Canberra Knights: The Rise and Fall of the Public Service Mandarins

The word “mandarin”, as applying to those government bureaucrats closest to political leaders, first became commonly used in Australia after the election of Gough Whitlam’s government in 1972. Since then, heads of significant departments have increasingly come to be seen as an influential part of successive governments. Professor John Nethercote, Adjunct Professor at the Australian Catholic University, Canberra Campus, has long studied the work and workings of Canberra mandarins over the period of the second Menzies Government and beyond. On Tuesday 15 September 2015 he addressed The Sydney Institute to look back on some of the most influential among them in the generation when the leading public service heads of departments were the knights of Canberra.

CANBERRA KNIGHTS – THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE MANDARIN, 1936-86

JOHN NETHERCOTE

Two stories. The alpha and omega of the knights of Canberra is epitomised by two narrative peaks. The first, in 1947, the second, 27 years later, in 1974, with some overlapping cast.

On the afternoon of Friday 15 August 1947, following a meeting of the Cabinet which had taken up most of the day, Ben Chifley, Prime Minister and Treasurer, was meeting in his office in the north-eastern corner of what is now called Old Parliament House with four of the most influential officials in the land. Three of them were officers of what was then known as the First Division of the public service. They were Dr Roland Wilson, the Statistician and Economic Adviser to the Treasurer who had been, from 1940 to 1946, secretary to the Department of Labour and National Service; Dr H. C. Coombs, generally known as Nugget, Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction; and Professor Kenneth Bailey, Solicitor-General and secretary, Attorney-General’s Department, since 1946. The fourth was Mr F. H. Wheeler, the ranking officer in the Treasury at the helm of the General Finance and Economic Policy Branch.

None was a shrinking violet and only Coombs had something of an inclination in these circumstances to wait to be spoken to before speaking.

Two days earlier, the High Court of Australia had delivered judgment in the Melbourne Corporation case, in which the Melbourne City Council had successfully challenged a provision in the Banking legislation that public authorities bank with the government-owned Commonwealth Bank, then the central bank as well as a trading bank.

One of the officials present at the meeting with Chifley, during a pause, asked what he intended to do about the Melbourne Corporation judgment. Chifley, who had already arranged for the Cabinet to meet again the next day, replied: “I’m going to nationalise the banks.”

The four officials present were struck dumb. After a further pause discussion of the matter in hand resumed. One of those present, the youngest and most junior at the gathering, Wheeler, reflected many years later on this brief interlude as a moment of great shame in his long career as an official.

His view simply reflected his well-known and dogmatic insistence on due process, and, following Thomas Hobbes (not necessarily consciously), an opinion that good advice centred on consequences. In his view, the High Court’s decision should have been thoroughly examined from all angles; was it fatal to the Government’s policy? What other possibilities were open to achieving the government’s purposes? Would public ownership of all banks accomplish the government’s objectives?

Instead, the Cabinet met the next day with little expert briefing or analysis. Late in the afternoon the government’s decision to nationalise the banks was contained in a 45-word press release. The era of spin was yet many decades away.

The rest is history: the new legislation passed both the House of Representatives easily and the Senate; the government had comfortable majorities in each House (33 to three in the Senate!). The High Court held the new legislation invalid and, when it went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, it again failed notwithstanding advocacy over many days by the Deputy Prime Minister and Attorney-General, Dr H. V. Evatt, himself a former justice of the High Court. While the case was in progress, two Law Lords died. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr R. G. Menzies, asked the Prime Minister one day how many more jurists would have to die before the Attorney-General concluded his case!

Twenty-seven years later, in mid-December 1974, there was another similar meeting in the same neighbourhood of Old Parliament House, with a much larger cast but including, in some cases in absentia, survivors of the 1947 meeting. Ministers present included the Minister for Minerals and Energy, Mr R. F. X. Connor, and the Attorney-General, Senator Lionel Murphy, shortly to be elevated to the High Court.

The Treasurer, Dr J. F. Cairns, was already in receipt of some compelling advice from the Deputy Secretary (Economic) in the Treasury, John Stone. (An exemplary piece of public service drafting, the text may be found in Alan Reid, The Whitlam Venture, Hill of Content, 1977, 9-11; readers wishing to read more of Stone’s incisive prose should consult Peter Walsh, Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister, Random House, 1995, 173-5.)

