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The New Transport Department, the RTA and Outcomes Management

By John Mant - posted Tuesday, 17 May 2011


The newly elected NSW Coalition government’s hopeful reforms to the Transport Department look much like a small group of us proposed to Labor Premier Carr back in 1995.

Carr had made a statement about the problems of Sydney growing too big and had to follow up with some action.  So he asked me to head an Urban Strategy Group to make recommendations on how Sydney might be better planned and managed.

Early on it was apparent that our job was just to produce another report and not to actually cause any disturbance to the deal the then government had with the public service unions, namely that there would be no real change in anyone’s job.

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So my little group of I’ve-seen-it-all-before public servants decided to write a comprehensive report on how the NSW public sector could be restructured to significantly improve effectiveness and efficiency.

It was a time when governments, especially those of NZ and Victoria, in pursuit for improved productivity, had been attempting to separate out the business operations of government and subject them to market testing – the purchaser/provider model.  Kennett (in Victoria) had amalgamated departments by appointed twelve super heads of departments over the 35+ heads of existing agencies.

While the creation of business units led to some increases in efficiency, neither government did what was necessary to improve effectiveness over the long term.   In the main, all that happened was that while the business units were separated out, the old colonial departments continued on, depleted, certainly, and sticky taped at the top, but not defeated. 

The new layer of 12 super senior managers did achieve some better top down coordination, but there was precious little bottom-up change.  Some years after Kennett’s blitzkrieg, I recall being asked by one guild division in a super department to draft amendments to its guild legislation making it clear that that division had the final say in a particular category of decisions. I was not appreciated when I suggested that perhaps the issue should be raised at the weekly meeting of division heads with an administrative, rather than a legislative, solution being devised. It might look like an integrated department but guild warfare continued beneath the surface.

There were several reasons for the job only half being done. Many of the consultants brought in to manage the reforms were from the private sector. Good at business but not good at, indeed, sometimes antipathetic, to government. In Kennett’s case, I suspect he considered the public sector was irredeemable and therefore was to be subjected to concentrated direction by the Premier and Treasurer and the generally competent heads of the super departments, without the need for long-term change.

Kennett got a lot done. But he did not substantially reform the public sector. 

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Our little team’s blue print for the structure of the NSW government did not start from the premise that government consisted of agencies that were not yet ready to be transferred to the private sector.

We believed in a role for government, but we also believed the many agencies that had proliferated since the earliest days of the colony were in dire need of fundamental reform.  The colonial model no longer worked and a new one was needed.  

The Colonial Model

The colonial model was set on the first days of the colony. Next to the Governor the most important colonial officeholder was the Surveyor General. His office consisted of separate division of surveyors, administrative clerks, draftsmen, and chainmen.  Except for chainmen, membership of each division needed specialist qualifications.  It was assumed you starting work at the bottom and, over a lifetime’s career; you should have made it close to the top, even becoming the SG.

This model was replicated in almost all other agencies, and in local government. 

The problem was the model ensured that agencies proliferated as colonial life became more complex. 

For example, when the SG reserved unalienated Crown Land for forestry, it was recognised that specialist land managers were needed.  As a Forester is not a Surveyor, if foresters were to be employed, a separate employment category and division were needed. In time, this division became The Forest Commission.

In these specialist colonial bodies, the members of the core guild were paramount.  A high price is set on guild solidarity. Not so long ago in the Victorian Forest Commission, the Secretary, being the head of the administration staff, wrote up the Minutes of the Commission from the notebooks of the three Commissioners. Being a mere clerk, he could not attend Commission meetings.

Also paramount was protection of the role and function of the agency, which was the production of the goods or services that were the outputs of the specialist inputs of each guild.  Surveyors produce surveys, draftsmen make maps from the information, while administration staff support the guilds by writing correspondence and minutes.  

It is difficult to pursue changed outcomes when the government consists of guild organisations.  Stated outcomes may change, but whatever the outcomes in the ‘strategic plan’, the answer will always be the continued production of whatever it is the guild organisation produces.  

For example, Planners produce plans.  With each parcel of land is Sydney now legally affected by well over 40 statutory plans, in output terms the Planning Department clearly seems to have been a success. However, not everyone would judge the outcomes to have been so successful.

Does Structure Matter?

Many commentators, and especially supporters of the existing agencies, criticise those with a concern about the structure of organisations.  But history and structure matter. Unless the design of agencies and the jobs within them are fundamentally changed from the bottom up, directions from the top to pursue different outcomes inevitably will fail.

The RTA

Take for example, the Roads and Traffic Authority, a typical colonial structured agency even if it did not first appear until after WW I.

An appreciation of history and structure helps understand why the RTA behaves as it does.  

The predecessor of the RTA was set up to solve the problem that the road authorities, namely the local councils, did not think beyond their self-interest. Early in the car driving days, once you got towards the edge of a council’s area the main road was a goat track.  Except for some of those built by the convicts, the main roads were shocking.

Encouraged by the newly formed motoring organisations, the State government passed laws to collect registration fees from car owners.  These taxes were hypothecated to a new corporate body, which was to grant the money to council engineers to encourage them into building the missing links of the main roads. (The legislation allowed chief engineers to receive a personal reward for the extra work.) The starting point for this scheme was the classification of what were the main roads and what the local roads.

