Craig Jeffery - Chief Financial Officer

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Craig Jeffery, Chief Financial Officer. 

Craig tells many amusing stories from his long career in the Tasmanian State Service, and you’ll hear how he likes to make sure work is fun.  

He shares his thoughts on the many silos within the Department and tells us about his desire to be a hands-on problem solver. 

He also shares advice for financial delegation, managing budgets and writing a successful proposal, and walks us through the Government budget process.

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling.

My name's Dorian Broomhall, and I'm the Manager of Culture and Wellbeing for the Department of Health here in Lutruwita, Tasmania. For this episode I got to know Craig Jeffery, the Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Health.

In our conversation, Craig has many great stories to tell from his long career in the Tasmanian state service. He shares his thoughts on working in silos and tells us about his desire to be a hands-on problem solver.

He also gives us advice for financial delegation, managing budgets and writing a successful proposal, and walks us through the government budget process. You also very much get a sense for how Craig likes to make sure work is fun.

We start every chat with the same question, so let's get into it. What did you want to be when you were in primary school?

Craig Jeffery:

I don't remember to be honest, what I wanted to do when I was at primary school. As an interesting segue, when I went to primary school, it were in the days where we used to get milk to drink every day to increase our calcium. One of my main memories of primary school is drinking the milk, and then they used to store it in a wooden cabinet at the back end of school. When we went up there on the weekends and we got thirsty, we'd drink the leftover milk, and sometimes in summer it wasn't quite as fresh as it could have been, so yeah, that's a fond memory.

Anyway, getting back to your question, I don't know what I wanted to do, at primary school. When I went to high school, I hated high school, but my only memory out of that was one of the few subjects I enjoyed was commerce. At about that time I decided that commerce, for some reason was interesting to me and I enjoyed it, so that set my path into the great realms of accountancy. Luckily I've got a fairly good sense of humour, so I fit pretty well in the accounting profession.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's funny that you say that, right, my interactions with you are that you are not what people expect.

Craig Jeffery:

Well yeah, maybe that says more about me than it says about other people. Yes, I figure that one of the main fun things about coming to work is meeting people and getting on with people and understanding people, which I enjoy.

I figure as part of that, that if you can have a bit of a laugh or share some good conversation or some experiences, it makes work a bit exciting. I prefer to make work fun, and at least if I get a laugh then I'm pretty pleased with that, and if other people think my nonsense is amusing, then that's all good as well.

Dorian Broomhall:

Throughout your career, working now with numbers in various guises, I imagine, have you come across other people that share that passion for making work fun? Because I have to say, from the outside looking in, most of us that find numbers challenging think, "Gosh, that must be a boring place to work."

Craig Jeffery:

I've got a story there. When I was at Treasury, where I worked for about 100 years, I remember meeting the then Leader of the Opposition, Will Hodgman, and basically we gave him a bit of a review of the work we do at Treasury, and there were a whole heap of us, the directors of the various areas that gave him a thumbnail sketch of what our job is.

I did my little five minute spiel on what I did, and then Mr. Hodgman said, "Thanks very much, that sounds like one of the most boring jobs I've ever heard." That was a fun takeaway, but to answer your question, it takes all sorts, and I suppose as I said, my early interest was in what they called commerce, and I used to enjoy playing around with numbers, and sadly my experience has been, the more that I went into the management side of the business, the less work I do on numbers.

Probably my greatest love of playing around with numbers or spreadsheets or manipulating things or building models to solve problems, I don't get to do that anymore, so I don't get to do much of the fun stuff, all I get to do is solve probably problems, or sort out management type issues and things like that. The job is what you make it I think, so yeah, I still find a bit of fun in there.

Dorian Broomhall:

Are you a Tassie boy?

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, born and bred. My mum still lives in the family home in Mount Stewart. I probably shouldn't say that, because I don't want people throwing rocks that are windows. I went to Mount Stewart Primary School and then New Town High School, which I hated, Elizabeth College, University of Tasmania, so yeah, I'm a local yokel.

Dorian Broomhall:

Have you always been in state service or have you forayed into the private sector as well?

Craig Jeffery:

No, I'm a creature of habit, so no, I've stayed in the state service. I went to university under a scholarship from the then Audit Department. I finished that, did four years there, went to work for TT Line as an accountant, did five years there, when they had the good ship Abel Tasman, which was interesting days.

Then I went to Treasury, stayed there for 26 years, finally got time off for good behaviour and was lured across to the Department of Health by the current Secretary Kath Morgan-Wicks, who was my boss at Treasury.

