By Peter Shergold, Published The Straits Times, 1 Nov 2012
IN 2007, soon after becoming Australia's prime minister, Mr Kevin Rudd found himself unable to attend the Christmas party of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet of which I was the secretary.
This is not an implied criticism: He (and I) were extraordinarily busy with the transition to government. He was scheduled to visit the department, and meet its enthusiastic staff, a few days later anyway. At a meeting in his office on the morning of the party, I told the PM that I had scribbled a few notes on the back of an envelope to convey to staff his apologies and festive greetings. The message, I confidently anticipated, would go down well.
He asked to see what I'd written and then, as valuable time slipped away, and subsequent meetings became ever further delayed, painstakingly rewrote my script. The final text was far better (and longer) than my hastily written version but, as I read it to the party-goers that afternoon, few would have appreciated the extra half-hour that the PM had devoted to their Christmas cheer.
Mr Kevin Rudd, I realised, was going to be a challenge to the speechwriters who would be tasked with putting his multifarious ideas into narrative form. Perhaps if I'd been able to recount that story to Mr James Button in December 2008, it might have saved him a lot of pain and grief over the next 16 months.
As it was, Mr Button accepted a position as a speechwriter in Mr Rudd's office. He was appointed not as a political adviser in the Prime Minister's Office (which would have been normal) but as a public servant in the department.
After six months that ended in tears: "I heard (Rudd) read one of your speeches on a plane, had a tantrum, and that was it," a staff member informed him. As a result, Mr Button was transferred to a position in the newly established Strategy and Policy Division of the Department.
The book Speechless: A Year In My Father's Business (available in Kinokuniya Singapore from next January) is his account of that period. Each reader will appreciate Mr Button's disarming honesty from a different perspective - in terms of understanding his family and, particularly, his complex relationship with his father (John Button, a Labor Party minister who died in 2008); appreciating the craft, mystery and ultimate frustration of speechwriting; ruminating on the sad demise of Australian Labor Party values; or examining, sometimes brutally, what Mr Button characterises as Mr Rudd's "dysfunctional" leadership style, emanating from his "endemic failure to focus".
I approached the book from the viewpoint of a now-liberated public servant. I read it on a flight back from Perth where I'd been addressing a conference on the need to reform public administration. I'd presented a half-way decent journeyman's speech. By contrast, the book I devoured on the return trip was exceptional. If you read only one account of the world of apolitical public servants and their relationship with political advisers (admittedly not a substantial oeuvre), read this one. It's the most perceptive assessment of the Australian Public Service that I've come across: an inside account written by an outsider.
Let me immediately dismiss a furphy (Australian slang for "rumour"). Mr Button does not do disservice, still less breach public service guidelines, by writing his account. It's not apparent that he attended many high-level meetings at which, behind closed doors, public servants gave advice to their political masters. Certainly he breaches the confidences of none.
Indeed, Mr Button extols the value of secrecy. He comes to understand that it underpins the relationship between prime ministers (or ministers) and their public servants as they debate policy options. He is fully aware that he "had crossed from the disclosure business to the secrecy business". "There is a reason for secrecy," he argues. "Public servants' first task is to inform and advise ministers, not the public."
I think Mr Button is correct.
Public servants are accountable to Parliament through their ministers. While I believe strongly that public information should be as transparent and accessible as possible, the ability to speak truth to power in confidential discussions remains vital to the Westminster system of democratic governance in which professional public servants are required to serve successive governments with equal commitment.
My experience was that every time policy advice was leaked by some public servant who foolishly imagined that they had a better view of the "national interest" than elected government, the trust necessary to the minister- public servant relationship was corroded.
Mr Button discovers the way in which public servants scrutinise the accuracy of political statements, poring over every word: "Never in journalism had I seen such fact-checking."
He comes to appreciate that bureaucrats "know so much about their subject" (and is frustrated that journalists too rarely gain access to that information). Policy goes through countless drafts, responding both to critical scrutiny and the changing political environment.
Yet, contrary to common perception, he sees that a key role of public administrators is to deliver programmes on time, on budget and to government expectation, and that "the cliche of public servants as ditherers and delayers was (often) false". This is not the stereotypical portrait of shinybum paper-pushers.
Mr Button quickly finds that senior public servants are overwhelmingly rationalists. Harder for him to understand is why so often they are able to maintain equanimity in the face of adversity, and "betray no frustration when politicians dumped a project on which they had spent huge amounts of time".
It was for such reasons that I used to emphasise to the best and brightest graduate Australian Public Service entrants each year that public service was not for everyone. It called for the development of a particularly self-effacing character. I warned them that while they would find themselves given opportunities to influence policy on matters of extraordinary importance they would also require, in Mr Button's words, "stoicism (as) part of the survival kit".
Senior public servants have made the difficult decision to "swop profile for the chance of influence". Public servants regard themselves as actors as well as observers. Their role is to be responsive to political direction and to identify and promote policy initiatives without seeking to take the kudos. For Mr Button, of journalistic and academic temperament, this is a different world. No one has written a more perceptive assessment of how they do things differently there.
This is no hagiographic account. Mr Button met some public servants who were "time-servers, pedants of process and overly deferential" and a lot who were overly cautious and too risk-averse. On occasion, he discerned, so much effort was expended on making sure nothing bad happens for the ministers they serve "that nothing happens at all". I've argued in that past that such approaches stifle public innovation.
Mr James Button is someone who (like me) came into the Australia Public Service from the outside. He has captured with sympathetic insight the role, commitment and the frustrations of public servants.
Peter Shergold was Australia's top civil servant as secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2003-2008. He is now chancellor at University of Western Sydney.
The full version of this article can be found on The Conversation, which carries analysis of academics and researchers in Australia.
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