This book should be essential reading (or listening!) for anyone who works around government – public servants, consultants, funded organisations, and more.
This is a book for those of us who wonder at how bad policy and programs are developed and sustained. It shows the chains of decisions and micro-edits that shift perspectives and thinking, and it shows how assumptions and standard-practice and hierarchy influence the actions people choose to take.
I regularly look for Rick Morton’s reporting in the Saturday Paper and on its podcast twin 7am. More than any other journalist I’ve ever read, Morton understands how organisational culture influences policy, practice and action. Morton’s reporting on the activities of agencies never treats the agency as a monolith – instead, he looks for the people that shape the culture that drive the decisions taken. This isn’t about scapegoating or identifying the proverbial ‘bad apple’, it’s about understanding why people in organisations act the ways that they do, and the ultimate consequences.
Mean Streak is Morton’s book-version of his award-winning robodebt reporting. He’s won multiple Walkleys for this coverage, including the inaugural award for explanatory journalism. The book format isn’t a re-hash of what he’s already covered – rather, it’s a deeper dive than short-form reporting allows, drawing on new and old interviews and the detail of the Royal Commission report.
Mean Streak is forensic, pedantic, and detailed in way that makes me cringe with recognition and understanding. Morton doesn’t just describe the headlines of what happened or what was published. He goes into detail about who edited what draft when, and how, and just what changed because of this. He shows that on date x, the brief was sent to Person A, who made these edits, and sent it on to Person Y, who made these further edits, and so on, with each individual edit creating only a subtle shift in meaning, but with the ultimate version bearing no resemblance to the original intent. This is how we got from “the scheme requires legislative change” to “no legislative change is required”, which is what ultimately undid robodebt. (The scheme was always illegal, and would have required a change to legislation to make it legal, but that change was never made, so it was ultimately illegal the whole time it was in operation.)
This is the power of words, word choice, and editing. But Morton also dives deep into why these edits were made. He exposes the organisational culture and the relationships between individuals that cause them to want to soften a word here, and emphasis a different element there. In the case of robodebt, often enough that was about self-preservation – Morton details multiple accounts of public servants who were literally screamed for hours at and had items smashed in front of them by their boss, and lower-level officials who were sacked and threatened with legal trouble for questioning their orders.
But it’s also sometimes about promises made and kept, instances where the motivation seems to have been ‘we said we could do this, and so we must demonstrate that we are achieving it, despite clear evidence that it is not working’. As an evaluator, this part is particularly important – where the overwhelming data about the failure of the scheme (even if it was legal, which it wasn’t) was cherrypicked and manipulated and massaged and adjusted until it could resemble data that showed the resounding success that people wanted. The data never stacked up – Morton shows this clearly – and he also shows just how those data were manipulated and selectively reported to hide that.
This led to telling powerful people what they want to hear. Morton details a consultancy report that was developed in two versions – a slide deck presented to the minister, and a ‘thicker’ report. The version presented to the minister emphasised what they wanted to hear, with carefully selected headlines and talking points. The ‘thicker’ report was discarded when it was nearly finalised. The detail in the report made the failures of the scheme obvious, and it seems no one was prepared to tell that to powerful people.
There’s also the way group-think and regard for ones’ peers plays into it. Robodebt was both illegal and invalid. The scheme assumed that people’s earnings while they were in receipt of a welfare payment were the same in every fortnight in a financial year, which is only true for a tiny fraction of people. The fact that this assumption is wrong was obvious to many people – but, the scheme was operational. So, a whole lot of people decided to assume that since it was operational, it must be both legal and valid, and they behaved accordingly. You don’t want to assume that the people you work with are endorsing and implementing an illegal and invalid scheme, so, you assume they’re not, and you get on with your part.
For those who did know that the scheme was illegal and invalid, there was the obfuscation of the constantly changing names and acronyms for the scheme. It wasn’t called robodebt within the agencies that implemented it, that name was bestowed by the media. Within government, the name for the scheme changed regularly, meaning that some people who had provided advice that the scheme was unlawful genuinely didn’t realise that that was the scheme in operation under a different name.
Mean Streak makes it all just so understandable. For most of the people involved, I don’t agree with their actions, but I more-or-less get why they took them. Lots of people in that organisational culture with those pressures and access to the information they had at that time would do the same things. I like to think I wouldn’t, that I’d be one of the few people who spoke out – but how can I know?
Ultimately, this book is a tough read/listen. The scheme had a huge human cost, and Morton emphasises that. But what I think makes this book essential is the nuanced way it explores how this happened. This isn’t about blaming any person as a mastermind behind the scheme, or even about a cultural examination of why, as a society, we’re so amenable to ‘cracking down on welfare recipients’ and what makes such announcements a vote-winner. Instead, this book details why each small bureaucratic decision was made, and how the culmination of those decisions – a word here, a word there – caused so much harm.
These decisions are made every day, and most of the time they lead to good policy, good programs. But sometimes they contribute to failed, or harmful, policy and programs. These failures aren’t always as big as robodebt, but they still cause harm. A more nuanced understanding of how and why such decisions get made can help those of us who work with governments to see what’s really going on, and try to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.
Read or listen to Mean Streak. Seriously.