For some reason she remembered me fondly, and asked me to come over here and told me it would be fun and exciting. I've seen some of the excitement and I've created my own fun, so I'm not sure Kath's delivered on the whole promise, but she's done her best.

Dorian Broomhall:

Well, I suppose that a few things didn't necessarily go to her plan a couple of years ago. I didn't realise that you've only been with Health a couple of years as well, so you are relatively junior in all that.

Craig Jeffery:

Oh yes, I'm very young for an old person. I started, I think, well, I know I started on the 1st of March and that was about a week or two weeks before COVID became a bit of a thing, and that's got bigger and bigger and taken a vast amount of everyone's life, probably over the past two and a half years.

Dorian Broomhall:

With all your different experiences working as a creature of habit, your words, across your career in the state service, did that allow you to think creatively and differently in order to be able to actually meet some of the challenges that were thrown our way from a finance and presumably procurement point of view?

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, I've done some fun things I suppose, in my time, and probably some hopefully valuable or important things in terms of the state service. A number of years ago, when I was a Treasury, I was in the accounting policy side of their business, which I found interesting, but everyone else finds extremely boring, that's my earlier story, and somehow that segued into procurement policy.

I probably had what I thought was the fun time of setting up a procurement framework and writing the first set of TI's for the Tasmanian State Service, which has morphed quite a lot over the years, so nobody should hold me responsible for the current slightly more complex arrangements.

Played with a few pieces of legislation along the way, which once I started getting into legislation, doing the briefings of members of parliament and working with parliamentary council and taking the legislation through parliament, I find interesting and challenging.

We did the new Audit Act in 2008, which I think is a pretty good piece of legislation, hopefully, and the new Financial Management Act in 2016, which probably took the best part of 10-15 years to put together.

Once again, probably not that exciting for people, but in terms of putting together a sensible, or what I thought was a sensible legislative and up to date framework, financial management, hopefully something that was good and useful and will stand the test of time.

Dorian Broomhall:

My interactions with you, was before I came into the dark side of the public service, through some of the work that I was doing with Ambulance.

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, you were doing some cultural reform work.

Dorian Broomhall:

I remember being struck by the fact that, oh, this seems unusual that another member of the executive of the Department of Health, the Chief Financial Officer, is involved at that level with Ambulance, and that you came along to a couple of those workshops and not only listened, but you actually, from my recollection, participated quite constructively.

That struck me as unusual. As you've come into this organisation, what's that been like for you, understanding how these different parts of it work, and what these different challenges are, and what's motivated you to actually get down to that level of detail, if you like?

Craig Jeffery:

I think the answer to that's pretty complicated, but I think what I discovered early on is that Health is a very large and complex entity, and it probably won't surprise anyone, if I may, but it's quite a siloed entity and also with some cultural challenges.

I think part of that is probably due to the various decentralizations, centralizations, machinery of government changes over the years, and there's probably lots of internal processes that are quite complicated, maybe unnecessarily complicated, and there's just parts of the process that seem to be broken and need fixing.

I'm a, don't lift rocks up unless you want problems to hop out, but if you lift the rocks up and the problems hop out, then I'm a try and fix them person. I suppose one of the challenges with Ambulance Tasmania was a budget situation that was very, very tight in terms of managing it.

One of the reasons that I'm on the Ambulance Tasmania executive committee, is to try and help with that financial management challenge, but obviously there's significant pressures on the workforce. COVID hasn't helped, and a lot of issues of, for want of a better word, poor culture, maybe poor governance, lack of understanding, almost certainly poor communication probably from both sides, I'm not criticising anyone in particular from saying that.

Just some issues that concerned me when we had our cultural workshops, people challenges and situations that people were, difficult problems that they were putting voice to, and some of that was really challenging to hear, and it was disgraceful and needed to be fixed.

Like I said, I'm not a person to, if I can ignore things and get away with it, I will, but if things are waved under my nose, I want to see things improved if I can. I suppose that's a long-winded answer to say, that's why I'm interested in trying to help if I can.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's interesting that you talk about this metaphor of silos, that come up quite a lot. I would've thought that it's easy for someone that works in finance to silo themselves away and just deal with the numbers as they come to them and follow the process accordingly.

Craig Jeffery:

Well, I'm comfortable sitting in a silo, and I've obviously worked at Treasury for a number of years, and so all the other agencies think that that's a very siloed workplace, and that they sit up on a silver cloud and throw down thunderbolts of wisdom every now and then, and maybe with a few dollars to help ease things along.

I'm happy to exist in a siloed environment, if I have to, but what I find is, the challenges, the budget or the financial management challenges, the only way that you can deal with those is by, well, I'm a big believer in creating networks, using networks, creating friendships, doing favours, exchanging favours, claiming them back, so that's the way I like to set myself up.

