Meet the new Assistant Minister for the Public Service

How Patrick Gorman plans to leave his mark on the Australian Public Service. 4/8/23

Transcript

00:00 You're the new Assistant Minister for the Public Service.

00:02 How do you plan to make your mark on the APS?

00:04 I just want to help deliver on the quite ambitious agenda that Katie Gallagher has already outlined,

00:09 which is to make sure we've got an APS that's able to do its job,

00:12 that is well valued across Australia by the public that the Australian Public Service serves,

00:19 and to make sure that we are ready to deal with the big challenges that we already have on our plate,

00:23 the big policy challenges that we can only solve in collaboration with the APS.

00:28 And you are WA-based. Does that affect the way that you relate to a public service that is largely based in Canberra?

00:33 Well, about 39-40% of our public service is based here in the ACT.

00:38 The rest is spread across all of Australia, including I've got a large tax office contingent in my electorate of Perth,

00:46 so I've got a really good sense of the public service here, and obviously the core agencies,

00:50 and I've been working with many of them in my other role as the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister.

00:55 And I also appreciate all the work that our public service does, whether they be in, yes, the tax office in Perth,

01:01 here in the ACT, or anywhere around Australia.

01:04 We haven't had an Assistant Minister for the public service in this government yet, so why are we seeing that now?

01:11 We have a really ambitious reform agenda for the public service.

01:14 It's clear from a range of reports, from 30 all the way through to what we've seen in the recent RoboDep Royal Commission,

01:21 that there's a lot of legislative and other work that needs to be done, and I'm really pleased to be a part of that.

01:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]