How political egos led us to the shame of robo-debt

The old men, all bonhomie, cream flannels and wooden racquets, drifted through the garden and down to the carefully tended tennis court.

They came from a world long gone now.

We had been invited on that spring morning, bees humming and big old trees throwing shade, to morning tea with friends living high on Canberra’s establishment slopes, where the stately homes of the quietly powerful dwell, each surrounded by acres of greenery.

Our friends were employed as humble groundskeepers of one such place, recently acquired by a consulting firm as an investment and to give its lobbyists a suitable base for the twisting of political and bureaucratic ears.

Who, though, were these members of the Sunday morning tennis party wandering freely through the garden?

It transpired the mansion had been sold by an elderly fellow long retired from his position in the top levels of the Commonwealth public service. He had made it a condition of the sale that his old colleagues be allowed their weekly game of tennis at his personal court for as long as they wished.

Here then, was perhaps the most exclusive tennis club in the land: the Retired Mandarins of Canberra.

Each of these elderly men had spent years running Commonwealth public service departments. They had been what was known as permanent secretaries, having worked under the principle that they had tenure.

It meant they were relatively free to provide what public servants, at least in theory, were expected to deliver: frank and fearless advice to their political masters.

Theirs was an era that flourished postwar under Robert Menzies, when senior public servants built their empires, undoubtedly filled with cunning and intrigue but relatively free from naked political intrusion.

Menzies did not offload any Labor-appointed civil servants when he became PM in 1949, and formed trusting relationships with many who became so permanent they kept their positions for decades.

Former prime ministers Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard.Credit: Fairfax Media

That was never going to continue unchallenged once Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating came along. They were in a hurry to stamp their own ideas and egos on how the nation should be changed. They had little taste for the meandering processes of an ossified public service. Hawke abolished the word “permanent” from secretary positions in 1984, suggesting impermanence for those who displeased (though he didn’t much act on it).

In 1994, Keating - then prime minister - removed tenure from departmental secretaries and replaced the system with contracts. The message? Perform or move on.

John Howard, when he became prime minister in 1996, was perfectly thrilled to have no tenure nonsense to deal with. In a single evening - the “night of the long knives” - he sacked six departmental secretaries. Soon, he got rid of 30,000 public servants.

Many of them gained new jobs with “consulting” firms - private companies that charged the government massive sums to develop new ways of delivering what had been historically the task of government-employed servants.

It should be no stretch to understand that consultancies, pursuing the juiciest contracts, cosied up to ministers to learn precisely what the government wanted - which did not necessarily align with what the nation’s citizens actually needed.

If we are to search for clues to how parts of Australia’s public service over the past decade became so bastardised that a royal commission would be required to report that it actually turned on the nation’s most defenceless people - welfare recipients - it’s worth knowing the history.

When Tony Abbott became PM in 2013, one of his first acts was his own night of (shorter) knives, when he purged four departmental secretaries.

And why? “It’s more important to be bending the public servants to the policies and directions of the new government than it is to be out there trying to manipulate the media,” he proclaimed in a speech soon after assuming power. In truth, of course, he also set about manipulating sections of the media to ensure he got enthusiastic support for bending public servants to his will.

At the same time, Australians were confronted with a new minister for immigration, Scott Morrison, giving weekly “briefings” about Operation Sovereign Borders, accompanied by a military or police chief who was required to say next to nothing while Morrison smugged his way through a refusal to provide details about asylum seekers because they were “on-water matters”.

Here, then, was the transformation of the public service into something that, in at least one key area, no longer properly served the public. Morrison, the “cop on the beat” as immigration minister, soon enough transferred his peculiar skill to become what he called a “cop on the welfare beat”.

Later, as PM in 2019, Morrison would indulge in his own purge of five departmental heads, calling it a “restructure”.

Over the years, some senior public servants learned to understand that if they wanted to keep their jobs and prosper, they needed to fall in line with the demands of the government, even if that meant guessing what ministers like Morrison wanted, and even if it meant turning like wolves on members of the public whom consulting firms had trained them to call “clients”.

Deformed might be a better word than bent.

Is it idle fancy to imagine those old mandarins, ghostly at their long gone Sunday tennis, nodding knowingly and crying “game, set and match”?

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