The matter under discussion was a proposed US $4 billion loan from Middle Eastern sources. One question was whether the loan required the approval of the Loan Council, a Commonwealth-State body which for many years oversaw government borrowings in Australia. The Attorney-General assured those assembled that Loan Council approval was not needed when the loan was for “temporary purposes.” That a 20-year loan could be considered to be for “temporary purposes” surprised even the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, when he arrived. Hitherto, “temporary purposes” had been regarded as a matter which could be finalised during the financial year.

Wheeler, by now Sir Frederick and himself secretary to the Treasury (since 1971), was also taken aback by the view that a loan for a 20-year period could be deemed to be for “temporary purposes.” There was no reticence on this occasion: he simply contended that the idea would not be accepted by “informed public opinion.”

The prime minister, with at best a tenuous grasp of financial and economic questions, grew impatient with Wheeler’s interventions, which had something of an air of a viva voce about them, and addressed him directly: “Fred, you are on the skids.” But, as many people present have reported, this was not the last word. With a clarity no-one could mistake, Wheeler responded: “Prime Minister, I simply seek to inform you of facts your ignorance of which will bring you down.”

Later in the afternoon, Wheeler convened a largish meeting of senior Treasury officers to brief them on the day’s excitements. It was a feature of Wheeler’s administrative practice to keep “the team” informed. As the meeting closed Wheeler, not usually thought of as a person of prayerful disposition, put his hands together and said: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Early in the evening, he accompanied the secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, Clarrie (later Sir Clarrie) Harders, to the Prime Minister’s Lodge where two meetings were in progress: in one room a smaller group of ministers and officials were still discussing the US $4 billion loan for “temporary purposes”. In another room, the federal executive of the Australian Labor Party was in session. There was some overlap in membership between the two gatherings.

When the time came to constitute a meeting of the Federal Executive Council to authorise the Minister for Minerals and Energy to raise the loan, Wheeler advised the Treasurer, Dr Jim Cairns, who was also at this time Deputy Prime Minister, not to sign the relevant minute as neither he nor the Treasury could expect any control over its implementation and management. This struck Connor as an impertinence. He confronted Wheeler: “I am a Minister of the Crown,” he said as they reportedly went toe to toe. “And I am the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury,” Wheeler responded. When, in later years, he was asked the meaning of this exchange, he explained it was “a mutual exchange of pomposities.”

Cairns did sign the documentation, as Deputy Prime Minister, the only time Executive Council proceedings have carried four signatures instead of the customary three. In the ensuing twelve hours, by a process of which Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or the Marx brothers would have been proud, Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, whose approval for the previous evening’s  meeting of the Federal Executive Council had not been sought, was brought into the action. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister and a sizable entourage headed off to spend Christmas-New Year in Europe. It was a sojourn interrupted but certainly not terminated by Cyclone Tracey’s devastation of Darwin.

Canberra Knights – the great age

The three-and-a-half decades between the Second World War and the Fraser Government marked the great age of the public service mandarins in Australian government. They were formidable presences during all prime ministerships from Curtin to Fraser inclusive but, after the drowning of Harold Holt on Sunday 17 December 1967, they were increasingly under challenge.

They were almost unknown to the public (though Coombs and Wilson for 15 years had their signatures on the banknotes as governor of the Bank and head of the Treasury). This was an era when the public service was expected to be anonymous. Most of them wore their anonymity as a badge of honour though some clearly had a flair for publicity.

When they joined government service, mostly at or following the outbreak of war in 1939, they were relatively young men, highly educated by the standards of the time and the standards of a public service dominated by clerks with school-leaver qualifications and a diminishing number of veterans of the Great War.

It is relatively easy to date the start of the mandarin era – the appointment of Roland Wilson as Commonwealth Statistician in 1936. It occasioned a strike (in public service terms, a stoppage) among the staff, which epitomised deep-seated hostility to university graduates and an unhealthy attachment to seniority in promotions. Outbreak of war immediately brought Wheeler and Len Hewitt to Canberra to assist the Prices Commissioner, Douglas Copland, one of their professors at Melbourne University. Another of their fellow students was intended to come but did not – Bruce (later Sir Bruce) Williams, vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1967 to 1981 and a member of the board of the Reserve Bank for most of that time. Coombs was already in tow as an officer of the Commonwealth Bank under the supervision of Professor Leslie Melville; he was temporarily seconded to the Treasury.

