I have been asked to speak about my role as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs. That was from 1979 to 1984, before the amalgamation with the Department of Trade. My talk focuses on what the job entailed and how I approached it, not on particular policy issues, or on Australia’s external relationships, or on the political context of the day.^[2]

One other thing before I go further. I must remind you it is now over 20 years — or two decades to use that fashionable and overworked word — since I was secretary. That is a very long time: a whole generation. I emphasise this for two reasons. My memory of the details of the events which took place over 20 years ago is now a bit porous. And if at times I sound somewhat out of date, I am.

A friend of mine has described the job like this:

If that describes the job, how did I go about it? Let me begin with the ministerial and parliamentary, responsibilities. I shall go on later to the responsibilities of the day-to-day management of the department as an institution.

There are, I believe, two major determinants in the role that any departmental secretary plays in relation to the minister and the Government. First, there is the nature and personality of the secretary himself, shaped largely by his previous career experience and his general outlook and attitude of mind. Second, there is the minister of the day, his outlook and expectations. And overarching both, of course, is the key question of whether the minister and the secretary can develop a successful working relationship.

So how did I become secretary? And having been appointed, what did I actually do in the job? It is easy enough to answer the first question. It is very hard not to be long-winded in answering the second.

I became secretary because I was tapped on the shoulder for it. There was no application, no interview, no requirement to provide some sort of policy statement beforehand, no fixed term. My appointment, like others before it, came about as a result of consultation between the prime minister (Malcolm Fraser) and the minister (Andrew Peacock). Who else they consulted I simply do not know.^[3]

In my case I had the advantage — at least I suppose it was an advantage — of being a known quantity to both of them: I had acted in the job for some seven months at different intervals over the preceding three years, first after Alan Renouf left and again after Nick Parkinson’s departure.^[4] It has been suggested to me that I was appointed because I was Sir Robert Menzies’ son-in-law. I do not think the family relationship was a factor on this occasion.

I referred a moment ago to a public policy statement, or rather the lack of it. This did not mean that I had no idea of what I wanted to do as secretary. And what I wanted to do was in many respects the outcome of what I had seen and done in the department over the preceding 28 years. Careers were and, I suppose still are, very much governed by chance: what posts you are sent to, what jobs you are given in Canberra, how long you stay in any one assignment, health, family problems and so on.

In my case my general approach was influenced very heavily by the three-and-a-half years I had spent as a First Secretary in the personnel and administrative division of the department. Then, later on, I was First Assistant Secretary, Management Services and later again a deputy with some management and personnel responsibilities. I did not choose that career path. It just happened. Indeed, at one stage I was so depressed about the way I seemed to have been typecast that I applied for a transfer to the Defence Department. But I was much cheered to come back from London in 1970 and to be put in charge of the South and South East Asia Branch. I found it much more enlivening and more of a challenge, to be drafting a message from Mr Whitlam to Washington about Vietnam, than yet another long statement for the secretary to be sent to a promotions appeal committee at the Public Service Board.

Naturally, and this must be true of anyone appointed secretary from within the Department, I was also very much influenced by my perceptions of how my predecessors had handled the job. I had worked closely with some of them. There were, to my mind, a number of lessons to be drawn — examples to be followed, examples not to be followed. For example, I had seen at first hand the benefits to individual officers if the secretary took a painstaking approach to individual career aspirations and problems, and to be accessible to staff. I had also seen what happened if the paper was not kept moving and filing cabinets were stuffed higgledy-piggledy with files needing decisions. I had also noted the consequences of the secretary making no real effort to work with, or for the Department to be accepted by, the rest of the Commonwealth public service.

High on the lists of the fields of activity where one tried to learn from observing the behaviour of one’s predecessors was the question of the relationship to be established with the minister. The record was, on the whole, a daunting one. There were a number of known, or suspected, cases of extreme difficulty. Senior officers had for years given us spine-chilling accounts of confrontations with Dr Evatt,^[5] but he was not the only one. In some instances we had to wait for many years to know what actually happened. One recent example is Peter Edwards’ account in his book published only a few months ago of Sir Arthur Tange’s treatment by Sir Paul Hasluck.^[6]

The actual circumstances varied in every case, depending on the pressure of events at the time and on individual personalities. There is no golden mean that I know of, no commonly accepted way, for a minister and a secretary to proceed. It is a testing relationship which has to be worked out from scratch each time by two often very different people.

