‘They’re driving me insane’: The 24/7 life of a political chief of staff

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

Lidija Ivanovski has an enduring bond with Richard Marles, the deputy prime minister and defence minister. They meet for coffee. They have dinner together. “I see Richard probably two or three times a week when he’s in the country,” says Ivanovski, who for two stints totalling almost six years was Marles’s chief of staff. The job required her total dedication. Besides being Marles’s closest adviser, she ran his office and pretty much ran his life – “everything from buying his ties to telling him he needed to get his eyebrows trimmed”. She became his confidante.

Politics can be brutal: as a parliamentarian’s top aide, a chief of staff is often part strategist, part therapist. “You know their deepest, darkest secrets,” Ivanovski says. “What keeps them up at night. What terrifies them. You get an insight into the person that no one else has.”

Chiefs of staff are our political system’s ultimate insiders. From prime ministers and state premiers down, our elected representatives rely on their counsel, their discretion and their ability to manage the backroom business of government. As a group, these key figures keep such a low profile that most of us are barely aware of their existence.

Ivanovski agreed to be interviewed for this story because she no longer works for Marles. Serving chiefs of staff have such an aversion to publicity that they might as well be members of a secret society. “It’s a shadow world,” says Allan Behm, director of the international and security affairs program at the Australia Institute think tank and one-time chief of staff to former federal Labor minister Greg Combet. “In fact, it’s an invisible world.”

Tim Gartrell, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s chief of staff, is said to have greater sway over the government’s agenda than most cabinet ministers. An old friend and ally of Albanese, he sits atop The Australian Financial Review Magazine’s covert power list, an annual compilation of the individuals who wield most behind-the-scenes influence in this country. It is a safe bet that 99 per cent of Australians, including those who follow politics closely, wouldn’t recognise Gartrell if they bumped into him in the street. Even in the corridors of Parliament House, he attracts little attention. “He’s a very calm, unassuming person,” says Ivanovski. “There’s no arrogance.”

Self-importance seems equally lacking in John Kunkel, who was chief of staff to Albanese’s predecessor as PM, Scott Morrison. When I visit Kunkel at home in a quiet Canberra suburb, he admits to having had moments when he wondered whether he was the right personality type for the cut and thrust of running the nation’s highest political office.

“I’m basically an introvert who doesn’t like conflict,” he says with a smile. “It wasn’t my natural habitat, really.”

The job had landed in his lap almost by accident. Morrison was the treasurer in Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government when Kunkel, an economist by training, started working for him in June 2018. Three months later, when Morrison seized the Liberal leadership from Turnbull, Kunkel found himself right-hand man to a prime minister he was still getting to know.

Tim Gartrell, Anthony Albanese’s chief of staff, wields vast covert power.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Ongoing fallout from Turnbull’s overthrow added to the difficulty. “Basically, the Liberal Party has imploded; you’re picking up the rubble,” Kunkel says. “And you have to try to govern at the same time.” He remembers getting a call from Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott: “In his inimitable style, he said, ‘Ah, John, ah, you’ve just become the second-busiest man in the country. In fact, you may well be the busiest man in the country.’ ”

All chiefs of staff work insane hours, but a prime minister’s chief of staff is on duty virtually around the clock. “You wake up and you’ve got 15 WhatsApp messages,” says Kunkel, who tried to avoid disturbing his boss during the bits of the weekend cordoned off for Morrison’s relaxation: “‘The poor bastard, let him have Sunday morning with his family and go to church.’ Often, that’s what you thought.” For Kunkel, there was no respite. Even when he wasn’t physically in the office, his mind was on the job. “You’ve got stuff rolling around in your head the whole time. You’re swimming in it.”

Prime ministerial chiefs of staff are whole-of-government trouble-shooters, required to sort out problems that arise in any minister’s portfolio. Drama of some kind is always unfolding, often in several portfolios at once. As Allan Behm wrote in his 2015 book No Minister: So You Want to Be a Chief of Staff?, “politics is possibly more inherently chaotic than any other field of human activity”. According to Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff to former UK prime minister Tony Blair, an essential qualification for the role is the ability to keep a large number of balls in the air. “My rule of thumb was that six simultaneous crises were manageable,” Powell wrote in The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World, “but the seventh would usually prove too much.”