Another important source of graduate strength was the Economics Division of the Bank of New South Wales, from whence came people such as Arthur Tange, James Plimsoll and John Crawford – all subsequently knighted – and a number of lesser luminaries, several of whom also collected accolades of knighthood. By slightly more regular paths came Allen Brown, Jack Bunting, Fin Crisp, Peter Lawler and Geoff Yeend; all served in the Department of Postwar-Reconstruction. They all became department heads and, apart from Crisp, who became Professor of Political Science at Canberra University College in 1950, were knighted. Not all the stars saw the public service as the place to spend the war: one, Richard (later Sir Richard) Randall, who was already on the strength, insisted on serving in uniform as a private.

All these men, and others of comparable quality, mainly worked in new organisations or new units of established bodies concerned with higher level policy of the war and, above all, with planning for the post-war world, domestically and internationally. The leitmotif, generally, was qualification in economics and commerce. But three of the most famous had degrees in law – Professor Bailey, in his mid-40s when he came to Canberra as an adviser to the Attorney-General’s Department; Allen Brown and Henry Bland.

These men rose rapidly to senior posts and eventually to top posts in departments and agencies. For most of their careers they worked either for very senior officials or for ministers; they had little experience of hierarchy in any ordinary sense.

Another prominent figure in this phase of public service development was Dr J. W. Burton. He was the first person to win a public service post-graduate scholarship, which he used to take a doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics. He returned to work in the Department of Labour and National Service and then Post-War Reconstruction. His rise really started when he became private secretary to Dr H. V. Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs, and thence, in 1947, at age 32, secretary of the Department of External Affairs. It was a controversial appointment made the more controversial the following year when he unsuccessfully sought Labor pre-selection for the newly-created House of Representatives seat of the ACT (limited voting rights).

Burton was hardly alone in having studied abroad – Coombs, on a Hackett Fellowship from the University of Western Australia, took a PhD also from the LSE (with a thesis on central banking); Wilson, a Rhodes Scholar and Harkness Fellow, had doctorates from Oxford and Chicago; Bailey and Crisp had been Rhodes Scholars; and Crawford had done research in the United States.

Paul Hasluck’s career follows some of the same paths as Burton’s but is otherwise a contrast. After graduating from the University of Western Australia where he had studied part-time, he had embarked upon a career in journalism. Early in the 1940s, with encouragement from the Labor leader, John Curtin, also a journalist, he joined the infant Department of External Affairs where he worked on planning for the post-war world. Unhappy with the Evatt regime, especially after Burton had been appointed secretary, he joined the History Department at UWA. He had already been engaged to write the civil history of the war but before he had moved much beyond the first volume, he was endorsed by the Liberal Party to contest the new seat of Curtin, which he held until 1969. In less than two years he was a Cabinet minister – Minister for Territories. After nearly 20 years as a Cabinet minister he was appointed Governor-General and in time held several knighthoods including in the most illustrious order of all, the Garter.

Quite a number of these luminaries were, physically, of modest stature and they have become known as the Seven Dwarfs. There is no canonical list but Wilson, Coombs, Bailey, Crawford, Bland and Randall are on almost everyone’s short-list. A related topic of dinner party conversation is the question of who is Snow White. On the latter matter, both Chifley and Menzies have claims.

The old guard

It is misleading to be totally pre-occupied with the Canberra knights, the Seven Dwarfs and their peers and contemporaries. There was also an old guard to which laurels rightly attach. In the conduct of the war itself, the pre-eminent official was Fred Shedden, head of Defence since 1937 and secretary to the War Cabinet, born in 1892. Shedden, who had strong and long relations with Whitehall, is one of the few individuals to have been nominated for a knighthood by a Labor prime minister. In 1943 Shedden was heading to Washington, DC, for important negotiations. The Prime Minister, John Curtin, sought advice from Douglas MacArthur about what could be done to ensure the success of the mission. MacArthur suggested a knighthood.

Curtin took the advice. Shedden became a Knight of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, the highest honour ever conferred on an Australian public servant except for Sir Robert Garran, a Knight Grand Cross in the same order (and possessing a couple of other knighthoods as well). The Treasurer, Chifley, when informed of Shedden’s elevation, shook his head in disbelief: “I could never have done it!”

