You can't help feeling sorry for Peter Garrett; he is looking a bit like the ham in the sandwich, caught between the Prime Minister's office and his own department.

The way things work in Canberra these days, with the P.M's office all over every initiative it is reasonable to assume there was pressure from that quarter to get Batts in the roof as fast as possible. The new Secretary of the Department of Environment, who was recruited from N.S.W where she was head of Premier and Cabinet under Morris Iemma, would have been anxious to please her new masters. It is easy to see how a “can do” attitude could take over. The problem is that the Commonwealth public service is not equipped to undertake “can do” service delivery, which begs the question of whether it should be?

There is no doubt that the public wants governments to deliver services. The general premise of Kevin Rudd's election campaign was that the Government is here to help you. It was implicit in the hand out of computers to school students, grocery watch and fuel watch. This view was reinforced by Rudd's essays in The Monthly, which argued for a greater role for the public sector in society and the economy. His approach hit a chord with a public that has been conditioned to the efficient delivery of services by the changes that have taken place in the private sector since the advent of new technology.

The Prime Minister wants to use the Government to change the country, possibly to the extent that the public sector is the dominant sector in the economy. The problem he confronts is that he has to change the way Government operates first. It is the same problem that bedevilled the Blair Government in Britain (it is amazing how much the Rudd Government is emulating the Blair Government including all its failures). The Rudd Government has been a fertile source of initiatives (600 at the last count), but is finding implementation hard work. The Blair Government had the same problem to the extent that Sir Michael Barber (Blair's chief policy adviser) says in his memoir of the Blair years that he would cringe whenever he heard a minister use the term initiative.

As Joyce Bourguin, the former head of the Canadian public service has said, it is not the policy initiative that carries the risk, it is the implementation that has both the risk and the reward. Politicians in government quickly learn there is a big difference between politics and public administration. If they fail to do this then they are likely to suffer retribution from the public. The Rudd Government started by using public administration as a political tool and as a consequence left the public service with huge uncertainties as to their true role and poor implementation as a consequence.

The public service is caught between a public that sees the public service as a huge free service delivery machine that should be providing schools, hospitals, child care centres, and emergency assistance in spots all over the world, and a government that sees them as an extension of the political process.

In the middle of this the Commonwealth Public service is undertaking a review with a view to transforming itself into the best bureaucracy in the world. In the course of the transformation it will have to answer some fundamental questions: is it a regulator or a service deliverer? Does it tell the public what it needs or does it ask it what it wants? Are policy initiatives the politicians business while implementation belongs to the service? If this is true how much should a minister know about implementation and how much responsibility does he have for stuff ups?