One of the points I made was the difficulty of achieving good accountability in the public sector. I'll elaborate a bit on that.
As I said before, accountability a number of decades ago was really looked at from the point of view of the propriety of spending money. Was the money really spent for education the way it was supposed to be? Now we're into much more of a results-oriented management-type universe, where the accountability story has to be not only was the money spent where it was supposed to be spent in terms of the sources, but did it get good outcomes. Are we getting good education for the dollar we're spending?
That's a very difficult question for any government to answer, just because so many factors besides the education system produce good education. It's not simply because you have teachers in classrooms, but there are a lot of other factors, parents and the like, that go into making a good education system. Accountability is no easy thing.
The other thing about accountability is that it's not an absolute, sadly. You can put too much store on accountability and essentially have derogatory effects on other good government principles. For example, if you put so much store on accountability, you're likely to reduce performance. You're going to have so many people worried about the risk of somehow being labelled as some person who has gone beyond the bounds that there isn't any kind of entrepreneurial spirit within the public service. It's not an absolute.
Another problem with accountability is that it can deal adversely with legitimacy. You have so many bad stories coming out of accountability institutions that all politicians are somehow seen as stupid or corrupt. That's the other problem with accountability. If you put too much emphasis on accountability, you're going to have questions about the legitimacy of politicians and the legitimacy of public service. That's why accountability in some sense is so difficult. It's not an absolute, and this results-based management makes it very difficult to have a compelling, cogent, accountability story.
In summary, transparency is obviously critical to good accountability. I don't think there's any question about that. It's the handmaiden to good accountability. It's not a panacea that's going to suddenly get you to nirvana or some promised land.