Looking at the issue from the point of view of the secretary, there are — and have been in government departments over the years — various patterns of behaviour. At one extreme there have been those secretaries who have sought to cling leech-like to the minister and to establish themselves as the only substantial source of advice, to be constantly at the minister’s elbow and to discourage contact between the minister and other officers of the department. At the other extreme there have been those secretaries who have risked giving the minister the impression of deliberately keeping their distance, even perhaps talking down to him, and that they have their own distinct and unassailable power base. A bit like Sir Humphrey Appleby perhaps in Yes Minister. Most of us, though, probably came down somewhere in the middle.

The relationship between the minister, the secretary and the department is a three-way one — and in many cases as difficult as the classic eternal triangle. The initiative in handling it, in my view, should lie with the secretary. It is really up to the secretary to decide how he wants to present the department to the minister. I believed very firmly that, in most instances, I should encourage the minister to deal direct with senior officers on specific policy issues, especially those of particular complexity. If we had an expert on Japan, say, I thought it would be a waste of time for that officer to brief me and then for me to brief the minister. I thought the minister would be much better served by having direct contact with that officer and to be able to ask questions, to have a dialogue.

There were, of course, one or two angles to this. First, it was a deliberate act of delegation on my part intended to facilitate expeditious and effective handling of issues and to avoid bottlenecks. Second, it represented a deliberate expression of confidence on my part in the competence of individual officers, that I trusted them to have direct ministerial access, oral and written. I knew it would be on my head if any of them botched it. Although this did happen once or twice, it was a risk that, with most senior officers, I had little hesitation in taking. I also hoped that individual senior officers would respond positively to my demonstration of confidence in them.

Perhaps the best way of describing how I wanted the minister to see me in relation to the department — and I know this is a hackneyed analogy but I cannot think of a better one — was as the conductor of an orchestra playing for his benefit. I could not reasonably be expected to play every individual instrument with the skill of a professional player but I was responsible for the orchestra playing together and in tune.

But, if the minister’s dealings were in many cases with senior officers, where did this leave me, as secretary? The answer, partly, lay in the arrangements I made within the department for making my own input to what was going on. I did this in various ways. To begin with I had regular morning meetings with a small group of senior officers. There the current and contentious issues were discussed. Then, time permitting, I discussed with individual senior officers by themselves, or accompanied by their own immediate offsiders, their major draft submissions to the minister. On major issues I would sign those submissions myself. I always saw drop copies of all ministerial submissions the day they were sent. If I thought it desirable I could always follow them up with the minister personally, either by seeing him or ringing him up, but it was rarely easy to make quick personal contact with most of the ministers I worked for. I return to this in a moment.

Then there was the daily intake of telegrams from overseas posts. The handling of telegrams has always been a major problem for any secretary. It certainly was for me. Every morning there was an enormous bundle of them, sometimes a foot or more high. I had a devoted assistant who used to come in very early and go through them all for me, picking out the ones she thought I should read, or at least be aware of. I felt I had to deal with the telegrams before the office opened properly at 8.30am. There was always the possibility of an early call about one of them from the minister or from the head of another department, say Prime Minister’s or Defence, both of whom were early risers. And then, of course, there were the subsequent deliveries of cables during the day as well as the outward telegrams to be read, not all of them necessarily originating in Foreign Affairs.

There are two relevant points to be made. The first is that reading the telegrams was yet another and very important way of keeping up with events. The second is that the actual process of reading so much so quickly was a constant and severe physical strain. The reason Nick Parkinson had to retire as secretary was the damage being done to his eyes from having to undertake so much unavoidable reading, especially telegrams. In the end, he was told in mid-year that, if he kept that reading up, he would be too blind by Christmas to drive the car. Once he had left the job, his eye condition stabilised.

While I believed at the time that the arrangements I had made were the most effective I could devise to meet the minister’s and the department’s normal and regular working requirements, I have sometimes wondered since whether I should not have tried to be seen to be making more of a fuss of the ministers I worked for — to have been more conspicuously active in doing their bidding.

One practical problem, in regard to some ministers, was the difficulty of seeing them or securing an appointment, or even to talk on the telephone. In my day, especially when Parliament was sitting, ministers usually spent only three days of the week in Canberra. Often they found it impossible to spare time for appointments.

One quite common result was for me to spend a whole Monday or a Friday travelling interstate to see the minister on his home ground. If the minister was spending the week at home anyway, I had no problem, but I used to find it galling, when I knew the minister was coming to Canberra the following day or had flown home from Canberra on the afternoon of the previous day, to spend the whole day away from the office simply to have an hour or so, or even less, with him. And the expense to the taxpayer seemed unwarranted.