Shedden was still in the saddle in the mid-1950s when he was finally persuaded to retire a year or so early, the Prime Minister, Menzies, being among those who had concluded it was time for him to go. Two old Treasury hands, successively secretaries to the department, S. G. McFarlane (Misery Mac) and G. P. N. (George Percival Norman Bloody) Watt, were not, in the fashion of the time, knighted. Another of the old brigade was the Chairman of the Public Service Board reconstituted in 1947, William Dunk. He was a veteran of the Audit Office who, in 1945, found himself head of the Department of External Affairs. Apparently there was some optimism that he might be able to bring some order to the department (and its minister, Dr Evatt). In what is one of the earliest contests between a department and a minister’s private office, Dunk was hardly a match for the two doctors, Evatt and Burton.

Dunk guided the public service through the difficult years of the 1950s, a time of marked parsimony. He was acutely alive to the seemingly intractable problems confronting the public service as it developed – a combination of statutory and industrial relations complexity. Accordingly, over several years, he set about persuading Wheeler to return to Canberra from Geneva where he had been Treasurer of the International Labour Office since 1953. He succeeded in the face of the Treasury’s strong support for Harry Bland’s claim to the post. Wheeler took over as Chairman in the first days of 1961.

Dunk presided over introduction of computing into the public service – it was one of the first organisations in Australia to apply ADP to its operations. Convinced that the public service could not be efficient while it was divided between Canberra and Melbourne, and dispersed around Melbourne, Dunk successfully added his weight to the case of developing Canberra as the national capital and headquarters of the public service. On another front, he guided through and effected important changes in recruitment, opening the door a little further for graduate recruitment. The vehicle for this change was the Prime Minister’s Committee on Public Service Recruitment chaired by Sir Richard Boyer and whose most influential member was R. S. Parker of the Australian National University (he would have liked to be more influential). Dunk was knighted in 1957.

Another significant figure was the Solicitor-General until 1946, Sir George Knowles, who was subsequently high commissioner in Pretoria. The redoubtable Alf Rattigan, Chairman of the Tariff Board from 1963 and tireless campaigner against protection, was another who in style was more reminiscent of older traditions and practices.

Back to the Canberra knights

In this generation of officialdom, 1936 until the early/mid-1980s, though they may in shorthand be described as the Canberra knights, the full story is more complex.

It is now almost impossible to recapture fully the ambience of government in this era, the era of the typewriter and the file, of the trunk call, the telex and the stencil. STD and photocopying were well in the future; the Internet and the mobile phone had not yet entered the imagination.

Until the 1950s, the highest levels of Commonwealth administration were centred on Parliament House, East Block and West Block. West Block itself housed the Treasury, Attorney-General’s and External Affairs, among others. In the 1960s the Administration Building, now the John Gorton Building, was completed, used first by Defence and later by External Affairs, Trade and Attorney-General’s. All were nevertheless still in the Parliamentary Triangle, within easy walking distance of Parliament House.

In the late 1960s, the Administration Building was matched on the western side by the Treasury Building where, in addition to the Treasury, the Tax Office and the Bureau of Census & Statistics could be found. On the eastern side of King’s Avenue, in temporary buildings since demolished, the departments of Immigration, Customs & Excise, and Primary Industry, and the Public Service Board (itself!), were housed.

Most department heads and other senior officials would see their ministers every day if they were in Canberra. It was a short walk from the office to Parliament House. Apart from travel to Melbourne and less frequently Sydney, officials rarely travelled from Canberra which, until the 1960s, was located in the central basin.

The knights were largely to be found in the parliamentary triangle – Treasury, External (now Foreign) Affairs, Defence (located at Russell Hill from the 1960s), the Prime Minister’s Department, Trade (later Trade and Industry), Attorney-General’s and, because of its Defence connections, Repatriation (now Veterans’ Affairs). They were occasionally to be found elsewhere – Immigration; National Development; Customs and Excise; Education and Science; Health; and Aboriginal Affairs come to mind. It was only in later times that they were to be found, geographically, in Civic or Woden, but certainly not Belconnen or Tuggeranong.

The public service knights were not all to be found in Canberra. At a time when significant departments were still based in Melbourne, knights could occasionally be found in the Post Office; Labour and National Service; Works and Housing; and Civil Aviation. (Indeed, after the war, Shedden himself was based in Melbourne.)

Not all the knights were in the public service. The chiefs of the fighting services stand out in this category. In Sydney, knights headed the Commonwealth Bank and the Reserve Bank (the Governor of which was usually created a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) rather than the more humble Knight Bachelor); also in Sydney was the General Manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the Managing Director of QANTAS. One knight could even be found in Cooma – Sir William Hudson, chief executive of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority.

