Stuart Harris, AO

Stuart Harris was secretary through a time of considerable upheaval in the Australian Public Service: changes that also had a major direct impact on the Department of Foreign Affairs. From 1983, the Hawke Government instituted major reforms to the Canberra bureaucracy seeking to make it more performance oriented, better focused on client service and, generally, more efficient and effective. As secretary, Harris was determined to introduce these reforms into the department on the grounds that it could not remain aloof from such changes as it might have in the past.

The second upheaval resulted from the 1987 changes to the Administrative Arrangements that saw the Department of Trade broken up and all its external components brought into Foreign Affairs and renamed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. As a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Trade, Harris was well placed to oversee this transition, but the pressures that this generated cannot be underestimated. Eventually, this reform was regarded as a considerable managerial triumph and was emulated by some other foreign ministries. The reforms changed the culture of DFAT for at least the next two decades. Despite the ‘pain’ of absorbing budget cuts consistently over many years (often more than other departments in Canberra), the 1987 changes left the Department ‘competitive’ with its overseas counterparts.

Internationally, these were times of unusually rapid political, economic and technological change. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union, the growing success of China’s ‘open door’ policies and transforming economic growth in the other ‘newly industrialising countries’ of East Asia, all had some impact on Australia. Managing Australia’s alliance with the United States as the differences emerged between the relatively new progressive Labor Government in Canberra and a conservative administration in Washington, represented a particular challenge for the Department.

Australian diplomacy had to adjust to an increasingly globalised world, where issues were inter-related and where managing the implications of technological change confronted governments everywhere with difficult choices. While he was the first non-career diplomat to head Foreign Affairs in forty years,^[1] as an economist, Harris was comfortable dealing with economic aspects of international relations that were increasingly impinging on traditional foreign policy concerns.

Stuart Harris was the author of the Review of Australia’s Overseas Representation in 1985. Since his retirement as secretary, he returned to The Australian National University where he has written extensively about international affairs.