Relations with the minister could also be complicated by relations with the Prime Minister. Nick Parkinson told a meeting of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Brisbane in 1992 how he was once rung by Prime Minister Fraser and asked a few questions, to which he gave the best answers he could. Shortly afterwards he was rung by an angry Mr Peacock asking him what he meant by going behind his back to the Prime Minister. I had similar problems on the home front.

One area of personal contact, both with the Prime Minister and the minister, was accompanying either or both on official trips overseas. In relation to prime ministerial visits, I often used to think of that wartime slogan: ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ There were times when I felt the departmental secretaries were there mainly for the sake of appearances and in case something happened that made us needed. On the other hand, the work of the prime ministerial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, specially in the communiqué committee, was unremitting. All night sessions were common.

I have spoken of the secretary’s role in relation to the Prime Minister and the minister. I now want to turn to Parliament. When Parliament was in session one of the daily tasks was to keep up to date for the minister the big file of draft answers to possible parliamentary questions (PPQs). The possible questions, and the proposed answers, had to be up-to-the-minute in content and over in Parliament House well ahead of Question Time to give the minister a chance to read them.

Often the answers amounted to brief and authoritative statements of Australian policy. It was here that I felt the secretary had an important role to play: to know what the minister had been told in previous PPQs and to be sure that the new formulations were accurate and succinct. Therefore, every day, or perhaps more accurately, every evening, I would go though the PPQs before they were sent across to Parliament House. I would, of course, be given the new ones, or the revisions, separately from the others already on file, but even so it was a time-consuming task. Often we had to make last-minute amendments because of some telegram that had just come in. There could be a real scramble under extreme pressure.

At times the secretary’s role was to attend sessions of parliamentary committees and to answer questions. There were periods when ministers forbade their secretaries to attend those sessions, on the grounds that the secretaries could be seen as usurping ministers’ roles in making and giving public expression to, matters of policy. At other times, the Opposition used the sessions to attack ministers through their private secretaries and other senior staff. That could be very uncomfortable. The discomfort was increased when the sessions were open to the press.

Another of the secretary’s responsibilities, deriving mainly from the minister, was for relations with the Diplomatic Corps in Canberra. When a new head of mission arrived in Canberra, he or she presented credentials to the Governor-General at a formal ceremony at Yarralumla. There was provision in the order of proceedings for attendance by the minister. In practice, ministers very rarely went. That meant my getting dressed up in a morning suit and going to Yarralumla for an hour or two, often at the busiest time of day. Heads of Mission also expected the secretary to attend their national day receptions and to accept dinner and cocktail party invitations particularly when, as often occurred, ministers were unwilling or unable to accept invitations themselves.

I used to try to go to each diplomatic mission for dinner once a year. But that, coupled with the practice I had inherited of giving a formal farewell lunch in the department to every departing ambassador or high commissioner, plus the presentations, all took up scarce time. I did, though, have plenty of practice at making cheery little lunch and dinner party speeches for foreign diplomats. Those speeches would have been harder if I had not tried to establish good personal working relationships with the heads of mission themselves.

Our ministers have not been the first to shuffle off the corps. In 1900, Lord Salisbury delegated the work to a junior minister, telling Queen Victoria that ‘many more ambassadorial afternoons would certainly shorten his life’. The same ministers, of course, often expect their representatives overseas to have instant high-level access to foreign governments. It is easy to forget the process is a two-way one.

I should like to turn now to the second half of the responsibilities I outlined at the beginning of this talk: the day-to-day management of the department as a large institution with a mobile and diverse membership. By and large, with the exception of the appointment of heads of mission overseas and the filling of very senior positions in Canberra, this did not involve most ministers.

Two headings come at once to mind: structure and staffing.

The structure of the department and of its overseas posts was the outcome of consultations with, and directives by, the Commonwealth Public Service Board. By this I mean the number of established positions and the salary scales applying to these positions, both at home and overseas. In addition the Board set allowance scales intended, theoretically, to cover the cost of living at overseas posts, such things as the education of children, the rental of living accommodation, excess medical expenses, etc. There was a system in force of regular Public Service Board (PSB) inspections of overseas posts as a preliminary to setting local allowances for each post. I use the word ‘theoretically’ advisedly. Things may be different and better now, but in my day the inequalities and vagaries of the allowance ‘system’ were notorious and most departmental officers had their favourite story about some PSB inspector who had little if any idea and did not seem to want to find out, what was involved in living and working in foreign countries. My favourite was the inspector who, after examining how we all lived and tried to make ends meet in Jakarta in 1956, stepped on the plane saying: ‘I would never bring my wife to live here’.