Not everyone took a knighthood. The most conspicuous abstainer was Dr Nugget Coombs, notwithstanding Prime Minister Billy McMahon’s offer of a KCMG. (A few people have claimed to have turned down offers of knighthoods or lesser Imperial honours but it is not invariably clear that the offer actually came their way!)

Knighthoods generally went to heads of department and other chief executives. Sir Richard Randall was knighted whilst still Deputy Secretary at the Treasury. Most public service knights who were not First Division officers were senior diplomats. It was necessary to ensure Australian diplomats were not too obviously seen to be of lower rank than their British counterparts. Even so, a knighted Australian ambassador in Washington was invariably of lower rank than the UK ambassador but it is unlikely that most people in the capital would have been sufficiently acquainted with the nuances of the pecking order to realise this.

As the 1950s drew to a close, the public service elites were prominent in foundation of the Commonwealth Club. In the late 1960s, when the Gorton Government, perceived as anti-establishment, was in office, the Commonwealth Club was something of a symbol of establishment resistance to the new regime. This owed something to appointment of Len Hewitt as secretary to the Prime Minister’s Department, replacing Sir John Bunting who had been ousted. Hewitt was reportedly not a member of the Commonwealth Club though in more recent times he has listed the Melbourne Club and several London clubs in his Who’s Who in Australia entry.

Everything was thus in place for the colourful portrayal of Gorton, the Tory larrikin as John Howard portrays him, and the formidable secretary of his department, against Sir Frederick Wheeler, the dour proponent of due process and frank and fearless advice. Fertile territory for the gossip angle on government and, as such, readily exploited. But it might be recalled that when the financial journalist Tom FitzGerald was recruited to the RCAGA, it was at the Commonwealth Club that Dr Coombs entertained him at lunch (a rendezvous which did not go unnoticed by Sir Frederick Wheeler.)

The end of the era

Deciding when this discernible era comes to an end is less clear-cut than working out its commencement. It will be obvious that the era is very much the Keynesian ascendancy and in many senses it is in decline by the early 1970s.

The protracted removal of Sir Arthur Tange from External Affairs, over the four years 1961-65, is an important sign that what the Public Service Act then called permanent heads were not as permanent as they may have looked. In Tange’s case, the Cabinet was advised that, except where misconduct was involved, he could only be removed by abolishing the department! Eventually Tange went to India where he replaced Sir James Plimsoll as high commissioner; Plimsoll in turn returned to Canberra to replace Tange as head of the department.

The removal of Sir John Bunting as secretary to the Prime Minister’s Department in 1968 by the newly-appointed prime minister, John Gorton, was certainly a decisive moment in the erosion of high office in the public service. So, likewise, was the even swifter removal of his successor, Sir Lenox Hewitt, when Gorton lost the prime ministership in March 1971 and was replaced by William McMahon. Bunting remained formally in situ for two months; Hewitt had little more than two days. Hewitt himself described his removal as “the first public execution of a permanent head”. In both these instances the displaced department head was accommodated in a new department – the Department of the Cabinet Office in Bunting’s case; what eventually became known as the Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts in Hewitt’s.

The arrival of the Whitlam Government in December 1972 definitely brought upheaval. The Minister for Labour, Clyde Cameron, simply refused to work with the inherited head of the department, Dr Hal Cook, whom he had never met. Cook took an ambassadorial post in Geneva, as did another displaced department head, George Warwick Smith, who lost his post when the Department of the Interior was dismembered.

The department heads were unsettled in the Whitlam years by which time abolition of a department was now seen as a viable option whenever an unwanted department head hesitated. The appointment late in 1973 of Alan Renouf as secretary to the Department of Foreign Affairs ruffled quite a few feathers. Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor-General at the time, recorded in his notes of discussions with the Prime Minister, Whitlam:

He[Whitlam] said that the whole of the ‘public service establishment’ (Bunting, Waller, Cooley, Tange, et al) had been against Renouf and in favour of Shann and had tried to keep him from making the appointment. He took responsibility for it. I repeated that I thought Renouf a better man than Shann, who, in my view, was a bit too shrewd, too partial to his own favourites, and apt to talk too freely. Renouf, however, would need underpinning on the administrative side. Whitlam said that an attempt had been made to get him to take either Plimsoll or Tange back as Secretary to Foreign Affairs instead of Renouf. (Discussion with Whitlam, [27] August, 1973. NAA M1767, Folders of copies of papers maintained by Governor General, 1969-1974. Item 4)

A major assault came in mid-1975, in the wake of the Loans affair referred to earlier. Whitlam determined to dislodge Sir Frederick Wheeler from the Treasury on the basis that he had lost confidence in both Wheeler and the Treasury. A bid to activate disciplinary action against Wheeler failed after vigorous counter-argument from Clarrie Harders, secretary at Attorney-General’s. Whitlam then tried a carrot – in this case, an offer of appointment as Governor of the Reserve Bank. Wheeler still resisted, not least because he was not keen on the person most mentioned as a likely replacement. He wondered if he was the only person ever to turn down an appointment to the governorship of a central bank!