I have a network and I utilise those networks to try and get shared understanding, or if this happens, then this might happen, and that would be a good thing for something else. I don't see any benefit in terms of financial management in managing it without that network or that communication process, it just doesn't work.

There's just about no problems I can solve by myself. There's not a never-ending stream of money to solve all the things that people want to do or could do, so there has to be re-prioritisation or a change of priority or money moved from one area to the other, and you can't achieve that unless you're talking to all the people involved.

Dorian Broomhall:

There's a really critical part of that isn't there, that money is not always the answer, right?

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, money's pretty helpful, and everybody in their personal lives, most people would think there's no problems in managing their household budgets, that a bit of additional money would assist. I try and encourage people to think about the decisions they're making within their professional lives.

They're spending the Tasmanian community's money, and at a bare minimum, I'd hope they'd be thinking about that the same way they'd be thinking about managing their household budget. If you're managing your household budget, the house might need, the roof of the house might be leaking, your kids are struggling at school and you want to send them from the public system to the private system.

You've had two years of COVID, the family haven't had a holiday, you want to go on a ... So how do people work out the relative priority of the leaking roof, the school needs of their children, and their work-life balance and needing a holiday?

People work out a way to manage that and prioritise, and we have to be able to use those same skills to be managing working within the Departmental environment, which is a fixed pie within a fixed pie state budget, which is a fixed pie within an Australian government budget.

There's not an unlimited supply of money, and even during COVID, governments have borrowed money or printed money, however people want to do it, but the Australian government is already seeing a harder budget coming in, and talking about the pressures on its finances and it can't fund everything, a number of other jurisdictions are doing it.

The same principles apply, from your household budget up to the Australian budget and all the way through, and really that's the simple disciplines and the simple, I'm only a simple accountant, as I say numerous times, John Burgess loves it when I say that, but it's true. I can't solve the problems of the world, and there's not an unlimited supply of money to do it, so you've got to do things differently or smarter or whatever.

Dorian Broomhall:

That idea of how you manage your budget at an appropriate level, I think is quite important, and I don't think that everybody understands necessarily what delegations are and what it actually means when you've got a small slice of this bigger pie, how you actually go about managing that.

Have you any thoughts on that, no matter what level you're at, as you talked about, if you're at a frontline management level, how might you go about thinking about it?

Craig Jeffery:

I've picked up on the word delegation, so I'm going to latch onto that if I can, because that was actually something I was keen to talk about.

What I'm not sure that people understand or what sometimes I think people miss, is that we're all working on behalf of the Tasmanian community. It's the Tasmanian community's money that we're effectively spending, and Kath is responsible to the Minister, so that's the Secretary obviously, is responsible to the Minister, and as the accountable authority, has responsibility under the Financial Management Act, and under the Financial Management Act, the power to delegate is given to Kath as the accountable authority.

That means that everybody that's exercising a delegation within the Department, is doing that specifically under a delegation approved by the Secretary and on the Secretary's behalf. What people need to be thinking about is, are they doing something that the Secretary, if she was exercising that power would be doing?

I'm not expecting everybody to know and understand what Kath would think in a particular circumstance, but if they understand what her role is and what her perspectives are, and her priorities, then they should be making decisions on that same basis.

People are exercising delegations provided to them by the Secretary, and they should be mindful of the fact that they're doing that on the Secretary's behalf. It's not their own decision to make, it's on behalf of, and likewise, the Procurement Review Committee, who are oversighting procurements, which I'm lucky enough to chair, are also doing that as delegates of the Secretary.

As PRC chair, I'm basically looking at procurement processes. Is the process fair and reasonable? Has natural justice been applied, etc, etc, etc? Within the lens that I'm doing that as a delegation for the Secretary, and so when I recommend something that should be approved or not approved, is that what Kath as the Secretary would see appropriate?

Whether you're delegated as a group of six or whatever, up to 5,000 or whatever it is, you're still doing that in a tiered structure with specific delegations from the Secretary, it's not your own decision to make necessarily.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think that there's almost two sides to this delegation piece that aren't necessarily widely understood. What your delegation is, is only one part of it, because then it's what budget do you have available to you? It's not like every time you want to make a $5,000 decision, you can make those until forever. I'll just keep spending $5,000, because what I'm delegated to. Hang on, there's also that next level, right, of considering what your whole budget is.