If the Department believed an increase in staff was needed, whether for a section in Canberra or for an overseas post, it had first to convince the Board that a new position at a certain salary should be approved. Likewise, if allowances were thought to be inadequate anywhere in the world, the department had to take up the case with the Board. As you can imagine, these were laborious and time-consuming procedures.

The Board also had a key role to play in relation to departmental recruitment and departmental promotions. Again the actual procedures were laborious and time-consuming.

I mention all this about the Board simply to drive home the point that, when it came to managing the department and to establishing conditions of employment, the secretary was not the master of his own household. In later years, after I had left the public service and had in-depth contact with some major Australian companies, I used to reflect ruefully on the difference in circumstances between the limitations on me, as the head of a government department, and the freedom of action enjoyed by the chief executives of big commercial enterprises.

Against this background how did I deal with the personnel issues, with individual people and their conditions of employment? What were the major staffing and personnel issues facing me in 1979?

The biggest issue facing me, setting aside for the moment the conditions of service overseas, was how to begin bridging the gulf between the political staff of the department on one hand and the staff of the consular and administrative service on the other. The two career streams were quite separate and distinct, beginning with different recruitment procedures. The political staff were selected from university graduates on the basis of exhaustive selection procedures conducted in conjunction with the Public Service Board. The consular and administrative staff were clerical officers of the Commonwealth public service. The political staff could aspire to Second Division positions in the department in Canberra and to head of mission appointments overseas. There were no Second Division positions for the consular and administrative staff and none, as far as I knew, had ever been appointed a head of mission or a consul-general.

Some members of the political staff let their feelings of superiority show in a less than heart-warming way. Many of the consular and administrative staff exhibited varying degrees of resentment and ill-feeling. I strongly believed that this gulf should be bridged, that all members of the department had to feel they were members of the one team and that there should be no structural limitations on the advancement of competent people whichever section of the department they had begun their career in.

Now is not the place, nor is there time, to embark on a detailed account of steps taken by me in this area. Suffice it to say, though, that by the time I had left, some discernable progress had been made. Members of the consular and administrative service had reached the Second Division, had become Head of Mission and had become Consul General.

A related issue was the thorny question of lateral recruitment to the political side of the department. I did not like the idea of the department being a closed shop, or being criticised for it. I did not see why talented people who had not happened to be recruited at the usual age but who were keen to join and had something valuable to offer could not be brought in at middle or senior levels. This was particularly so when the person or people in question were already members of the Commonwealth public service.

The other side of the coin was that I felt it would be a good thing to promote the interchange of officers with some other government departments. It could broaden our outlook and theirs. I extended this also to having a limited exchange of staff with big Australian companies. I had valued my own six months secondment to (the Australian resources company) CRA, as it then was, and wanted to make it possible for others to have similar experience.

The prospect of even very limited lateral recruitment, which I believed I eventually achieved, aroused strong feelings amongst some of the political officers in the department who feared their career prospects were being threatened. Again, I cannot remember the details of how it went, but I do remember myself as acting secretary in 1977 when lateral recruitment was, I think, already an issue, microphone in hand, addressing a large lunchtime meeting outside the department. As I looked at the photograph in The Canberra Times next morning, I wondered if I had not crossed the borderline to becoming a politician.

Another group issue was the position of women in the department. Until the 1960s, Foreign Affairs, like all other departments, had been hamstrung by the Public Service Act requirement that female officers should resign on marriage. This meant that, by 1979, despite recruiting women graduates every year, the department was still suffering from the unsought loss of many members of a whole generation of female recruits — roughly from 1945–65. The reason why we had comparatively few senior female officers in 1979 was not prejudice against women, as the press and other critics tended to assert, but because so many good ones had, so to speak, ‘gone missing’. With the passage of time and the continued recruitment of women graduates the gap has, I believe, now been filled. In 1979 it was a public issue which held no possibility of quick solution.

Before turning from groups to individuals I want to acknowledge the role played by a different but very important group of women, the secretarial staff of the Department. Both in Canberra and overseas much depended on their competence and good humour. Often they had to contend with very difficult places to live and work. Most did so uncomplainingly and made notable contributions to the department. As secretary I had regular contact with the head of that group.

I move now to individual staffing matters. I had to spend a considerable amount of time on making head of mission recommendations to the minister; on overseas posting decisions for other staff; on promotions and placements of all staff, specially at the more senior level; and on the recruitment of graduate staff. To do all this properly, I felt I should know personally as many as possible of those concerned.