The Fraser Government’s arrival in 1975, though there was some talk of restoring traditions, as there had been when McMahon became prime minister in 1971, also brought continued institutional weakening of the top public service offices. Ministers and, more particularly prime ministers, were becoming more restive and more assertive.

Whitlam had appointed three of his private secretaries as heads of department – John Menadue to Prime Minister and Cabinet; Peter Wilenski to Labor and Immigration; and Jim Spigelman to Media. Fraser kept Menadue at Prime Minister and Cabinet until the spring of 1976 when he left to take up the ambassadorship in Tokyo. But the other two were left to find new assignments immediately. Wilenski, after an interval, went to the Australian Graduate School of Management, from which base he conducted a review of the New South Wales Public Service commissioned by the recently elected Wran Government; Spigelman spent some time at the Law Reform Commission before eventually going to the Sydney bar.

Fraser went a step further. On the advice of Sir Henry Bland, who headed what was called the Administrative Review Committee, he secured amendments to the Public Service Act to ensure that any future appointment of a department head had to be vetted by the Public Service Board. Anyone, official or otherwise, not designated “an established candidate” by the Board, could only be appointed for the period of the appointing government. The legislation also made provision for appointments to be made on the basis of recommendation by a panel headed by the chairman of the Public Service Board.

This legislation ran effectively from 1977 until 1984. All department head appointments in this period were of “established” candidates. The Bland system was, thus, only ever partially activated. It was probably never intended that it would be used more than very sparingly.

The new procedures had the effect of diminishing the power of the Board chairman who now had to operate within a statutorily prescribed structure instead of having great flexibility. This new, more formal procedure provided the means for the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to forge a new role in relation to the public service; he was almost invariably a member of the selection panels.

During 1979, both Wheeler and Sir Arthur Tange retired. Tange had made a big comeback after leaving India. Following the 1969 Federal election he found himself with three offers: returning to External Affairs as secretary; going to Defence as secretary; or going to Washington as ambassador. He chose the Defence post.  Over nine years he became the architect of a unified Defence administration.

It was the fate of Wheeler, by contrast, to preside over the division of the Treasury in 1976. Henceforth, public expenditure management functions were handled by a new Department of Finance. The only satisfaction, which Treasury traditionalists could derive from this course of events, was that it did not entail adoption of a proposal of the RCAGA to establish a Department of Industry and the Economy.

In 1984, the Public Service Act was again amended, removing the procedures incorporated in 1976 but also further loosening the tenure provisions for department heads; department heads, henceforth to be called secretaries, could now be readily removed, the only safeguard, if it can be so described, being requirement of a report (note: not a recommendation) from the chairman of the Public Service Board. The Act was also amended to underline the subordination of secretaries to ministers by addition of the words in italics:

The Permanent Head of a Department shall, under the minister, be responsible for its general working and for all the business thereof, and shall advise the Minister in all matters relating to the Department.

Towards the end of 1984 John Stone, head of the Treasury since 1979, left the Treasury registering strong dissent about what he described at “Public Service Reform (sic!).” Stone accepted no honours and disclaimed descriptions as a mandarin (as did most department heads, especially after Yes, Minister reached Australian TV screens).

In 1981 and 1982, the last department heads were knighted – Sir William Cole (Chair, Public Service Board) and Sir Peter Lawler (Administrative Services).

Following the election of the Hawke Government, Lawler went to Dublin as ambassador (he was also accredited to the Holy See). Very much more seriously, the Hawke Government did not reappoint Cole when his term as chairman expired in October 1984 – the first occasion this had happened to a chairman. Peter Wilenski was appointed in his stead. Cole eventually went to Defence as secretary until retiring in 1986. He was the last knight to occupy a head of department post. Sir Geoffrey Yeend, secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet since 1978, had left earlier in the year.

