I now return to the early days of the new Labor Administration. There were many unexpected problems to deal with while simultaneously developing the reorganisation.

For example, a January 1973 publication of some classified information roused interest in the attitude of Ministers towards security in the context of its belief in open government. A classified minute of the Defence Committee appeared in the media. In some sensitive areas public servants were feeling concern about the willingness (or ability) of Ministers to control the activities of private office advisers who were enthusiastically taking it upon themselves to implement open-government policies. Barnard’s staff, consisting of Clem Lloyd, a long-time adviser during his Opposition years, and Brian Toohey, a self-assured journalist, exhibited distrust of the Department’s loyalty to Labor’s mandate—or perhaps its understanding of it, particularly in respect of matters under attack by the Labor Left, of which the American defence connection was a prime example. There was a related problem. For the first time in my experience, a Department could not be sure that submissions and reports sent to the Minister actually reached his desk. When, as I shall relate, both of these appointees departed, I was told of papers having been sidetracked in this way.

There was a certain irony in this, given the propensity of those suspicious of the Public Service to accuse us of withholding information in order to serve some agenda or policy bias of our own, a charge which in my case at least was as baseless as the alternative, which was that we set out to confuse Ministers by ‘snowing’ them with a surfeit of paper. The Labor movement is notorious for inventing conspiracies perhaps because, as I have heard its critics say, it sometimes organises them against its own.

We were entering an era when people with ideological convictions, but with no experience of the problems and constraints that fall on Ministers of any party when they enter Cabinet, were setting up as rivals to seasoned departmental advisers. Later administrations learned to make room for both sources of advice. It was beneficial for career public servants to be relieved of such tasks as preparing material for Ministers to discredit political opponents. But no precepts were laid down: Whitlam was content simply to issue a minatory direction to Departmental Secretaries not to issue instructions to Ministerial Staff. What was needed was a policy modus vivendi. Fortunately in our case, Barnard’s later staff replacements established harmonious relations with his Department.