Craig Jeffery:

That's true, and for similar reasons, yes, you've got to manage within the framework of your budget and within your existing delegations. Then, there's a whole range of processes and procurement instructions that suggest, if your delegation is a million dollars and you've got two transactions that are 900,000, then you don't separate those and deal with them. If it's for one thing, it's 1.8 million above your delegation it goes to someone else, not split it up and do two things.

Yes, it's very, very important that you monitor your budget and you know what your budget is, and that you approve things in the context of your available budget, and hopefully have strategies, if there's not enough budget, reprioritize or explore avenues to seek further funds, which is usually going to be through the budget process.

Dorian Broomhall:

Can you talk us through that budget bid process that does go to Treasury, what that's for and why we want to be aware of it, but also who's probably the right people to be instigating?

Craig Jeffery:

I'm not sure that there's an answer to who are the right people, but in terms of the budget process, I've got a lovely one-page, standard budget process timetable picture, that if I was doing a presentation, I'd usually show, and I'd take people through the timeline.

In broad terms, the Treasurer will ask Ministers to provide Treasury with agency budget submissions. This agency's budget submission, I think was lodged about two days before Christmas, so the 22-23rd of December, and that's input to the budget committee's consideration of the budget process.

The Minister was invited to attend the budget committee in February, to take the budget committee through that submission. The budget committee then considers, meets with all other agencies. They would usually consider a final budget outcome sometime in April.

The budget committee is a subcommittee of Cabinet, so then the budget committee's recommendations, go to Cabinet. Cabinet approve or don't approve, and then they decide what allocation the agencies are going to get.

We're expecting our agency allocation advice the 17th of April, and we've got about a week to get our budget piece, chapter written, cleared through the Minister, and then the Treasurer will hand down the budget on the 26th of May I think it is.

Obviously, in preparing the budget, so that's the timeframe from when we lodge the budget submissions. Obviously, as I've already said, the government have got a fixed pie budget to cut up. They're going to allocate agencies their existing budget, which we talk about as base budget, and fund new initiatives which they decide to fund.

They might take back some budget savings from agencies if they decide to do that, I'm not saying they will. It's usually base plus their new initiatives, so all the agencies are putting submissions forward. Generally, if you've asked for saving strategies, you'll put some of those up, but you're generally putting up new initiatives.

Once again, we ask all the group heads to put budget submissions into the budget and finance subcommittee of Health executive, and I think they came in about early November this year. We asked all the group heads, so the group heads will get submissions or budget business cases within their groups. We asked for these to be prioritised and a limited number of the top priorities to come forward to the budget and finance subcommittee, who will then consolidate those, re-prioritise, go to Health executive, some will go forward, some will fall off the bottom, and that's how the budget submission goes together.

Everyone's making decisions for better or worse on a priority basis, so at a whole of state level or at Australian government level, no-one's saying that Victoria's more important than Tasmania, or that flood repair in Queensland is more important than the transport issues in Sydney. At a state level, the Tasmanian government have to make a decision about funding Justice through police, or Justice or Health or Education, and there's challenges in those.

Yeah, so they've got to make them, but they're not saying that the education of the children is more or less important than the health of the population, it's just they've got a fixed sum to manage. Likewise, the agency's got to decide what the relative priority is of the need for culture reform through people, and HR versus the demands on the clinical areas and likewise.

Nobody's saying that HR is more important than finance, heaven help me, or that surgical is more or less important than paediatric. There's a limited pie of money, and it just has to be done on a priority basis, and then for the areas that miss out, an opportunity next time.

Dorian Broomhall:

You talk about it, and these are my words, not yours, being slightly, you're assessing it on a values-free basis, right? Because we're not saying anything is more important or less important necessarily from a-

Craig Jeffery:

There's always things that are more important, and like the analogy I used earlier, the roof is leaking, kids' education.

Dorian Broomhall:

I'm going on holiday, though.

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, well yeah, you and your wife need a second honeymoon, but-

Dorian Broomhall:

We haven't had a first one yet.

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, it's clear that whether you're sleeping and having drips on your head is important, but so is your kids' education. It's the relative important, or what needs to happen, what's important now, what needs to happen now, what needs to happen in the short-term, what you can move down.

It may well be, the roof needs to be fixed now, the kids' school can wait until next year. The holiday can wait until the year after that, and so you can shuffle the timelines a little bit.

Dorian Broomhall:

What helps you do your job, which isn't necessarily to provide judgement as such, but the presentations or pitches that come to you that are good, what have they got?

Craig Jeffery:

The easy answer to that is a funding strategy. Proposals that come forward with no funding strategy apart from, "Craig, can you grab some money off the money tree and send it my way?" Completely unhelpful. What's your funding strategy? Can you put some of your own money towards it? Can you reprioritize? Is it a corporate overhead activity that all my executive colleagues should share in?

