills to the boards of the local hospital and the volunteer rural fire brigade.
She left her high-paying job to study science at the Australian National University in the hopes of pursuing medicine like her molecular biologist uncle.
But when her graduate medical school admissions test results came back, and she realised she could get in, she was forced to consider whether medicine was conducive with the life she and her husband had envisaged.
“We had way too many drinks, and I thought about the 13 years of study and post qualifications. We wanted to have kids in that time, and so I thought a lot about how you find meaning in life. Is it the work?” she recalls.
“It actually made me reinforce my commitment to my profession.”
She co-founded the public sector audit and governance advisory firm that would set her on a path to becoming auditor general, a role she says she couldn’t have taken on without the support of her husband and two teenage sons.
For Spencer, her interest in public sector governance is underpinned by a passion for justice.
WA Auditor General, Caroline Spencer, during an interview with Jesinta Burton at The Shoe.Credit: Ross Swanborough.
“There are plenty of nations that are ever-blessed with natural resources, and there’s very few with the standard of living we have because of poor public governance, corruption in public life … because people in power give it away or steal it,” she said.
Spencer’s role became more challenging with the arrival of the pandemic, a period she says was marred by panic-driven decisions and a deterioration of controls that saw a record rise in deficient accounts, but one that brought about necessary lessons.
“We are a necessary tension point in the system, it actually makes for better government and longevity because there is more trust and better decision-making.”
The pandemic also brought a significant shift in the political landscape ahead of the 2021 election, delivering WA Labor the largest election victory in Australian history courtesy of popular premier Mark McGowan.
A self-confessed “election nerd”, Spencer can still recall watching at home on election night as the state became a sea of red seats: something she was warned would make her job much harder.
“Having sat through estimates, you can see just how hard the much-diminished opposition is working, and I’ve got enormous respect for the job they’re doing,” she tells me.
Lunch at The Shoe in Northbridge.Credit: Ross Swanborough.
“I know the office’s role in providing that information to parliament is more important than ever. Sometimes it’s felt like we’re the only voice critiquing.”
Keen observers of politics have remarked the same thing, with the office’s reports on everything from the government’s management of the pandemic to multibillion-dollar blowouts on its flagship Metronet infrastructure program at times the only real form of accountability.
But Spencer baulks at suggestions she might be the most effective form of opposition this state has.
“The majority of what we look at is fine, it’s the exceptions that get the attention of the parliament, the media and the public,” she says.
“I don’t oppose anything, I’m just an advocate for good public governance.”
But Spencer got a taste of the dangers of a government with total control of both houses of parliament in 2022, when the laws governing her office were overhauled.
The legislative changes included sweeping information access restrictions, less power to report in the public interest, and permission for the treasurer to vet reports before their release.
Spencer used an annual report to lay bare her concerns in 2023, something she says wasn’t comfortable, but was necessary.
Looking back, Spencer believes the situation was born out of an “unfortunate misunderstanding” and frustration after she attempted to tackle information roadblocks with sector-wide guidance.
“We look under the covers, and people have to trust that we’re actually going to tell the truth,” she tells me.
“I think there is a misconception in parts of government and the public sector that by accessing information, we’re disclosing information. I don’t think they understand the volume of confidential information we see [as part of the audit process] and the lengths we go to maintain confidentiality.
“While there might be some findings they’re uncomfortable with, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a public interest.”
Spencer is concerned by the delays such roadblocks to information will create for routine audit processes, and the cost of that to the community and senior staff.
“It shouldn’t need managerial staff involved, and certainly not a chief executive … but here I am, calling my counterpart in the agency asking why they are holding up information,” she says.
“They’re concerned because it’s classified as cabinet in confidence, but public servants are not there to run defence for government of the day: they’re there to serve.
“I don’t know what the public interest or benefit is in showing Treasury my draft reports and expanding the definition of confidentiality.
“If that’s what the parliament I serve understood those laws to be, that’s fine, but I don’t think those had been ventilated before we had a chance to understand what the implications were.
“We are a necessary tension point in the system, it actually makes for better government and longevity because there is more trust and better decision-making.”
Even in the face of challenges, Spencer talks at length about how proud she is of the office she says has never shied away from the tough job it has to do.
She tends to gauge whether she is having a good week by the number of days she’s able to cycle to work.
With Spencer now more than halfway through her 10-year tenure, I’m curious to know whether she’s given much thought to what else might be on the horizon.
“Sailing off into the sunset with my husband,” she jokes.
Spencer says she and her family recently doubled down on establishing roots in WA, with both of her children now adamant they want to stay even after her 10-year term expires.
While her children are aware of what she does, and have even thanked her for doing it, Spencer says they have no intention of following in her footsteps.
Equally, she says, they humble her, too — from her “boring mum voice” in media interviews to a 21-nil ping-pong defeat.
As we push away our plates and make our way to the bar, I ask what she hopes her legacy will be.
“If I’ve contributed in a useful way to the good governance of this state, I’ll be pleased,” she tells me.
“Hopefully in the future, when others flick through the history books of the office, they’re able to point out some useful things and see where that allowed self-correction and helped to retain our standard of living for another 195 years.”
And before you ask, she insisted on paying her half of the bill.
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