Tag Archive for: ministerial staffing

The growth of the Canberra Minder

New Parliament House

Minder (noun): Body guard; staffer working for a politician/minister. Derived from London West End slang for a muscle man who protects a criminal or shady operator.

Minding (verb): The act of working as a Minder, to protect, promote, serve or help.

When created by Gough Whitlam in 1972, they were called ministerial staffers. Or simply staffers.

Then a decade on, by 1982, the ‘staffer’ usage was subverted in Canberra. Minders they became, and so they have remained.

The nomenclature switch was driven by British comedy-drama series, Minder, which quickly hit the ABC.  

The Minder character, Terry, was streetwise but always in thrall to his boss, Arthur Daley. Arfur was a wheeler-dealer with one eye on the cops and the other fixed on the next deal, and had a great way with words. Not for Arthur the cliché about the world being your oyster: ‘The world is your lobster, my son!’ Any Oz Minister would understand. Any Oz Minder could merely nod.

The TV Minder inhabited a grey area between law and crime, just as the Oz Minder works a shadowy zone where politics meets power and the Parliament meets the Executive.

The zone operates as a pressure cooker and clearing house: push policy, run politics, skirt Parliament and ride the public service.

Arthur would be amazed at the scope but energised by the bounteous opportunities. And the lack of oversight by anyone outside the executive.

Having provided the Westminster model for what has become the platypus model of the Australian political system (works only in practice, not theory) London also has naming rights for the Minder as the strongest new creation of Oz politics.

Created by Whitlam (1972–75), the Minder model was cemented in place by Fraser (1975–83). Both sides of politics tried the Minder model and found it good.

The Hawke-Keating governments (1983–1996) pumped power into the model and numbers boomed.

The Hawke government formalised the existence of the Minders in 1984 with the Members of Parliament Staff Act.

The law enacted what had already been established: Minders serve at the Minister’s (or Member’s) pleasure and can be dismissed in an instant. If the Minister falls from office, the Minder goes over the cliff at the same moment.

The Act created a unique legislative framework for staffers and consultants working for Ministers, Members and Senators—giving Minders four notable features:

  • they work directly for individual Members of Parliament
  • their salaries come from the public purse
  • they have little security of employment
  • unlike public servants, they may perform political functions

The trend line for Minder numbers, from the moment of creation, has been steadily upward. New governments sometimes slash at the numbers in the executive wing to show how different they are to their despised and defeated predecessors. Then the upward trend resumes.

The Minder momentum reached warp speed with the move into the New Parliament in 1988. The Old Parliament imposed a physical limit on numbers.

The new building meant the executive wing at the rear of the building could easily hold 400-plus ministerial Minders. Glory days had arrived.

Much speculation at the time of the move up the hill was about how extra parliamentary space would allow the Senate committee system to expand in power and scope. It didn’t really happen.

The big change was the Minder phenomenon, as both driver and expression of the presidential pretensions of the prime ministership.

By the end of the Hawke-Keating period, the Minder was still a shadowy element in the power structure. Few in Canberra doubted, though, that the Minder was also a central element in the way power flowed.

From the ministerial suites, Minders stood eye-to-eye, as equals, with the elite public servants atop departments—a remarkable rise in only two decades of Minder existence.

Consider this judgement in 1996 by Sandy Holloway, a senior public servant who had been top Minder (1988–91) as Hawke’s Principal Private Secretary/Chief of Staff:

‘I would hazard that ministerial offices are as important now in big policy, big program design – and big crisis management – as departments. More selectively to be sure, differently to be sure, but as important in their own way. If departments often not only generate some creative ideas but also do the bulk of the hard, slogging work…ministerial staff can be crucial in choices about prospective lines of work, sifting options, running an ever critical eye over what is put forward, tossing out ideas (in both senses), and navigating propositions forward through the political labyrinth in Parliament House to a point where decisions are made.’

Holloway listed Minder attributes:

  •         fast footwork
  •         capacity for troubleshooting
  •         immediate access to the Minister of a kind the public servant generally does not have
  •         personal closeness to the Minister—‘a relationship of trust, and savvy about the political, media and parliamentary environments.’

The attributes build on the legal framework created by the Staff Act.

The next post in this series will discuss the Minder Administration—the network of Ministerial staffers in the executive, serving both a Minister and the Prime Minister’s office.

The birth of the Canberra Minder

5230334240_8b95f9009b_z

The Canberra ministerial adviser—the Minder—was born on 5 December 1972, when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister.

