For me in 1970 there was much to learn about the requirements of each Service and what went on inside each of their different systems. Weapons procurement apart, Defence could only exert influence through its right of approval of total budget allocations and major weapons acquisitions. Attitudes did not help. The Defence Department was seen as an outsider—a primarily civilian regulatory Department, no more welcome to involve itself in Service decisions than was an analogous Department, the Treasury. The vast area of expenditures and decisions on maintenance and running costs, which imposed commitments on future budgets, remained a mystery to me. There was some confirmation that the secretaries of the Service Departments had their difficulties too, despite their responsibility under the law to safeguard economy in expenditure. In 1968 W.J. Curtis, then Deputy Secretary in Defence under Bland after long experience in the Army Department, spoke of that Department’s lack of penetration into Army activity. Entry into this area by the Defence Department had to await the progressive introduction of the programming of intended expenditures, with a ceiling which provided an incentive to establish higher and lower priorities. In the absence of such a system, only resolute military leadership would have made any progress. Parliament had many former officer members ready to protect one Service or another against change, particularly if it involved unwelcome civilian initiatives.

For the new Departmental Secretary in the Fraser years, 1970 and 1971, there was more to defence administration and policy advice than battling over reforms to the antiquated system. There were intelligence arrangements with allies to deal with; defence arrangements with Singapore and Malaysia (whose relations with each other were deteriorating); the consequences of supporting our forces in Vietnam; and major weapons procurement. Meetings had to be attended in Singapore and Wellington. There were some problems in the Department following the influx of Service officers, and the Fairhall/Bland exhortation for them to take a ‘Defence’ rather than a single-Service approach to their duties. There were a few cases when exploratory ideas about reforms, still not considered at the policy level, were rushed off secretly to the Service that might be affected, leading to premature reactions and occasionally appeals to sympathetic journalists. This was no way to encourage people to put to paper innovative thinking about possible reforms. Civilians in the Department became wary. I was probably at fault for withholding access by these Service officers to departmental files. But, with time, a more trusting atmosphere developed, as all wrestled with the procedures for introducing defence programming for the ensuing five years.

My wish to get out of Canberra in 1970 in order to visit the commands and operational units was frustrated by having to attend to jurisdictional disputes of the kind described. I concluded that Bland had introduced too many rationalisation studies, and too many changes to the practices required of the Services, in too short a time. Moreover, to be successful, the changes required Service officers to look for solutions without bias towards their own Service. There was no less a requirement to find civilians who understood the needs and ethos of the Services, but also with the intellectual ability to be innovative, and the stuffing to stand up for what they believed. Such people were hard to find in sufficient numbers in the Defence Group. Many in the geographic commands, like the stereotypical ‘Colonel’s clerk’, acquiesced in Service authority. Tempers were frayed by some Defence Department demands with short timetables, and by some ideas of doubtful utility put to the Services. Some emollient was needed, as well as new priorities for our activities.

I let some of Bland’s inquiries run down. I gave high priority to the handful of officers (principally John Moten and John Enfield) who were drawing up the procedures for the new system of defence programming. Time had to be given to explaining the system to officers at all relevant levels, and to circumventing the sceptics about the McNamara method of control.

Its significance for the authority of the Defence Minister and his advisers went much further. With the exception of large capital expenditure items, which would go to Cabinet individually, Treasury would cease to be concerned with the detail of expenditure of the Services and Supply. The Defence Department, consulting within the Defence Group, would become the system’s treasury, acting within the overall expenditure limit agreed with Treasury.

There were weaknesses and anomalies. The rights of the Defence Group Ministers and of the Service Boards remained intact in legislation. Central scrutiny of the expenditure on the running costs of the Services and the group’s factories and science laboratories, under their respective systems of authorisation, was impossible. As to decisions on equipment procurement, with the foreseeable related manning and maintenance expenditures they would generate, I concentrated on having this major aspect of the Secretary’s financial responsibilities put to systems analysis by a mixed committee of qualified Public Service and uniformed officers. As I said earlier, this area of control in the Department was to become the focal point of controversy and objection to civilian intervention throughout my years in the Defence Department.

In his Defence Report published in September, Fraser said:

In effect, the intention was to displace the traditional Service ‘requirement’, with its mandatory connotation, with the more supplicant term ‘bids’. Terminology is important. If Fraser realised what an uphill battle it would be, given the existing Ministerial arrangements, he did not admit it publicly for understandable reasons. The Opposition would have loved it.