YOU cannot accuse our leaders of being timid. Having failed at so many comparatively trivial feats of government they are now going to attempt the Matterhorn of public administration, the North Face of the Eiger of institutional change: reform of the civil service.
This is not a task for the timid. Civil services have an astonishing power of resistance to change. Brilliant initiatives are proposed and approved, even welcomed. They disappear into a committee. Exceptions are made, rules modified, costs counted, and plans scaled down accordingly.
The latest proposals were hardly off the drawing board before cynics were predicting the mountain unveiled to public view last week would become a molehill before any plans were implemented.
On the whole I suspect this is just as well. The first requirement of civil service reform is that it should be clearly better than existing arrangements. The idea that they will be improved by wholesale copying of the private sector is a misunderstanding. The reason why the terms of employment in the civil service are different is not because officials have unscrupulously dealt themselves a sweetheart deal (although some of that used to go on in colonial days). Arrangements are different because the work is different.
A private sector employee has an unambiguous responsibility to his employer, and an unambiguous objective: to maximise profits.
A civil servant's position is more complex. We expect him to have loyalties which are more complicated than following the instructions of the person who pays his wages. The objectives are also more complex, because the aim of the civil service is not to make money. The delivery of services at a reasonable cost is not at all the same. The civil service has a continuous relationship both with users of its services and the political leadership of the community. It must be accountable in its aims and methods to president or parliament, and accountable in its spending to precautions appropriate to the disbursement of public money.
No doubt there are some areas - like the Government Flying Service or the Government Printer - whose occupants have tradable skills. There is also that suspicious syndrome by which the retired Secretary for Airship Services becomes a non-executive director of Graf Zeppelin (Far East) Limited. But in general the differences in work style present major difficulties to mid-career transfers.