The increase in management responsibilities has reduced the time secretaries have to focus on high-quality policy advising. This impact can be exaggerated, however. Commonwealth departmental secretaries still spend considerable time personally on policy advice and on marshalling policy analysis in their departments. I believe the overall quality has diminished for the reasons outlined above, but many secretaries still have formidable competence in their various policy fields and can and do win the policy arguments against the views of external ‘experts’ in confidential ministerial forums. Notwithstanding the emphasis on generalist skills (which are indeed important, particularly those relating to deep understanding of parliamentary and government processes), most secretaries do have considerable expertise relevant to the particular responsibilities of their departments.
The increase in engagement outside the Public Service has also given senior public servants wider perspectives than they might have had in the past, from which to draw on when giving advice. Moreover, arguably, the increased involvement of external groups in the political process has offset some of the reduced capacity within the Public Service.
A perennial criticism of the senior echelons of the APS has been that they represent a narrow and privileged group in the Australian community with a common orthodoxy about social and economic policy. I do not share that view, notwithstanding the obvious fact that white, Anglo-Saxon males have dominated the SES since Federation, and the many efforts (my own included) to ensure better opportunities for women and Indigenous people in particular to succeed in the APS.
As Ian Castles highlighted some years ago, the APS is not a bastion of privilege and it might be that the senior echelons are more representative of their society and culture than counterparts in other countries. The APS certainly does have further to go, but it leads most state public services (though not some overseas, such as New Zealand and Canada) and private sector companies in the employment of senior women and Indigenous Australians. With the exception of people with a disability, the trend lines for senior jobs are consistently in the right direction in terms of broadening participation. Mobility is also increasing, though modestly.
Table 2.3 Secretaries: an elite class or a reflection of an egalitarian, upwardly mobile community?
Ian Castles defended the Public Service against criticism in the 1980s that it represented an elite and powerful class. He did so by detailing the personal background of the then five most recent Secretaries to the Treasury, highlighting how many came from modest family backgrounds and had risen to the top through great personal sacrifice along with strong family and government support.
The four secretaries I have highlighted as people I particularly respected and learned from over my career also have varied backgrounds.
Tony Ayers was born in modest circumstances in Fitzroy. The son of a junior public servant in the Customs Service, he had a good education through scholarships including to St Kevin’s College. He also supported his education for a while earning pocket money working for an SP bookie. He gained a social work degree and then worked in Victorian prisons as a parole officer before joining the Commonwealth.
Ian Castles was from Sale in country Victoria, where his father was a hardware merchant. He completed his schooling at Wesley College after attending state schools in Sale, going on to do a commerce degree at Melbourne University.
Mike Keating was also brought up in rural Victoria, by his widowed mother, who relied on her War Widows Pension while he was young. He gained various government scholarships to pursue his education, going on to complete an economics degree at Melbourne University, and later obtaining his PhD.
Helen Williams was born in Adelaide but spent much of her childhood in England, where her father was a senior academic in economics. She completed a history and sociology degree at Reading University, a ‘redbrick’ establishment. She returned to Australia when her father was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University.
None of the four could be said to have come from a highly privileged background. Two progressed from modest rural backgrounds and one from the inner Melbourne working class.
My own background is middle class. My father was an engineer in the NSW Public Service and my mother a casual teacher at Asquith Girls High School. I am one of seven children and attended public schools in Sydney until my final two years at Shore before going to Sydney University, completing a science degree in pure mathematics.
The criticism of a narrow orthodoxy among secretaries is harder to refute, partly because the nature of the job virtually precludes secretaries from holding extreme views. Most do have strong personal views of broad policies that would enhance the public interest, while also accepting absolutely the right of the elected government to set policy. Most, and certainly the best, are not blinkered in their views but are genuinely open-minded and are keen to find the relevant research and analysis, including evaluation of past policies. There are nonetheless some common threads about the benefits of free trade and well-functioning markets, with governments intervening only where clearly justified in order to redistribute resources to those not able to rely on markets, to address market failures and to provide public goods and to support social capital. All those whose views I know believe firmly in a very substantial role for government to enhance the wellbeing of Australians. Beyond these broad threads, however, there are wide variations of views among secretaries: from liberal to conservative, from strong support for redistribution to strong belief in self-reliance, from philistines to disciples of the arts, from mathematicians and physicists to historians and sociologists to economists and accountants.
A related criticism even harder to refute is the ‘clubbish’ nature of the departmental secretary clique in Canberra. I have certainly found great support through regular informal lunches with colleagues. It is lonely at the top and such networking provides valuable opportunities to compare notes. For years, I shared the common criticism in the 1970s of the Commonwealth Club as the centre of public service power, yet for a long time failed to see that our lunches were not really all that different.
Table 2.4 Tony Ayers’ club
In the 1970s, it was de rigueur for permanent secretaries to be members of the Commonwealth Club. A challenge for some Whitlamite appointments was to break down the barriers to this perceived establishment power base including by widening membership. I recall vividly the evening Marie Coleman, Chair of the Social Welfare Commission, was escorted to the club for dinner by Sir Frederick Wheeler, Secretary to the Treasury.
By the time my generation joined the ranks of secretaries, most of us shunned any association with that apparent bastion of establishment power. Tony Ayers had already set the example with his working-class club, the Emperor’s Court Chinese Restaurant in Yarralumla. We joined him there or met at other no more salubrious restaurants around Canberra.
My pride in our rejection of prestigious places of establishment power was effectively pricked, however, when a member of my staff told me bluntly: ‘Wherever you blokes meet is the centre of establishment power in Canberra.’
People appointed from outside do face a challenge if they are not included quickly into such networks. Stephen Duckett (Secretary of the Health department, 1994–96) certainly told me how much he appreciated our invitation to him to join the lunches Tony Blunn (then Secretary of the Social Security department) and I hosted of heads of the social policy departments at that time, finding these enormously helpful for breaking into the Canberra scene.
I am not sure that the reliance on such informal networks is unique to the Australian Public Service. All governments have elaborate systems for collective decision making and anyone wanting to influence decisions has to build formal and informal networks; it comes with the territory. Perhaps, however, the networks in Canberra can present an obstacle to the broadening of perspectives that might be expected from an increasingly mobile public sector executive workforce.