Destroying trust with “transparency” and “honesty”
First published in The Mandarin (18 February 2026)
I was taken by the recent speech of the Secretary of PM&C’s words reporting Kennedy: Flexibility needed for uncertainty in a dangerous world
“Efforts around the world by authoritarians to control information and politicise data underscore the need for the public service to value transparency, honesty and reason…. …waning trust in institutions, growing intolerance and the ways mis and disinformation undermined the truth were all powerful forces that the APS had been able to resist in more recent times”
I have no quarrel with the intent of that statement. I am less confident about the conclusion.
Only 29% of agencies had qualified reporting audits
On the same day as the Secretary was speaking, ANAO released its audit report of 21 government entities annual performance statements to the parliament and the public. (Performance Statements of Major Australian Government Entities — Outcomes from the 2024–25 Audit Program | Australian National Audit Office (ANAO)). Only 29 per cent of those agencies received qualified audit outcomes.
This ANAO comment stood out:
“…audit findings show that simply meeting the minimum requirements [defined in the PGPA] does not necessarily produce information that is appropriate and meaningful for both the entity and external users of the performance statements…”
Stripped of bureaucratese, the ANAO is saying that Departments are either frustrating good governance by confused and unclear reporting, or they are simply not competent at producing meaningful performance information. They either do not know how, or they do not wish, to be genuinely transparent. That is a Hobson’s choice for agency heads who sign off on these reports. Neither option reflects well on the stewardship of public administration.
Personally, I suspect it is a combination of both, with the balance tipping toward a cavalier, compliance-driven approach to reporting to government and the public: a tick-the-box exercise rather than meeting an obligation to be visible and accountable. At the very least, it is disrespectful of Parliament and the public.
I am not even talking about the performance standards they set themselves, which could do with some scrutiny. This is before even examining the performance standards agencies set for themselves, which often warrant scrutiny. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs, for example, awards itself a green tick for processing just over 50 per cent of veterans’ claims within 30 days. A hurdle so low it ought to be impossible to fail, though it managed to do so for years.
One is left to wonder whether modern public administration has become so complex that effective democratic oversight is beyond our politicians, leaving our public sector with too free a hand.
More striking still is the latitude afforded to agencies over time. ANAO first audited performance statements for the 2019–20 reporting year, four years after such reporting was first required. In the latest report, the ANAO notes a “growing maturity” in agency performance reporting: only 29 per cent of agencies received qualified audit outcomes, compared with 36 per cent last year. That improvement, however, reflects the inclusion of seven additional agencies in the audit program, not demonstrable improvement among those previously audited.
The ANAO statement is truthful, mathematically correct, and selectively presented. Whether inadvertent or not, it exemplifies the lure of favourable framing: a temptation that sits uneasily with the rhetoric about resisting politicisation and spin.
More miss than dis-
Five agencies, five years of ANAO scrutiny, and the same common themes continue to fail. Three of those agencies are fiscal heavyweights: the ATO, NDIA and DHDA. Collectively they are responsible for more than 20 per cent of Commonwealth cashflow. This is not marginal administration.
In his opening remarks, Kennedy points to growing public intolerance for mis- and dis-information and argues that the APS has largely avoided these traps. When faced with a choice between conspiracy and SNAFU, I usually assume the latter. In this case, the problem is plausibly inadvertent mis-leading than deliberate deceit: the product of weak systems, poor measures, indifferent reporting discipline, and a lack of diligence by leadership.
While the ANAO formally qualifies only five agencies, its critique is broader and more serious. Without ascribing intent, the audit reports consistently point to performance information that aggregates measures in ways that obscure actual performance, emphasises activity over outcomes, and relies on performance standards set so low as to be largely meaningless.
In the private sector, any CEO who repeatedly provided analysts with unclear, unusable or selectively framed information about company performance would not remain in the role for long.
Whether the public is misled intentionally or by accident is beside the point. Repeated failure to provide intelligible performance information would not be tolerated. It is reasonable to ask why agency heads, many earning salaries comparable to senior corporate executives, are not held to the same standard.
On the same day
On the same day, the DTA released the strategic review of the whole-of-government single seller arrangements (SSAs), with the headline claim that it secured $1.6bn in discounts. I wrote about it elsewhere. (DTA review doesn’t deliver whole picture on government contracts)
This, too, is a true statement, but one that is favourably presented. It is difficult to avoid the impression that readers are encouraged to blur the distinction. I am left wondering whether the framing was intended to convince the Minister of a job well done, or to assist the Minister in convincing the public of the same. Either is inappropriate. The first risks internal self-congratulation; the second edges uncomfortably close to politicisation. Both sit uneasily with Kennedy’s claim that the APS has resisted such practices.
There is no doubt that savings have been achieved. But the quantum is materially smaller than the headline suggests, and the savings come with impacts and trade-offs. Politicians may employ hyperbole. The public service must not.
Trust is not all it seems
A recently published paper by two University of Canberra academics examines trust and distrust in public services. (Van Hummel and Russell-Bennett) It is a literature review focused on the energy sector, but its findings travel well. They argue that trust and distrust are not opposites and should be measured separately. Trust is a confident belief that an actor will meet positive expectations under uncertainty and rests on four dimensions: competence, openness, authenticity and responsibility. Distrust, by contrast, is the belief that an actor’s motives are malicious or harmful, reflected in incompetence, malevolence and deceit.
On that view, it is possible to trust elements of the public service’s technical capability while distrusting how performance is framed and disclosed. The behaviour on display in the ANAO and DTA examples damages both forms of trust. It undermines competence, because agencies repeatedly fail to produce clear, usable performance information even after years of coaching. It also undermines openness and authenticity, because true‑but‑selective claims and favourable framing look a lot like the “spin” Kennedy tells us the APS has managed to resist.
Kennedy is right to warn about mis‑ and disinformation. But trust is not built by rhetoric. It is built through competence, openness, authenticity and responsibility, expressed in the mundane artefacts of administration: audit reports, performance statements and review summaries. When performance reporting meets minimum requirements but fails to inform judgement, it weakens the competence signal on which trust in governments and regulators primarily rests. The result is not merely an absence of trust, but its erosion. Transparency that does not clarify performance does not defend trust; it quietly undermines it.
That is more “miss‑information” than disinformation, but for citizens trying to make sense of government, the effect on trust is much the same.