Ben Hubbard was chief of staff to Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, for most of her three years in the office. “Every shit sandwich in the country turns up on your desk,” Hubbard says cheerfully. Standard snafus were solved by other people, he quickly realised. It was the truly diabolical dilemmas that came to him. “No one ever knocks on the door and says, ‘Ben, here’s something easy to fix.’ Or, ‘Here’s some good news, Ben.’ ”

In his youth, Hubbard was a fan of The West Wing, the acclaimed American TV series set in the staff offices of the White House during the fictitious administration of Democratic president Jed Bartlet. The series was famous for its “walk-and-talks”: scenes in which characters, including chief of staff Leo McGarry, exchanged snappy dialogue as they hurried along corridors on one urgent mission or another. Hubbard regrets to report that real-life chief-of-staffdom bears little resemblance to the screen version. “Less glamorous,” he says. “And the lines aren’t as witty.”

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The belief that the best chiefs of staff stay out of the spotlight is as pervasive in US politics as it is in Australia. When Ron Klain stepped down in February after steering president Joe Biden’s administration for two years, he was approvingly described in The New Yorker as having “limited celebrity but an uncanny command of how to wield power in Washington”. In 1968, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, told a meeting of presidential aides that the ideal staffer had “a passion for anonymity”. Ironically, Haldeman ended up in the headlines, excoriated – and jailed – for his part in the Watergate scandal.

Ben Hubbard, who was Julia Gillard’s CoS, says the role never involved good news.Credit: Andrew Meares

Journalist Chris Whipple maintains in his book The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency that Haldeman should have confronted Nixon, apprising the president of the folly of his administration’s cover-up of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex.

Similarly, Whipple argues that Donald Trump’s chiefs of staff – he went through four of them – should have done more to rein in his worst excesses. Writing in The Washington Post, he nominated the last of the four, Mark Meadows, “who raised sycophancy to an art form”, as the worst White House chief of staff in history.

Even well-intentioned political leaders tend to be surrounded by people who agree with them (and laugh at their jokes). It is clear to Ben Hubbard that a chief of staff must have the strength of character to express an opposing view – “to say, ‘Don’t do this. It’s batshit crazy. Let me take you through why I think it’s a bad idea.’ ”

Bran Black, who was chief of staff to former NSW Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet, agrees: “I needed to be in a position to say to him from time to time, ‘I don’t think this is the right approach, and this is why.’ ” With Scott Morrison, John Kunkel trod a little more softly: “In my case, it was more of a nudging role. ‘You might want to think about that again.’ ”

People who claw their way to the top in politics are by definition forceful characters. “Scott is not short of self-belief, pretty obviously,” says Kunkel, who frequently found himself weighing up whether to debate an issue or defer to the prime minister. He would remind himself that Morrison was the one who had put his name on a ballot paper; no one had elected Kunkel (“You shouldn’t forget that important detail”). He doesn’t pretend to have made the right call every time. “There’s no doubt I could look back and think, ‘Well, I should have challenged him more on that.’ ”

John Kunkel, who worked as Scott Morrison’s CoS, describes it as being “sucked up into this other persona”.Credit: AAP

Morrison’s Coalition government held office until May last year but political commentator Niki Savva believes his prime ministership was doomed from December 2019, when he holidayed in Hawaii while bushfires ravaged Australia. In Savva’s book Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s Fall and Anthony Albanese’s Rise, she quotes Kunkel as saying that failing to advise Morrison against taking the trip was not at the top of his list of regrets.

Savva, herself a former senior Liberal staffer, has always believed the fate of political leaders is ultimately in their own hands. But she reckons the smart ones understand the beneficial impact that the right aide can have on their legacy. “A good chief of staff can make the difference between success and failure,” she says, citing the example of Arthur Sinodinos, who was chief of staff to Liberal prime minister John Howard for nine years.

Howard would eventually serve four terms, but his first 18 months in office were beset by scandals, resulting in the loss of seven ministers. He also lost two chiefs of staff. By the time he got to Sinodinos, his third, both Howard and his government looked to be floundering. “People were starting to write him off,” says Savva, who credits Sinodinos with playing a big part in turning things around. “He had very good political sense, he was very good on policy and he had a terrific relationship with Howard,” she says. “He rescued Howard. Rescued the government.”

Sinodinos later entered politics himself, becoming a cabinet minister in Turnbull’s government. But in the eyes of some, his stint with Howard remains his most outstanding achievement. “Arthur set the gold standard for chiefs of staff,” says Wayne Eagleson, who sought Sinodinos’s guidance before taking on the role in the office of then New Zealand prime minister John Key. “I had a fantastic lunch with him where I just sat there soaking in all this knowledge and wisdom.”