Within a couple of years the Main Roads Board realised you were nothing in the State power game if you weren’t a public works organisation, so, while council grants still went on, the Board organised to directly do some of the works.

Nothing much has changed. The RTA is still focused on the performance of the main roads – now called ‘arterials’. Councils are still nominally ‘road authorities’. The key planning mechanism is still the decision as to which roads are to be classified ‘arterials’ and which ‘local’.  

And the key performance measure for the RTA is still the average speed of traffic down the arterials. While there has been some accounting for the movement of people in buses, rather than just vehicles, all else is secondary, despite the rhetoric.

In the last couple of decades, the RTA has purported to become a comprehensive road policy body, taking on responsibility for road safety, which surely is a conflict of roles and performance measures.

So much policy outcome flows from the chains of history:

The RTA thinks like a public works authority.  So when it decided to use the private sector to add bits to the network, it thought like a public works authority not a network manager. Only charging for the private constructed and funded bits of road distorted network pricing. As a consequence, there has been inefficiency and inequity.

The ‘look at me’ build solution overcomes all. Faced with a bad safety record along the Pacific Highway the solution was to build over many years a 120kph expressway, rather than reducing the truck movements by using pricing and spending money on freight rail, imposing compulsory rests for all drivers and building some of the road to a lower speed standard for far less cost, less environmental impact and far earlier construction.

To reduce the call on grants to local councils, the classification of arterials has lagged. The result has not been planned networks of higher capacity roads in new suburban areas but a constant upgrading of the old arterial turning its original two lanes into six+ lane wastelands with all the rest of the road system remaining local. Classification has driven planning outcomes.

With the council engineer being in effect an outpost of the RTA there is a strong vertical line of ‘brotherhood’ between the traffic engineers at council, state and national levels. The Traffic Committee membership and the clear division between the planners and the traffic people reinforce this. With the general disinterest of the Planning Department in urban design and the quality of the public realm, it is no wonder Sydney is so backward in the design and use of its roads as part of the public domain.

In order to protect the performance of the arterials, the powers of the RTA progressively have extended into all aspects of local road management. Although the Roads Act sounds like councils are responsible, in fact they can hardly change a thing without the OK of the RTA. When national standards (settled by the cabal of like bodies from other States) are added, preferences for the use of road space for local pedestrian and cycle usage are hard to negotiate.

Protecting the status of arterials is a key objective. One head of the RTA who, with the then prevailing ‘government is a business’ mentality, half seriously threatened to put fences down both sides of all arterials in the city to better serve ‘the customers’ i.e. those who paid vehicle registration. Fair enough, given the imperatives of the organisation and its history, but disastrous for all the other roles played by the strips of land used as roads.  

In the battles between the guilds Ministers for Roads are powerful.  They have significant discretionary funding. There is little outside interference in what the money is spent on. When I was head of planning in one State several decades ago I was not allowed to see the forward program for roads expenditure. That was kept hidden in the Roads Minister’s office and not even seen by Cabinet.   

It will be interesting to see just how the new Department of Transport affects the RTA. The following changes should be considered:

The road funds should become part of the general transport (accessibility) fund, administered by the Ministry and directed at the best solutions to achieve accessibility and safety outcomes.

The RTA, which is world class when it comes to operations, design and construction, should be retained as a service organisation, on contract to deliver; on tap and not on top.

There should be a separate and independent road/transport safety body able to report direct to Parliament.

The tie between classification for planning and use and classification for funding needs to be split, with the Department rethinking how local government is funded to play its part in achieving improved accessibility and safety.

Other interests besides those concerned with road speed down the arterials need to be brought into the planning and design processes. For example, each multi function transport corridor should have one person responsible for both its urban design and its operation. 

The Roads Act needs to be reconsidered along with the Planning legislation.

Bottom Up Change

The Department of Transport needs to ensure fundamental organisational change if it is to survive and prosper. Making fundamental change to powerful guild organisations is not easy. There is only one way and that is from the bottom up. Unless you involve the staff they will defeat you.

The existing staff knows most about an organisation. They have the greatest interest in having a worthwhile job that has them going home at the end of the week having achieved something other than the protection of guild interests.

Ministers need to make it clear what they expect from the agencies under their control. The staff of the agencies should then be given a set time within which to design an organisation able to deliver those outcomes.

Inevitably, the foundations of the colonial model must be questioned. While it makes sense to have experts in agencies contracted by outcome and ministries to produce specific outputs, it does not make sense for the central ministries to consist of one or more group of specialists employed in separate divisions. 

The model of a post-colonial, outcome focused, state government was set out in detail in our team’s report to Bob Carr. It included an enlightening reworking of the state budget on an outcome rather than input/output basis. 

Our report lasted a nana-second, once it was presented to the over 40 heads of the guild agencies. Apart from being dismissed by those who would find themselves heading a service body, as one of the potential outcome DGs said to me, ‘Being responsible for pursuing such a complex outcome would be way too much responsibility.’

The new Transport Department is a good start, but we have seen many other attempts fail. Lets hope the necessary organisational changes are put in place from the bottom up and that it therefore survives longer than its predecessors.

The new Government should now go on and apply the outcomes model to the rest of the government. There must be a copy of our 1995 report somewhere in the files. 

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Article edited by Jo Coghlan.
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About the Author

John Mant is a retired urban planner and lawyer from Sydney.

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