Verwaarlozing uitvoeringsorganisaties en complexiteit wetgeving

Theme video: The wondrous world of execution
Neglection of administering bodies and complexity in legislation
Final question to both of you...
which also refers to what we started with.
That is, we discussed that there have been major changes in the public service...
over the last 30 years.
Within that period, both of you were active...
in a role to increase the quality of the public service.
Do you think that currently...
the quality of the civil service has increased over the years...
or decreased or remained the same?
I think it's decreased.
I think in Australia it's clearly decreased. I think it went up in the '80s and '90s...
and I think it's decreased steadily since the late 1990s.
What has decreased?
What has... -What has decreased?
Well, I'm pretty horrified about a lot of the things that go on nowadays...
and I know it's to do with the complexity of lawmaking and rules.
We've all had our bad nightmare scenarios.
And obviously it is to do with overheating of the mobility model in some part.
It's also this complexity of our coalition governments, which makes it even worse.
We get very ugly, sausage-like laws made...
which are then very difficult to execute.
But also the services which are executing things...
have been really neglected, if not worse, over the years.
Is this process of deterioration, in both countries...
is that reversible or is it just the way things go?
I've got one thing I could change...
because there's one other thing apart from that which everybody noticed.
At the end of the second half of the 1990s, we got something called the Kok doctrine.
Prime Minister Kok said civil servants were no longer allowed...
to talk to Members of Parliament. Now, he didn't invent it.
His then-Home Affairs minister, Klaas de Vries, invented this.
But it was a terribly bad idea because before that...
civil servants had talked to parliamentarians.
We'd been doing the laws together, keeping each other informed...
and then we all went back and reported what had been going on...
but it was transparent, but you were much more working together.
This was then forbidden. Everybody's forgotten that, and it was a very bad idea.
It's led to misunderstandings and a lot of bad things.
And that could be reversed, is what I'm trying... So your question, that could be reversed.
They claim that it has been abandoned, but I...
I don't believe it.
No, my answer was: I haven't seen it in the law.
It's still there. -No, exactly.
Yes, but, but, but. -No, not but, but, but.
There are obviously other things, but there are very few things...
I mean, you can't change the way society is moving, but this you can change.
We don't have the equivalent issue...
because that's partly to do with your coalition governments and frameworks of that sort.
But certainly the political control over the civil service...
has constrained the civil service engaging outside.
They don't talk as much to experts outside as they used to...
or their stakeholders or their clients.
So that, though they don't publish as much...
Whether that can be reversed...
given that so much of the political system is now about professional politics...
and winning and minimising risk, I don't know.
I'm hopeful we can, but I'm not entirely confident.
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