Passing on tips is a tradition with chiefs of staff. As Sinodinos says, “There is no manual.” On the phone from Washington, where he finished a term as Australia’s ambassador to the US in March, he says he gives rookies one key piece of advice: “You’re there to protect your boss’s back. That is your first and most important duty.” He tells them, too, that they should be good listeners. “Prime ministers, ministers, they all need to be able to sit down and just sound off sometimes, and feel they are doing it with someone they can completely trust.”

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Political leaders see danger everywhere. The opposition benches are filled with people trying to bring them down. Their own party swarms with potential rivals. A chief of staff might be the only person to whom they are prepared to show their vulnerable side.

Says Eagleson, who stayed with Key for all eight years of his prime ministership: “There were some things that John and I would discuss, usually in the dead of night, that he wouldn’t discuss with other ministers.” When parliament sat late, Key would wander into Eagleson’s office, take a bottle of Heineken from the fridge and start talking. “He’d just decompress,” Eagleson says. “Getting rid of that stress at the end of the day meant he could go home and get some sleep rather than be tossing and turning.“

Chiefs of staff worry about their bosses not getting enough rest. If you’re running a country, you shouldn’t be befuddled by exhaustion. Or light-headed from hunger, for that matter. Ben Hubbard knew Julia Gillard was
inclined to skip meals when she was on the road, so he took pre-emptive action: “The adviser travelling with her would say, ‘I’ve been directed to make you eat this sandwich, otherwise the chief of staff will be deeply unhappy.’ ” During the 2010 federal election campaign, Allan Behm wasn’t just Greg Combet’s chief of staff but also his caregiver and cook. The Labor minister, then single, was laid up at home in Newcastle, recovering from vascular surgery. “I gave him a huge amount of personal support, to keep his self-confidence and his spirit uplifted,” Behm says. “During that period, we became very close.“

Arthur Sinodinos was John Howard’s chief of staff for nine years. “There is no manual,” he says.Credit: Mike Bowers

The British politician Peter Mandelson jokingly referred to Jonathan Powell as Tony Blair’s Jeeves. Powell has written that he thought the manservant
allusion quite apt. He watched the prime minister eat breakfast more often than he cared to remember; Blair would issue instructions to him in his dressing room while Powell passed him his clothes. Lidija Ivanovski, too, knows how it feels to double as a general factotum. Yes, she was the person who accompanied Richard Marles to a meeting in Geneva with future United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres. But she was also the person who raced out to buy Fisherman’s Friend lozenges when Marles developed a scratchy throat during a round of media interviews. And who dashed into David Jones to get him a pair of chinos when he realised during a work trip that he’d forgotten to pack spare pants.

Bertie Wooster probably gave Jeeves time off now and then. With Marles, Ivanovski was always on call. “It’s an intense relationship,” she says, “and you have ups and downs. You have days when you’re like, ‘I can’t talk to this person. They’re driving me insane. I want to go and work in an underground coal mine where I have no phone reception.’ ” Luckily, she never lost sight of the fact Marles was a decent bloke. “It’s a lot harder to get up at 5am if the person you’re working for is a dickhead.”

A dispute between a chief of staff and her boss burst into the news earlier this year. Sally Rugg claimed she had been unfairly dismissed by Monique Ryan, the independent MP for the Melbourne federal seat of Kooyong, after exercising her right to refuse to work excessive hours. Rugg said she usually put in 70 to 80 hours a week. In April, she reportedly accepted an offer of about $100,000 to settle the case.

To Ivanovski, the whole thing was slightly baffling. Being a chief of staff is an all or nothing proposition, in her mind. “It’s not a job you can do at 80 per cent. To do it well, you need to sacrifice everything else in your life.” [Rugg says that although she had the title of chief of staff, her job classification was the lower paid “adviser (non-government)” .]

Alister Jordan, chief of staff to former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, tells me he usually got to the office before 6am and worked seven days a week, clocking up totals of 80 to 100 hours. Not that he was signing a time sheet. “If you treat it like a job, you’re the wrong person for the role,” says Jordan, who was 29 years old when appointed to the position, having joined Rudd’s staff at just 22. “You have to believe in the cause. You have to believe that what you’re doing has meaning. Otherwise you can’t do what the job demands.”

It helps to have a tolerance for low-level pandemonium, says Ben Hubbard. “Literally people are lining up at your door before you walk into your office. You’ll get 500 emails in the day, and your phone won’t stop ringing and everyone wants to see you all day, every day. You’re really at the eye of the storm.” To some of us, that might sound like a recipe for a nervous breakdown. Hubbard loved it. “It was the only job I ever wanted to do in my life,” he says.