Like I said before, I'm a simple accountant, but I figure that if somebody wants a lump of money and they're prepared to put some of their existing money towards it, that's a lot more compelling than somebody saying, "Please give me $500,000 or $1-million of new money, which doesn't exist, but by the way, I'm not even going to put 50 cents of my existing." That just says to me, is it really a high ... I want it, but I'm not going to put anything of my own into it.

As I said, I'm a very simple accountant, but that's not a very compelling case. Versus the one, "I've had a look at what we're doing, there's some low hanging fruit that's not useful, let's stop doing that. We're paying some money out for this, that or the other, we can stop doing that."

Yeah, managing your home budget. Maybe you can have one less pizza a week, or for me one less carton of beer a week. When the politicians release the budget, it's always aligned to, this is only one Costa coffee a day, or it used to be X packets of cigarettes or something like that.

What can you give up and put in to help it? At least have a funding strategy, not, "I want this to happen, but it's someone else's problem, not mine, to find the money for it." Well, I may be a genius, probably not, but I ain't got unlimited sources of money that I can just put towards things.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's the same approach that as a manager, if someone comes to you with a problem, that they've come to you with at least some form of solution to begin with. You're a lot more excited to have that conversation.

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, I don't think I'm the sole, and I know I'm not the sole source of good ideas. If people have got problems, then maybe I'll be able to find a solution, but it's a hell of a lot easier if someone's got a problem, and what I want is, like that show on TV, you get a number of choices and you say, "I want that one."

That's what I want to do. I just want this, this or this, and I'm smart enough to be able to work out, this is completely unpalatable, this is maybe okay, this looks like a good halfway to get there, so I'm having that one.

Dorian Broomhall:

For those of us that don't work in finance, we get a little bit overwhelmed by spreadsheets, because they seem far more complicated than they probably actually are for someone that's used to them. What's your advice to someone who's not necessarily au fait with how to work in Excel? What's your advice to them for approaching, digesting and understanding a spreadsheet?

Craig Jeffery:

Well, believe it or not, when I started in the business, there was no such things as spreadsheets, so-

Dorian Broomhall:

You had just lots of abacuses.

Craig Jeffery:

Yeah, so when I did high school, we had books that were ruled up with cash columns or ledger columns, so I did it old school with pen and ink. When I started at the audit department, we were given a pad and a green pen, and if you were lucky an adding machine, and if you were really lucky an adding machine that had a paper tape on it, so you could actually print out your calculations and tick them, and they were your tools of trade.

I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask about Excel. I wouldn't claim to be an expert in Excel or Word, I just use it. People can do all sorts of macros and tricky things in it, I don't understand them, don't know how to do them, so my advice is, only play with it to the extent and do what you understand. There's heaps of advice on the internet that you can Google how to do stuff, but the best, this is for me, a total outsource it.

There's plenty of people sitting in these offices, probably the person sitting at the next workstation, who knows the answer to your question, so why don't you just lean over and say, "Hey, Dorian, do you know how to do this formula in Excel, or do you understand how this functionality works?" Most people are very, very happy to show off their knowledge and skills.

In terms of being a tool, I find Excel, at the basic level I can do it, and I can get by in most things and I can cut spreadsheets up to answer the questions and do it, and I'm not a very sophisticated user, so I just do it at a basic level and do what you can.

There's plenty of good courses, introductory Excel, intermediate Excel, advanced Excel, if you want to get a bit more technical at it. I think it's just a tool. For me, it replaces the calculator. It does things a lot better, but if I get a list of numbers in a budget chapter or in a minute, where I'm clearing it and I'm relying on the numbers, even if they come out of Excel, I'll get my calculator out and I'll add the column and I'll put my little audit ticks on them.

I don't want to be given the Secretary a minute with a table in there that doesn't add up, and I've seen plenty of them where you've cleared lots of reports, lots of whole of government reports, and I've added up columns and numbers and they don't add up and there's a formula error and I circle it and put two question marks on it because I'm a bit of a prick like that, or three if it's a real bad error. You can't just rely on the technology, I think is my answer to your great question.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think though, that bringing it back to what is actually simple, which is, is your balance sheet right? Do your columns add up? Does it need to be any more complicated than that? Thank you. I really appreciate your time.

Craig Jeffery:

You're welcome.

Dorian Broomhall:

Thanks to Craig Jeffery, Chief Financial Officer, for taking time to speak with us, and to you for listening. I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away and apply into your own work.

Join me again for our next episode, when I speak with Shane Gregory, the Associate Secretary for the Department of Health.