Like much that Whitlam did, the birth was attended by high purpose, low politics and scrambling.

The short, tumultuous Whitlam era changed much in Canberra. Some of it endures. The number of Minders exploded while their purpose stayed constant.

The previous column argued that the Minder is the strongest new creation of Oz politics, often more important than the public service in the way policy and politics gets done.

For all the calumny heaped on the Minders, this was no bastard child. A new and different child—Whitlam knew what he wanted.

After 23 years in opposition, Labor was back and Whitlam wasn’t entrusting The Program solely to the public service.

Every government since has felt the same, reaching for Gough’s weapon to push policy, run politics, skirt Parliament and ride the public service.

In the 1973 Garran Oration, Whitlam made the Minder case.

The creation:

‘We have found a need to provide Ministers with greater help on the policy side. I have no hesitation in saying that the help Ministers have obtained from their offices has relieved departments of involvement in party-political matters and has given Ministers support as they have forged ahead in their own particular fields.’

The system effect:

‘This development in no way represents a departure from the principles of the Westminster system. Central to that system is the principle that Ministers as individuals and the Cabinet as a whole must exercise real control over the Public Service and accept full responsibility for policy.’

The policy and public service impact:

‘It is a perfectly objective statement to say that there have been notable cases in Australia in the past of a remarkable lack of ministerial control over departments and over policy…To the extent that the appointment of a competent personal staff assists Ministers to exercise their proper constitutional authority we are enhancing the basic Westminster tradition.’

The man who designed the system, the PM’s Principal Private Secretary, Dr Peter Wilenski, wrote in 1978 that the new ministerial advisers were ‘the most controversial’ change in the policy process.

Previously, most ministerial staffers (apart from press secretaries) were seconded from the minister’s department. The department was where staffer careers and loyalties lay. The Minder completely changed the loyalty calculus.

The Minders appointed by Wilenski were usually aged in their 20s or 30s and ‘were different in background to the majority of public servants—for instance, a far higher proportion of women’.

The Whitlam revolution opened new battle lines in the assault on the male bastions of Parliament, press gallery and public service. The old assumption was that women made the tea. A sign in one of the ladies’ lavatories in Parliament requested: ‘Please lift seat before emptying tea leaves.’

Whitlam’s 27-man ministry got 27 top Minders to serve as ministerial Private Secretaries, three of them women. One of those three, Patti Warn, came direct from the ABC TV where she’d worked on Four Corners.

Arriving in Canberra in January 1973, Warn remembered: ‘I had no specific training for the job…I had not the slightest idea what a Private Secretary did. I did not know how the public service worked. I did not know how to recruit and manage staff. I knew little about parliamentary procedure’.

She climbed on top of the role and spent two decades as a Minder and consultant to Labor front benchers. Her first Minder job proved the permanent trapdoor rule. As Warn noted, ‘ministerial staff lived and died at the whim of their minister, as they still do’.

She lost that first job after the 1974 election ‘partly because I had defended a junior woman staffer in a dispute about who was responsible for leaving a key paragraph out of a speech. [The Minister] Morrison came back to his office from the caucus election which had just re-elected him to the ministry and told me I could find another job’. Off she went to work in Whitlam’s office.

Labor’s battles with the public service reflected its wider frustration at being in office but not in power. Wilenski wrote that public service empires and bureaucratic habits of mind were threatened by the new government.

Mandarins fought masterful campaigns, warning, worrying, limiting options and running interminable committees. The Mandarins pushed hard against being usurped by advisers in having privileged access to the minister and the right to the vital, final word in the minister’s ear.

Wilenski categorised ministerial views of the public service this way:

  • Extreme suspicion of the bureaucracy ‘as the natural enemy of a reform government’
  • Saw the Mandarins as dedicated but ‘simply the wrong people to understand and carry out Labor’s program’
  • Became frustrated by public service inflexibility, delay, empire building and secrecy
  • Shared Whitlam’s view that the service was co-operative, eager and efficient

Wilenski judged that the first generation Minders ranged from the reasonably modest to the spectacularly active. Enthusiastic and sometimes inexperienced staffers ‘tested the limits of their power’. The Mandarins saw themselves as ‘the sole interpreters of a minister’s intentions’ and challenged, co-opted or worked around the Minders.

Whitlam’s early-model Minders had a tendency to crash and burn, argue with each other, and congregate in the non-Members bar. Yet the breed flourished.

Only five years after the creation, early in the life of the Fraser government, Wilenski pronounced the Minders had ‘become an established feature of the ministerial system whichever party is in power.’