Political scientist Anne Tiernan brought together a group of former chiefs of staff as part of her research for The Gate Keepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff, co-authored by Rod Rhodes and published in 2014. She says she told the group that US presidents’ chiefs of staff liked to call themselves “javelin catchers”.

Geoff Walsh, who had been chief of staff to Labor prime minister Paul Keating, came up with a couple of names for their Australian counterparts: “shock absorbers and pest controllers”. The first term referred to the fact that it often falls to chiefs of staff to deliver bad news to their bosses (“PM, you’re not going to like this, but…” ), and as a consequence they’re the ones likely to be hit by the first blast of prime ministerial frustration.

Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was notoriously combative.Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The second term didn’t need explaining to John Kunkel. “There are people who want things from the prime minister all the time,” he says, and an astonishing number casually assume there’ll be room in the PM’s diary for them to pop in and tell him why their requests should be met. Kunkel says he was bombarded with phone calls, emails and texts from prospective visitors: “No one writes a letter to the prime minister asking for a meeting if they can send a WhatsApp message saying, ‘I’m in Parliament House next week, can I see the PM?’ ” His wife got him a T-shirt with “shock absorber and pest controller” written on it. “I became very good at letting people down,” he says.

Some chiefs of staff are gentler than others. Mack McLarty, the courteous Arkansas businessman who did the job for president Bill Clinton, became known in Washington as “Mack the Nice”. By contrast, Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had a nameplate on his desk that read, “Undersecretary for Go F--- Yourself”.

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Plenty of people will tell you that Victorian premier Daniel Andrews’s chief of staff, Lissie Ratcliff, is the second most powerful person in the state. As for James Cullen, chief of staff to NSW’s relatively new Labor premier, Chris Minns, it’s too early to tell how much clout he will have. It varies from duo to duo. Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott delegated so much control to his aide, Peta Credlin, that close observers concluded she was the one running the show. “He effectively outsourced his job to his chief of staff,” contends Niki Savva.

When parliamentary colleagues warned Abbott that Credlin’s high-handedness was causing mutinous murmuring in the party room, Abbott was unmoved. “People wanted Credlin to go,” says Anne Tiernan, “and he wouldn’t part with her. That cost him the leadership in the end.”

Peta Credlin was a pivotal power player during Tony Abbott’s prime ministership.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Former Labor cabinet minister Gary Gray has spoken of his unease as he felt the balance of power in Kevin Rudd’s government shifting from the ministry to Alister Jordan and others on Rudd’s personal staff. Jordan had only to fix ministers with a stare, Gray has said, “and they backed off like kittens. They lost all their dignity.” Like Abbott, Rudd was ousted by his colleagues before completing a full term.

In New Zealand, Wayne Eagleson argues that it’s the job of a prime minister’s chief of staff to keep members of the parliamentary party in line. Eagleson says he had Key’s authority to speak to ministers on his behalf: “On one or two occasions, the minister in question took umbrage, contacted the prime minister and said, ‘This is outrageous, that a member of your staff is telling me what to do.’ To which John said, ‘If you’re talking to my chief of staff, it’s like talking to me.’ ”

Twinges of resentment are probably understandable. Even pangs of envy. As Ben Hubbard says: “You can get more done in an hour in those very senior roles than some backbenchers get done in a career of two decades. It’s just a far more influential and effective role.” Tiernan makes the point that it is also a role with little public accountability. Ministers have to answer questions in parliament. Public servants are grilled by parliamentary committees. Chiefs of staff are answerable only to their bosses, some of whom are more inclined than others to stop them overstepping the mark. Lidija Ivanovski says Anthony Albanese has a reputation for insisting that staffers answer to parliamentarians, rather than vice versa. He certainly refuses to be pushed around himself. According to Ivanovski, “He’s always been known for saying, with reference to staff, ‘It’s my name on the door, not yours.’ ”

Tony Abbott lauded Peta Credlin as a “fierce political warrior”. Most chiefs of staff are party loyalists, but that doesn’t stop them having a sense of camaraderie with those doing the job for the opposition. Ryan Liddell, who was chief of staff to former federal Labor leader Bill Shorten, says top aides know the value of keeping lines of communication across the political divide.

“Sometimes there are things that need to be discussed in a really discreet way,” Liddell says. “A national security incident, for instance. Or if someone is under political attack and their welfare is in jeopardy. If you have those relationships, you can reach out to the other side and say, ‘I understand the politics here but I just caution you to back off.’ ”

Wayne Eagleson (right) with former NZ PM John Key.

On the night of the 2019 federal election, which Labor was expected to win convincingly, Liddell was in a room at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne with Shorten, the man set to be the next prime minister. When Liddell realised the results were trending the wrong way and that the Coalition government would retain power, he had the difficult task of telling his boss.

