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The time secretaries devote personally to different aspects of their responsibilities depends on a number of factors including the functional responsibilities and size of the portfolio and department, the style of the minister(s) and the personal preferences and style of the secretary.
Personal style is not a minor factor. Notwithstanding the development by the APS Commission of its generic SES leadership capabilities, each secretary (and each SES officer) has his or her own style of leadership. This affects how they do their job as secretary and how they allocate their scarce time. Being aware of this themselves is also important, to be mindful of the importance of roles that are not natural strengths but require personal effort and also to look to others in the senior team to complement their own strengths and preferences.
Among the secretaries of my era (first as an SES officer and then as a secretary of three successive departments) who I admired and learned from, there was a significant variation in styles:
Tony Ayers (former Secretary of the departments of Defence, Aboriginal Affairs, Social Security and Health and Community Services) was a wonderful manager of people and had a keen sense of what was feasible: a can-do operator rather than a policy analyst, close to ministers, with a great political ‘nose’, a delegator of authority to others (but insisting on being kept fully informed)
Ian Castles (former Secretary of the Department of Finance and Australian Government Statistician) was the top intellectual throughout my time in the APS, a careful researcher and analyst and consummate presenter of the evidence at the right time, but allowing others to lead in the management of his agencies
Mike Keating (former Secretary of the departments of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Finance and Employment and Industrial Relations) was a driver of reform, a hands-on developer of policy with government ministers and a hard task master demanding prompt implementation
Helen Williams (former Public Service Commissioner and secretary of many departments, including Education, Tourism, Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Information Technology and the Arts, and Human Services) was always insistent on rigour, whether in advice or in financial management, putting great effort into marshalling the expertise and resources of her agency while always taking personal responsibility for the advice given and the programs managed.
All of these devoted considerable time to supporting their ministers, but while Ayers would be in frequent personal contact by phone or in meetings, Williams divided that with marshalling the work in her department and testing it for accuracy and appropriateness; Castles would be doing personal research and analysis with a small number of key staff; and Keating would be personally switching between ministers, his own officers, officers in other agencies and senior people in the states to drive the reforms he was enthusiastically pursuing, looking for common ground without compromising anything he regarded as important.
Table 2.1 The Castles’ policy art
Ian Castles’ personal contribution to policy research and advice was extraordinary. His staff tended either to love him for this or to despair, as he appeared to ignore other matters. I was clearly in the first camp, perhaps because I was fortunate to find our interests often coincided.
I had the privilege to work with him on family allowances reform (1976), income tax reform (1977–78 and 1985) and superannuation reform (1983 and 1985), among many major policy initiatives. He had a great sense of timing and a brilliant capacity to identify a radical alternative option and to present the arguments in favour—he was never happier than when taking on well-entrenched views, either within the bureaucracy or among famous outside commentators.
An example of his style was his paper ‘Economists and anti-economists’, prepared for ANZAAS in 1984 when he was Secretary of the Department of Finance.
This paper, much larger than an article but shorter than a book, was ostensibly about the role and contribution of economists in the century after the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. It was also, however, a comprehensive rebuttal of internationally prominent scholars and television presenters Kenneth Clark and John Kenneth Galbraith who had been misrepresenting economists to pursue their own agendas, and a cry for economists to continue to contribute to the scientific study of social and economic issues. Castles marshalled the resources of the National Library of Australia to help him demonstrate the concern for public welfare of economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, and their challenging of the establishment of their day, taking on power and privilege gained from abuse of markets and from inadequate government involvement in areas such as education, and promoting what were radical views at the time on matters such as civil liberties and the role of women.
Castles spent hours for days at a time in the National Library preparing this superb paper, managing, for example, to draw on personal correspondence during the Irish potato famine. The paper, however, had no direct impact on current policy, let alone on financial management.
Did he neglect his other duties? There were those in the Finance department who felt he did, but I look back on the 1980s as the period during which Finance built its reputation as a powerhouse of policy and financial management reform. Castles’ efforts inspired many to raise their standards of policy analysis, emphasising research and evidence.
Peter Walsh (Minister for Finance, 1984–90) has since written that, despite rarely seeing Castles, he was impressed with the quality of written advice Castles provided and the support provided by the whole department under Castles’ leadership. He said that, when they did meet, Castles spoke to him as if he were at a university seminar.
I suspect that in allocating time to different responsibilities, Williams put more effort into managing her department than the others, ensuring its financial robustness in particular. Ayers also gave particular emphasis to management matters, in his case focusing very strongly on people. Whichever department he led, he also played a major role in mentoring people and advising heads of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) on succession management. Keating and Castles spent more of their own personal energy in developing and advising on policy, Castles being probably least involved of the four in managing the department, relying extensively on other senior officials to help him in that role.
There have also been some secretaries I have not admired. Their styles also varied, but the aspects that I most disliked were the effort of some to win personal political favour at the expense of rigorous policy advice or proper process, and the willingness of some to avoid responsibility or to bully and attach blame to others, including within their own organisations, in order to curry favour.