The position was complicated by so many people serving overseas for so much of the time. So I instituted a system of having short personal interviews with all staff, both political and consular and administrative, from very senior down to about First Secretary or Class 8, either going to or coming back from a posting. I felt that, given the nature of the Foreign Service, individuals had a justifiable expectation of some personal exchange with the boss, even if it lasted no longer than 15 or 20 minutes and occurred only every three or four years. It also gave individuals an opportunity, if they wanted, to get matters of great personal importance to them off their chests to me, and it was invaluable background for me in the decisions I had to make about them.

There were also one or two people who have been mentioned by Sir Edward Woodward, the former Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), in his recent autobiography, One Brief Moment.^[7] Of Australian representatives abroad who were homosexual. Sir Edward wrote:

The exercise of that responsibility, thankfully, did not come my way very often.

How many failures did I have in my attempts to get on terms with the staff of the department? I shall never know the answer to that question. There are two people, though, who come immediately to mind: the head of mission who brought a tape recorder with him to a private meeting between the two of us, saying he did not trust me to stick to what I told him; and the officer who refused to shake my hand when he came for a farewell call. Others, I know, have borne lasting resentment for my carrying out instructions from the minister affecting them and their careers. It was not simply, as I think they supposed, whether I believed, or did not believe, what they had told me, or whether I had failed to defend them effectively. I was not the one who had the last say.

One last area of responsibility I should like to mention briefly is relations with other departments and government bodies. As well as Foreign Affairs, there were two organisations responsible to our minister — the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) and the Australian Development Assistance Bureau (ADAB). I found it important to have regular and effective contact with the heads of both. Then, in its own special category of proximity, there was the Public Service Board. There follow the major departments of state: Prime Minister and Cabinet, Defence, Trade, Treasury and Immigration. At the personal level, I believed I should try to get on well with my counterparts in those departments even when there were differences in view and outlook on matters under discussion.

The reasons for some problems with the Board have already been mentioned. Another factor in our relations with the Board and with other departments, was the widespread recollection of Alan Renouf’s very public, but unsuccessful, attempts in the mid-seventies to have a separate foreign service act, like the Trade Commissioners Act, and broadly to allow Foreign Affairs to run itself. In many ways it was a logical and commendable objective but it was just not practical politics. But as a result of the attempt I was well aware that, in the eyes of many of my counterparts, Foreign Affairs could get above itself and needed sitting on.

Problems occurred with the Department of Trade from time to time, largely I think because of the differences between the Liberals and the Country Party within the Coalition when it was in power. I can remember only one major falling out with Jim Scully when he was secretary of Trade. I thought that Australian exporters would benefit from advice on local political factors within their target countries, especially in South East Asia, and that their executives would find it useful to call on heads of mission as well as trade representatives when they visited those countries and for heads of mission visiting Australia to call on them. Jim misconstrued this and thought that, in approaching individual companies, the department was trying to horn in on areas that belonged to Trade. The subsequent amalgamation between Foreign Affairs and Trade will have resolved that kind of difficulty, I hope.

In relation to Defence, there was a formal requirement for the secretary to represent the department at meetings of the Defence Committee. The Committee, which also included Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet, had very wide-ranging responsibilities to present policy options to ministers. Contrary to the impression of one or two ministers, the Committee’s role was not to make policy, which would have been to usurp the role of ministers. I have been told that these ministerial views led later to the Committee being disbanded.

I have spoken of the role of the secretary in relation to the minister, Parliament, departmental staff and other departments. I have said nothing about the press. This has not been a deliberate omission but has come about because in my day, although I have had interviews with individual journalists from time to time, the regular contact with the press was undertaken first and foremost by ministers, who regarded it as their prerogative, and then on a lower level by the departmental Press Officer. Personally I never felt at ease with most members of the press. On one occasion, Michelle Grattan^[8] rang me up at about 11 o’clock at night in Washington after I had had a very good and very liquid dinner with Nick Parkinson, then Australian ambassador there, to check some abstruse point on policy towards Cambodia. I still vividly remember agonising for the next few days over every Australian press summary from Canberra. Fortunately, I had got it right. But on that and many other occasions of press contact I never felt really comfortable.

So now, to conclude, I hope I have given you some idea of what I did and what I tried to do and some of the major difficulties I faced, in terms of running the department. It was a stimulating challenge that lasted five years most of which I enjoyed. I have always been glad I had the opportunity of taking it on.

I just wished at the time, though, that like Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Marcos at their much more elevated levels, I could get by on four hours sleep a night.