When I left the Defence Department there still remained doubt whether the structure of the Defence Force and the deployment locations of its formations were an accurate reading of what the official strategic guidance called for.

I had taken the view that it was for the Services themselves, and not the civilian administrator/adviser, to apply professional judgement to proposing for approval the detailed operational capacities, the particular equipments, the deployment of formations, and the logistics they would use for the kind of combat or deterrence declared to be a credible contingency in the agreed strategic outlook. But the Services, led by the four-star officer in the Department who had command over them, did not fill the void. From time to time they would complain about how the void frustrated them, but it remained.

Nor did Ministers in my time ask questions about the linkage or its absence. I have observed that, long after my retirement, under the direction of a well-qualified Minister (Kim Beazley), the gap was filled by the so-called ‘Dibb Report’ of 1986. Paul Dibb I know to have been an unusually well-informed officer with experience in strategic assessment. He was aided by a senior Army officer [and two senior-level civilians] and they mustered sufficient military support for the statement of capabilities, and the redeployment of units and assets, that was needed. There was a subsequent redeployment of forces to the North and West, and the mothballing of some equipment.

During his term, Beazley laid down a dictum in terms that civilian advisers had been urging Ministers to impose on the Services during the two previous decades in documents quoted earlier. This was a disciplined relationship between defence preparation and reasoned strategic guidance. In my time we could not be sure that we had unambiguous support where it mattered—the Cabinet Room. It seemed to me as an outside observer of the final years of the Fraser Ministry, at the time of the Afghanistan and Indian Ocean scare, that much of the earlier sober advice not to equip Australia for far-off missions, beyond the likely willingness of the community to support them with manpower and other resources, carried little weight. Perhaps those years illustrate the axiom that it is difficult for governments to change policies because to do so is an inherent admission of past error, to be exploited by the Opposition.

In his Roy Milne Lecture in November 1987, Beazley laid some blame on Defence Department practices for the difficulty:

These fears, he went on to remark, prevailed over ‘the more highly intellectual presentations that are the usual product from Russell Hill’.^[11]

He focused the blame on the closed internal processes of discussion there, while the public debate, with which Ministers were necessarily concerned, proceeded unaffected on its traditional course.

No Minister that I worked for drew attention to the defect in the advisory system. In retrospect I can see that the process, starting with Shedden and followed by his successors Hicks, Bland and Tange (and I would guess those that followed) of deliberating without the presence of Ministers, and thereafter mailing, in effect, the results to them, made an ineffective impact on Cabinet.

Looking back I can recognise other deficiencies in the scope of our inquiries in the 1970s. For example, the process of devising a force structure capable of projecting effective power from Australia, or of using it on our own soil if it came to that, should embrace contingency plans for mobilising the resources (such as transport) belonging to the private sector, and the support of the instrumentalities of government at all levels in the Federation. This for long remained an unexplored field for the Defence Department, perhaps because our history of fighting in the territory of other countries or on the high seas narrowed the vision of what defending our own territory entails in practice.

But I doubt that Beazley (who had a grasp unusual among Ministers that I served) offered a way by which the usual run of Ministers could dislodge popular misconceptions about defence threats. To persuade Ministers to listen to necessarily long presentations by the experts in the field would call for priority over party room, Parliament, constituents, petitioners and many other claimants on a politician’s time. Two full-time Ministers are the minimum required, such is the scope of activity for which the Defence portfolio is responsible. And it will be up to the Prime Minister to appoint Ministers not for their ability to beat drums that Servicemen like to hear, but to recognise what the security interest of the country requires. But can they always be produced by the electorate? Putting aside such a counsel of perfection, as history suggests we must, the public will need to support academic and serious media analysts, and to differentiate them from the lobbyists advocating narrow interests, some of whom can be observed in Parliament itself.

Two Ministers will not be on top of all the activities across the country and abroad. As might be expected, I believe Ministers will need a Public Service that is not afraid to supply the memory that few Ministers can have, or to suggest what does and does not serve the national interest, accepting that public servants can be shown to be wrong and may have to be moved if they are persistently wrong or waffle under tension. I also believe that the staff of Ministerial offices, appointed to serve above all the electoral interest of the Minister and the Government (assuming they are always identical) should not, while entitled to be kept informed, condition Public Service advice. Their advice may be parallel, but it should be separate.