The age of the Canberra knights was certainly now over, in every sense. Their successors were no longer knights and all but a few have to settle for appointment as Officer of the Order of Australia. A few – Prime Minister and Cabinet; Treasury; Defence; and sometimes Foreign Affairs – become Companions of the Order of Australia.

Tenure is uncertain and can be brief. The Governor of the Reserve Bank outshines his Treasury counterpart who now also stands second in the public service pecking order even to the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This is a bad move. The Treasury remains the fount of business, as it has been historically. Moreover, capable heads of Treasury are must harder to come by than capable heads of Prime Minister’s. The short list for the latter is much longer than the long list for the former.

The Solicitor-General is a larger figure than the secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department. The main employee enhancements have been in arrangements for superannuation and redundancy pay!

The Canberra knights in retrospect

This generation of senior public servants, 1936-1986, was significant for a good deal more than the fact that, having reached the highest levels of the bureaucratic greasy pole, they joined the knightly ranks of an order of chivalry. The comparable generation in Ottawa had similar distinction but it was not signalled by any titles and only, eventually, by very sparing post-nominals. Indeed, the distinction does not especially attach to the individuals or the group of individuals. But it does have much to do with the stage of Australia’s development, including governmental and administrative development, and the circumstances of the time, especially the war. It related, most particularly, to the opportunities of the times.

So, just what was the distinction of the knights and their generation, apart from academic accomplishment of a high order. First, it was the nature of academic accomplishment. Many of these men – and they were pretty well all men – took their university degrees part-time. For them, following school, and sometimes, as for Wheeler, even before, higher education and formative vocational experience went hand-in-hand.

The education they received was, likewise, distinctive. Classes were small and, above all, they were educated before text books had established an iron grip over learning. Those who read economics, as so many did, it was still in the Adam Smith mould, before mathematics became so important. A number read galley proofs of Keynes’s General Theory. If they studied ancient history, they often read Thucydides, Cicero and Tacitus (sometimes in original languages).

Second, when they entered government they filled a vacuum. They did not augment policy capacity; they were, in large measure, the policy capacity. They did not, in any ordinary sense, work their way up the hierarchy. Almost immediately, as has been observed, they worked either directly for ministers or for department heads and other top officials. They created a new form of organisation, not simply an instrument for executive action but one with thinking and research capacity.

A special feature of this era is the huge canvas on which they worked, both domestically and internationally. They were in new fields and many of the old puritanical/parsimonious inhibitions were starting, if fairly slowly, to drop away. What marked out the era were the opportunities. Nationally, the Commonwealth was claiming its ascendancy in the federation in economic, industrial and social terms; nothing symbolised this so much as Commonwealth assumption of the income tax and the powers over public expenditure thus acquired.

Internationally, Australia was establishing itself, regionally and in international organisations, the United Nations being most notable. It was increasingly a direct participant in international relations instead of, as previously, usually working within the umbrella of Empire. (It was with the outbreak of war in 1939 that Australia established its first missions abroad (apart from London) – in Washington, DC, Tokyo and [China], and also in Ottawa.

This generation, to repeat, had unusual opportunities and the participants of the time made much of them. Later generations can convincingly claim to have taken advantage of opportunities available in their time, but these opportunities have been more modest in scope.

The officials of the war and post-war era worked in particular fields of policy for long periods and had long tenure at the top. Shedden headed Defence for 19 years; Coombs was Governor of the Commonwealth Bank, then the Reserve Bank, from 1949 until 1968; Wilson had 15 years at the Treasury and another eight as chairman of the Commonwealth Bank (and seven at QANTAS); Bailey was Solicitor-General for 19 years; Bland, 16 years at Labour; Sir Edwin Hicks, 12 years at Defence after five at Air; Tange, 11 years at External Affairs and, later, nine at Defence; Sir Giles Chippendall, nine years at the Post Office; Dunk, 13 years at the Public Service Board; Wheeler, 11 years at the Board followed by eight at the Treasury; Randall, five years as Secretary to the Treasury preceded by 13  as the ranking officer; Brown, nine years at Prime Minister’s; Bunting, Cabinet Secretary for 17 years, preceded by four years as deputy secretary in the department; Crawford, a decade at Commerce and Agriculture, then Trade; Sir Alan Westerman, 11 years at Trade.

Simply to list these long tenures should not be read as advocating this as good practice. Certainly, Shedden eventually tried the patience of many, including the Prime Minister. And Bland admitted that he was getting bored half way through his time at Labour (partly accounting for his very strong interest in appointment as chairman of the Public Service Board when Dunk retired).

