Portfolio — 15 April 2026

Assistant Minister Patrick Gorman used a PM media release on 15 April to set out the breadth of his public service reform agenda, anchoring the program in the recently passed public service reform bill [TA-260415-pmc-e18bf1dd85df]. Capability reviews are now running across all departments — including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — with independent reviewers assessing performance and identifying improvement priorities.

Gorman flagged three recurring themes emerging from those reviews: public servants' appetite for training and capability uplift, persistent challenges around ICT costs and value-for-money, and strong cross-level engagement throughout the service [TA-260415-pmc-e18bf1dd85df]. One data quality concern sits alongside this reform activity: approximately 48,000 of the 198,000 public servants did not participate in the APS Employee Census, which Gorman acknowledged limits the government's decision-making base.

Gorman's field engagement has been substantive. He attended State of the Service Roadshows in Brisbane and Adelaide, covering innovation, cultural and linguistic diversity, border security, and regional service delivery. The government has set binding targets for department secretaries to lift cultural and linguistic diversity in senior leadership roles over five years, with improved policy outcomes cited as the expected return.

Artificial intelligence dominated the forward-looking portion of the release. Gorman framed AI as an extension of computing capacity rather than a disruptive break — pointing to existing deployments at the ATO (real-time nudging), Home Affairs (Smart Gates), and border mail-scanning as proof of concept. Data security and platform selection are the primary barriers to broader adoption, and the government is building the GovAI platform to enable server-hosted chatbots with appropriate access controls [TA-260415-pmc-e18bf1dd85df].

A Microsoft AI Copilot trial across several thousand public servants showed potential savings of up to one hour per day in administrative tasks for trained users — a figure that carries obvious workforce-planning implications if applied at scale. Services Australia is simultaneously running temporary service centres in regional and remote Australia to protect in-person access, a practical counterweight to the digital-first trajectory.

Gorman identified three structural challenges he says require whole-of-government response: AI's transformation of economic structure and the nature of work, climate change as a larger economic shift than the Industrial Revolution, and regional conflicts affecting energy security. The government is convening business roundtables co-hosted with the Public Service Commission and the Business Council of Australia to bring cross-sector leaders into dialogue on these challenges — a mechanism that positions the APS reform program as an enabler of broader economic resilience rather than a narrowly administrative exercise.

On performance benchmarks, Australia's OECD digital government ranking of second in the world represents a significant uplift attributed to government investment and mobile-first design. The 2025 Trust in Australian Public Services Report recorded 62% of Australians trusting the APS — a figure Gorman characterised as a foundation requiring further elevation and explicitly connected to defending democratic institutions against anti-democratic forces [TA-260415-pmc-e18bf1dd85df].

Robodebt lessons surfaced as contributing to greater accountability within the service, and Stewardship has been embedded as a formal APS value to orient the service toward long-term national challenges.