Correct. The Minders performed as designed.

Politics, public policy and political advisors

Parliament House, Canberra

The plethora of commentary on parliamentarians’ entitlements has pointed to systemic failure (a lack of clear guidance and rules) as a more fundamental cause of the problem than simple venality and carelessness on the part of MPs and Senators.

Sadly, this isn’t the only systemic failure facing contemporary government. There are other, and significantly more serious, systemic constraints affecting the timeliness, quality and durability of government decisionmaking.

At one level, the inability of contemporary governments to gain policy traction in areas as diverse as naval shipbuilding, climate change, vertical fiscal imbalance, marriage equality and education and health policy—to name just a few—represents the triumph of politics over policy. Governments of all stripes appear to be victims of the 24/7 political cycle, where ‘gotcha’ and ‘spin’ fight it out for supremacy, reducing everything to a contest to dominate the ephemeral. Quite simply, there is no strategy.

The respected Australian journalist Paul Kelly, in his 2014 book Triumph and Demise, attributes this situation to the loss of any appetite for reform. And, in turn, the aversion to reform is attributed to the ‘three deficits’—the lack of vision, the lack of leadership and the lack of accountability. This is a point that I elaborate on in my commentary on life as a ministerial staffer, No, Minister.

Martin Callinan’s 12 August post ‘Support advisors to support policy’ recommends that we take a serious look at improving the policy delivery value of political staff. There’s merit in the suggestion, but the issue doesn’t end there. For the unfortunate fact is that ministerial staff are too few, too inexperienced and too lacking in domain knowledge to address the complexities of contemporary policy development and program delivery.

Ministers, politicians and political staffers are in the box seat when it comes to streamlining parliamentary procedures and Cabinet processes. Twenty-first century parliaments continue to operate in the same way as their 19th century predecessors: interminable and usually pointless ‘debates’ that do little more than rehearse party platforms; organisational and time management inefficiencies; confected ‘busy-ness’; and little policy impact by the parliament on the prerogatives (and wilfulness) of the executive. Were any business or corporation to operate like the parliament, it would go broke.

The solution to the policy deficit that has infected Australian politics in recent years lies in the quality of the relationship between the ministerial decisionmakers and their public service policy advisors. The role of the ministerial staff is to facilitate and nurture that relationship, not to gate-keep it, and even less to replace it.

Ministers need clear and cogent policy advice if they are to make sound decisions. When ministers are left to their own devices, or when the relationship between the mainstream public service departments and their Ministers is strained, poor decisions and ungovernable programs result. The ill-starred Home Insulation Program is a case in point.

Many of the readers of The Strategist are skilled policy analysts and advisors putting enormous energy into preparing the submissions and memoranda on which ministers and cabinet make their decisions. What the analysts and advisors need to understand, however, is that ministers are inundated with policy proposals and issues requiring decision.

The Minister for Defence, for instance, is on the receiving end of upwards of ten thousand submissions and items of correspondence each year. This is an intolerable workload. Streamlining the policy-advising process would be one of the best ways of assisting the minister to make better decisions more quickly.

At the heart of a good policy-advising process is the quality of the relationship between the minister and the department. And that’s the particular responsibility of the minister, the secretary and the minister’s chief of staff. They are the people best positioned to set the priorities, determine the minister’s information needs, and agree the timelines.

In most respects, the ability of the secretary and the chief of staff to manage the workflow and to monitor quality standards is the key to smooth and effective decisionmaking. It’s too easy for ministers—who are generally not domain experts—to be swamped by indigestible technical detail. Too often, critical matters for consideration are buried in annexes and attachments where only the most forensic of ministerial staff can find them.

This problem, however, is readily fixed. The departmental secretary is, by law, the minister’s principal policy advisor. Everyone needs to understand that, especially ministerial staff. The secretary runs the departmental agenda, and will usually delegate to the division heads the task of ensuring that the minister gets what the minister needs—clear and unambiguous advice in a digestible form.

But the secretary needs to run the ongoing dialogue with the decisionmaker. Ministers and secretaries must collaborate on the basis of trust in generating the policy outcomes that are the real business of government. As experienced ministers have said, secretaries need to understand the political environment in which policy is delivered. Ministers do the politics. Secretaries provide the advice. This is a critical partnership.

Secretaries, and the departments they run, are the indispensible factor that generates sound and successful government. The closer the secretary and the departmental leadership is to the minister, and the greater the confidence of the minister in the secretary, the better the minister’s decisions will be. The most important help ministers can get is from professional, smart and apolitical public servants.