Susannah Nichols

In April 2020, three months into the critical phase to plan and mobilise delivery of the new Western Australian Digital Strategy Roadmap, the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic radically shifted priorities for Health Support Services, the health service provider that provides shared services (including ICT) for the Western Australian (WA) public health system.

Health Support Services was required to urgently develop a vaccine administration management system (VaccinateWA) to assist in the delivery of the State’s COVID-19 immunisation program. Delivering Vaccinate WA presented a series of risk considerations including an extremely time-pressured environment, a high degree of uncertainty and the high-profile nature of the project that attracted strong levels of public scrutiny.

Key lessons can be drawn from the success of VaccinateWA about the critical role leadership plays in a high performing public sector agency. The case demonstrates that leadership at all levels across an organisation plays a central role in establishing and embedding values and culture within the organisation, enhancing accountability and integrity amongst its staff, and expanding the capacity of teams to mitigate risks and deliver outcomes despite uncertainty.

Legal Aid Western Australia works to serve the community through legal education and representation and in 2020, after being approached by LGBTIQA+ youth advocacy group the Youth Pride Network, it decided to develop legal information resources to help LGBTIQA+ young people facing exclusion in education and employment settings understand their legal rights.

This case outlines how Jessica Baynes, Senior Solicitor, and her team at Legal Aid Western Australia, worked to develop resources despite having no additional budget to devote to the project, and a busy workload of existing commitments.

Key lessons can be drawn from this case about the benefits of the public sector being open to community-initiated projects. First, partnership was essential. The partnership between Legal Aid and the Youth Pride Network ensured that the factsheets were relevant for the LGBTIQA+ youth community, and the information could reach the intended audiences. From her experience, Baynes noted that she learned the importance of being open to different communication strategies and that ‘we need to collaborate with people who are in the know’. Empowering groups within the community is what drove the EIS team, while collaborating with the Youth Pride Network enabled this to be achieved.

As part of its commitment to Closing the Gap, and after the successful implementation of the federal government’s Indigenous Procurement Policy in 2015, the West Australian Government announced the Aboriginal Procurement Policy (the Policy), partly with the aim to improve employment outcomes for Indigenous people.

In 2017, WA’s Department of Finance were in a bind. It knew that including Indigenous people in policy development was crucial but doing so meant it had to overcome several challenges. The Department had various policy parameters, including fulfilling the newly elected first-term government’s election promise within a short time frame, but it understood that to achieve policy success, buy-in was critical from two key stakeholders: the Aboriginal business sector and WA government agencies.

The Department faced entrenched distrust of the government from the Aboriginal business sector, and a reluctance to change procurement practices within government agencies. It identified that for the policy to succeed it would be critical to have a consultation and collaboration process, which was both culturally sensitive to Indigenous needs and included areas for stakeholder input to into the development of the Policy.

The case study outlines the steps taken by the Department to develop that process and demonstrates the benefit of genuine stakeholder consultation and collaboration throughout the policy development, implementation and evaluation processes. The key lesson from the case study is that for certain policies or under specific conditions – in this instance a policy that seeks to address an issue within a marginalised group – genuine consultation and collaboration with stakeholders is critical to the whole policy process and for the lifespan of the policy