Nowadays, very occasionally, a secretary will have a decade in a job, but not often; not too many even have a decade at secretary level. The more astute, after five or six years as a secretary, will find a comfortable perch among statutory offices.

Canberra was not a Camelot but the Canberra knights had some similarities with the Knights of the Round Table. Informally, they had a code of behaviour for they saw themselves not as clerks but every bit as professional as doctors and lawyers, and certainly as engineers. The essence of the code was impartiality; ethical conduct; frank and fearless advice to ministers based on intensive and exacting analysis; due process; administration based on law; and what amounted to frugality in deployment of public funds. They were specialists in governmental, ministerial and parliamentary business.

Insights into this feature of the mandarin age can be found in the Garran Orations of Paul Hasluck (1968); Wheeler (1979); and Tange (1981), as well as Roland Wilson’s Giblin lecture of 1976 and articles by Crawford. And, like the Knights of the Round Table, there were rivalries, compelling rivalries. Apart from those with a personal element, of which there were quite a few, the rivalries were over policy (no doubt, in some instances, with a perceptible measure of what is now called empire-building).

The big clashes were between those concerned with growth and those who gave priority to distribution and fostering equality. There were also arguments about the extent of government intervention in economic matters, and those who preferred greater reliance on markets. As the 1950s proceeded, some officials eyed the activities of the Commissariat du Plan in France with envy; as time went on, others also saw the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan as a model which might be adapted for Australian use.

In the public domain, these rivalries came to a head in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the credit squeeze of 1960, which caused the Menzies Government so much angst at the 1961 Federal elections. The government, after a period, appointed a committee of enquiry into the economy. It was headed by Dr (later Sir James) Vernon, Managing Director of CSR. The members were Sir John Crawford (deputy chair), D. W. Molesworth and Kenneth Myer (Melbourne businessmen), and Professor Peter Karmel, an academic economist and university administrator.

The committee, very well resourced for the time, contested Treasury views on a number of matters (for example, foreign investment). It was notably timid (even evasive) on the tariff, perhaps having judged that the time was not ripe for an assault on this icon of public policy. And it proposed an advisory council on economic matters, rejection of which was the centrepiece in Prime Minister Menzies’ rejection of the report. Something of a manifesto for interventionists, the report was a significant episode in the now long-running competition between the Treasury and those seeking to clip its wings. Above all, the circumstances of government in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s and those half a century later were markedly different. Officials were advisers most proximate to ministers and they often had exclusive access to what information was available, but recall that this was essentially the pre-computer age.

Comparison with recent decades is neither easy nor clear-cut. Certainly, contemporary department secretaries have much to contend with – ministerial staff; the 24-hour media cycle; the burdens of administrative review; and maybe no longer have an advantage concerning information. On the other hand, government is now vastly better resourced. Departmental staffs are much larger, better educated and not nearly so occupied with “mechanical” work (to use Northcote-Trevelyan terminology). A contemporary public service should be superior in many respects, just as the word processor has many advantages over the quill.

Questions also arise concerning the accountability and power of officials in the war and war-time period. Ministerial control was exercised at two levels. Prime ministers can be formidable presences. This was certainly so with Chifley and Menzies. Both were endowed with a sense of strategy, purpose and priority, not qualities of which every successor can boast. Menzies had a Rooseveltian gift for fostering internal competition, advocates and opponents of particular approaches acting as checks on one another. It was a governmental variant of adversarial practice with which he was familiar in the courts.

Any government which survives must have a complement of senior ministers who understand the basic role of ministers is tell officials what the public will not stand (a precept first enunciated by the late nineteenth century Liberal minister in the United Kingdom, Sir William Harcourt).

An appropriate note on which to conclude is the question of whether the mandarin age was a golden age? This has long agitated major figures in the succeeding management age. An apprehension arose in the early years of the Hawke Government that the emerging generation lacked the eminence and gravitas of their knighted predecessors. Though a contrived apprehension, mainly promoted by disappointed fans of the Whitlam Government, there was much heat in what was, of sorts, the public service history wars (and also a curious case of intergenerational public service bashing).

Even those familiar with the life and times of what one of the earliest of the new generation of departmental secretaries disparagingly called the “good old days” would be circumspect about lauding war and post-war period as a golden age. The reasons for such reticence have been extensively covered in this essay. Shakespeare has provided wise counsel which these protagonists should heed: “all that glisters is not gold”.