This Review, commissioned by the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory examines the effectiveness, capacity and structure of the ACT Public Service.

The Terms of Reference canvassed were:

• the capacity of existing public-sector structures to support the government of the day with strategic and direction-setting advice;
• effectiveness in delivering on government policies and objectives;
• performance and accountability mechanisms;
• how existing structures differentiate between the roles of policy and regulation;
• across-government coordination of service delivery; and
• structures that would improve resilience and innovation across the public sector.

The aim of the Review was to ensure the configuration of the ACT public sector remains appropriate for meeting the Government’s needs and delivering its future agenda particularly in the major priority areas of sustainability, housing affordability and transport.

The Review has concluded that the ACT Public Service (ACTPS) is not broken.

The people of Canberra rightly expect high quality services and support to Government decision making from the ACTPS, and in general, they are well served. Much of what the ACTPS does on a daily basis is at the forefront of leading practice and some of it sets the standard for other jurisdictions.

There are nevertheless areas that require attention, including:

• the specification of strategic priorities should be enhanced through development of a clear line of sight from vision to delivery and back – the entirety of what the ACTPS does should be explicitly aligned with achievement of the Government’s priorities;
• objectives, priorities and actions should be specified at a level that is meaningful and measureable, and should also be manageable in number;
• the trend to fragmentation of responsibility across the ACTPS must be reversed;
• current arrangements in relation to land and planning are at best hindering, if not actively obstructing achievement of the Government’s priorities;
• the ACTPS needs to work better together in a genuinely collaborative and aligned way in pursuit of the Government’s priorities;
• the ACTPS needs to work better with the community and genuinely engage with the recipients of services, and centres of expertise, in policy and program design;
• the ACTPS needs to embrace learning, adopt leading practice and harness the capability of its workforce to improve systems and ways of working; and
• the ACTPS needs to be structured in a way that supports the ways of working, alignment and cohesion of effort that will be critical if it is to continue to meet the expectations of governments of the day, and the people of Canberra.