Curiously, while the management of external relationships has grown steadily in importance across all government agencies, the sensitivities involved have also grown, leading to increasing attempts to manage the process centrally through ministers’ offices and the PMO.

The Management Advisory Committee report Connected Government sets out some of the reasons for more interaction across and beyond government, including the technological capacity to do so, increasing community expectations and our increasingly informed and educated public. Looking simply at Commonwealth–state relations, there continues to be an almost inexorable increase in the national government’s involvement in public policy, whether in service delivery or economic and environmental regulation. So far, the states have not vacated these fields, so the extent of joint involvement has widened. More generally, the increasing number of players on the field, and their increasing professional capacity, requires secretaries to keep up to meet their basic responsibilities of offering disinterested but highly informed advice.

The international agenda is also inexorably increasing, so that almost every department now has its own networks among similar developed nations and very different, developing nations, and relies less heavily on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Most secretaries travel overseas several times a year, with and without their ministers.

Engagement with academics has moved in both directions. The Hawke/Keating Governments encouraged close connections with academia. Howe reflected this attitude when I was secretary of his department, encouraging us to engage with external centres and academics. The Howard Government seemed less enthusiastic on the whole, though Wooldridge was keen for us to consult public health and medical researchers in particular. The government’s unease, not often shared by Wooldridge, was more with consulting health economists known to be critical of private health financing and promoting closer control of doctors (indeed, I was instructed not to consult certain external experts when conducting the review of health services delivery for the Prime Minister in 2005). Nonetheless, a number of departments have strengthened their relationships with universities in recent years, including through contracted research, as they struggle to maintain research capability internally.