My consultations drew to a close in late November 1973. With the deadline imminent I was able to report that the several Chiefs ‘agreed that the organisation is workable subject to reservations … recorded on certain points’ and, in the case of the Chief of Air Staff and Chief of Naval Staff, subject to their reservations being satisfied. We all agreed that experience might call for further changes. I took the lukewarm endorsement by the Chiefs as sufficient to warrant recommending the plan to the Minister. In early December, Barnard met with the Chiefs (and me) to hear any objections they might have. Again the preservation of Service Boards was raised, and I repeated the arguments about inconsistency with the new structure. The Minister gained the approval of the Foreign and Defence Committee of Cabinet, and subsequently of Cabinet itself, with an exception concerning the Department of Supply.

The functions of the Department of Supply, extensive and employing a large staff, had, in Barnard’s initiating statement, been left (as I had recommended) for later study and decision. My report recommended that those activities central to defence policy control (such as procurement, contracting of acquisitions and related industry participation and the Scientific Service) be brought into Defence. Management of government factories and other matters I considered optional, though at risk of overloading the Minister if retained. Cabinet decided to put the factories under a separate Minister. I surmised that direction of factories to start producing in areas other than Defence was attractive to a socialist government, and perhaps the unions.

After release of the report, and in the flurry of public criticisms from various directions, it emerged that the Chiefs did not carry all their dispersed regional commanders with them. Some made public protests, the most prevalent being the claim that ‘civilians have taken over’. I believe that not only did they not understand the careful distribution of authority that had been drafted, but also the already existing role and authority of the civilians in their own Service Boards. Nor, in some cases, did they understand the established functions of the Defence Department.

Only then did I recognise the limitations of relying on the Service command system to inform subordinates, rather than to issue orders to them. I had wrongly supposed that the careful explanations made during the top-level consultations would be passed down the line. In the event it seemed to me that officers far removed from Canberra, with no previous experience at the policy level in Canberra, were being driven by what they read in the local newspapers and by the rather jaundiced Australian view of public servants (whether state or federal).

The Department was not equipped to engage in a public information programme. Eventually a team of officers from the three Services was sent to explain the intended structure to personnel in the commands around the country. Throughout my term as Secretary I had given addresses at training courses to explain the role required of the Services to conform to the practices of responsible government in a parliamentary democracy, as well as discharge their mission as fighting forces. Given the normal rate of discharges from the Services on age grounds, the impact was probably small. The weakness of understanding of these matters led me earlier to arrange with the then Chief of the General Staff, A. MacDonald, to incorporate some material of this kind in the Army’s staff course for its majors. However, the solution required Service leadership from the top.