Early in my consultations the Services had asked whether I would follow the experience of other countries. Apart from great disparities in size, I reacted firmly against this familiar lack of confidence in the ability of Australians to create machinery relevant to their own constitutional situation without running for tutelage from the mother country or any other. In any case the failure of the British to reform their system was attested to by a former Secretary of State for Defence and later Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. It seemed that we had already made all Britain’s mistakes.

In his book At the End of the Day, Macmillan said:

The similarity in Australia was striking when he wrote:

When he became Prime Minister, Macmillan was still frustrated. In 1957 he suggested to his Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, the creation of a single integrated Defence Department. ‘All through the spring of 1958 there was a kind of smouldering fire in Whitehall.’ When a White Paper emerged in 1958 four separate Ministers remained. A Chief of Defence Staff was created, but on the basis that ‘he was to have no control of his own’. Australia seems to have followed this course. In 1962 and 1963 Macmillan tried again. In 1964 a reorganisation established ‘the principle’ of functional organisations serving all three Services. But, on my observation years later, practice was different. His frustration led Macmillan to say in 1963: ‘If we have to decide between two possible courses of action we must always choose the more radical.’

As I said earlier, I decided that gradualism rather than radical change was better for a new and inexperienced Labor Government. Others might think that the political judgement of the Prime Minister of Britain was better than mine. I do not remember any cries for swifter change when I was preparing my report. But there was plenty of opposition to the content of the changes.

Another British Minister, Alan Clark, had said publicly that in considering proposals that came to him for decisions on new weapons acquisitions, he would consider first to what extent approval would further the career of the applicant. I began with a less cynical view of the motives at work in our Services. But I wanted a system of testing that went wider than the operational preferences of the applicant Service.

Defining the general objectives was relatively easy; but a replacement organisation had to be one that could be worked cooperatively and efficiently by Service personnel accustomed to procedures unique to each Service wherever located throughout Australia and at overseas bases.

Gradualism would be needed to avoid any sharp break in the operational state of the Navy, Army and Air Force. It would not be possible to foresee every possible hitch, psychological or otherwise, that would affect the working together of the senior personnel of the three Services in their support of the operational commands. There would be a testing period for the acceptance by some of new lines of authority, and acquiescence in new sources of material support. It would be prudent to leave some areas untouched, at least for the present. Rather than looking for complete solutions to be handed down from above (or from outside as many in the Services might see the Defence Department), the better approach would be, in my judgement, to create new organisations in the Department, covering clustered functions, where rationalisation would become a self-generating process.

The work of the advisers, then and later, was essential to the reorganisation. We did not always agree. White, who knew the military way of looking at things better than I, warned me against, as he put it, ‘opening war on too many fronts at once’. But, personal conviction apart, I had been given a deadline for satisfying a somewhat impetuous government’s demand.

As to that, I had to make a judgement as to how far the Whitlam Ministers and Caucus would stand up to resistance that could be expected to any change I might recommend. I could foresee the kind of opposition that some changes would draw from a core of members of Parliament likely to oppose any changes, particularly by a Labor Government; from the Returned and Services League, from the conservative press (fed by the disgruntled), and from the many who held a sceptical view of the competence of public servants, particularly if the much admired Services were to be made beholden to them in some respect. I would be under the disadvantage, on that emotional issue, of the seeming lack of awareness among them of the extent to which a conservative Menzies Government had in 1958 already endorsed the essential place of civilian Secretaries as one reason for rejecting the then proposal to abolish the Service Boards. Indeed, the same unawareness of the accepted role of civilians existed within the Services themselves, especially among personnel who were located at some distance from Russell in Canberra.

The task, essentially, was to find a form of public administration that would effectively support the military forces acting under Ministerial control in conformity with Government policy and under scrutiny of the amount and purpose of expenditures they incurred or committed for the future. I was not asked to share with any military officer the management of the inquiry, and still less that I carry the weight of a committee of three arguing about what areas I should or should not explore in an exercise in public administration in which I had accumulated some experience. I was simultaneously guiding an inexperienced Minister through plentiful problems and recurring crises.

I needed advisers who understood the constitutional and administrative principles to be embedded in the reformed system of Ministerial control. I arranged that I be assisted full time by Bruce White, whom I considered to be the most competent as well as the most experienced of the three Service Departmental Secretaries.