“To Bill’s credit, his first reaction was, ‘I feel embarrassed and like I’ve let everyone down,’ ” says Liddell, whose own reaction was similar: “The feeling of disappointment was obviously immense, but the greater feeling for me was a sense of guilt because I thought Australians were going to be worse off without a Labor government.” The next night, as he struggled to come to terms with the loss, Liddell received some calls of commiseration. One was from Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel.

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H. R. Haldeman was utterly devoted to Richard Nixon. The president’s speechwriter, William Safire, later described the men as “similar in a way to Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Cathy insisted she was not so much in love with Heathcliff as she was Heathcliff. So, too, did Haldeman see his identity merged with Nixon’s.”

To other chiefs of staff, that is not as nutty as it might sound. In Ivanovski’s experience, the job involves immersing yourself so deeply in your boss’s life and career that “you’re kind of an extension of that person”. Kunkel echoes her words: “You’re basically sucked up into this other persona for a substantial period of time.”

Haldeman lied to protect Nixon, testifying that the president had no knowledge of the Watergate cover-up. As a result, he was convicted of perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, and served 18 months in prison. Long before the cell doors clanged shut, Nixon had demanded his resignation. In the end, a chief of staff is expendable (unless perhaps you’re Peta Credlin). Late in the US TV series The Good Wife, when Eli Gold is unceremoniously dumped as chief of staff to Illinois governor Peter Florrick, he realises that he has been labouring under a misapprehension. “I was never your friend,” Gold laments. “I was just a political operative. I was the help.”

However the job ends, there is both a physical and psychological toll. Allan Behm says that when he stopped working for Greg Combet, he felt flat and drained, as if he were recovering from a bout of influenza: “It took me about four months to start feeling okay.”

Working for Dominic Perrottet so energised Bran Black that he would rise at 4.30am to go kayaking on Sydney Harbour, making his impossibly long days even longer. When Perrottet lost office, Black realised he had been running on adrenaline. He suddenly felt exhausted, though his dominant emotion was gratitude. He felt privileged to have had a position at the heart of government, and to have helped get stuff done that directly affected people’s lives. “I loved it. Loved it,” Black says. “Even the worst bits were wonderful.”

Being chief of staff to a political leader has its perks. Kunkel attended a state dinner at the White House. Wayne Eagleson sat in the Oval Office as John Key and Barack Obama animatedly talked trade. Arthur Sinodinos did his share of hobnobbing, too, but for him, leaving the job was a relief – “a bit like being released from jail”.

After almost a decade at John Howard’s beck and call, he felt he was back in charge of his life, able to make plans of his own. As a chief of staff, “you’re not the master of your own destiny”, Sinodinos says. “Your destiny is tied to someone else’s.”

Watergate conspirators H. R. Haldeman (at left) and Richard Nixon.Credit: Getty Images

Kunkel was second on The AFR’s covert power list for three years until Scott Morrison’s government was defeated. “And then, like, I’m nobody,” he says, as we sit drinking coffee in his home study. Kunkel, wearing jeans and a jumper, isn’t complaining. Getting out from under Morrison’s shadow has been liberating. “There are worse things than being anonymous and living in the suburbs.”

Lidija Ivanovski was chief of staff of Labor’s successful 2022 federal election campaign. Her colleagues were stunned when she announced after the victory, just as Richard Marles was about to be sworn in as deputy prime minister, that she was going to stop working for him. She tells me she felt she had no choice. She owed it to her partner to start leading a more normal life and spend more time with her. “She isn’t in politics and she’s put up with the job for the entirety of the relationship.”

At first, Ivanovski felt unmoored. After leading such a hectic existence for so long, it was weird to have time on her hands. “You’re like, ‘What do I do?’ ” At parties, when people asked her to tell them about herself, she was at a loss: “I really could only do so through the prism of, ‘I worked for Richard, and he’s a mad Geelong Cats fan, and he loves this or that.’ I could talk to them for 45 minutes about everything he likes.” What did she like? It took a while for Ivanovski to figure that out.

She likes sitting down to dinner knowing she won’t have to leave the table to take a 40-minute call. She likes having conversations without glancing furtively at notifications on her phone. She likes swimming laps without worrying how many messages will be waiting for her when she gets out of the water. She likes not having chest pains three times a week.

Does she miss being a chief of staff? Desperately, she admits. “There’s nothing else like it.” She is glad she quit, she really is. “But my wife’s like, ‘I notice you’re not as definite about never going back as you were a year ago.’ ”

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