Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff

Professor Anne Tiernan from the 
School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University is also the co-author of The Gate Keepers compiled from interviews with the most prominent among the CEOs of the prime minister’s office over decades. The book uncovers hidden wisdom about this complicated position and unparalleled insights into how things really work at the centre of Australia’s governing networks. Anne Tiernan addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 13 October 2015.

LESSONS FROM PRIME MINISTERS’ CHIEFS OF STAFF

ANNE TIERNAN

Thanks Gerard and Anne. And sincere thanks to The Sydney Institute for your interest in the book on Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff that I published with my colleague Professor Rod Rhodes in mid-2014. In fact, there are two books: firstly an academic volume Lessons in Governing: A Profile of PM’s Chiefs of Staff; and the trade version, The Gatekeepers, aimed at a general readership, both published by Melbourne University Press.

Tonight’s seminar is an opportunity to discuss in detail eight “lessons” that the cohort of eleven CoS who participated in our study told us they learned from their experience of the job. To contextualise and frame those lessons, I first need to provide a number of things. There is the background to our study of PM’s Chiefs of Staff, including a summary of our methodology and approach and a brief overview of how the job has evolved since its formal emergence in 1972. I’ll then report how those who have done the job describe the work of the CoS, and their views of how and why it has changed over its recent history, moving on to the “eight lessons”, before offering some reflections on the problems that have bedevilled our three most recent prime ministers. These have been widely attributed to the capacity and performance of successive Prime Ministers’ offices and, by implication, recent PM’s Chiefs of Staff.

Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff study: an overview

In the US, the job of Chief of Staff to the President has been described as a “javelin catcher”. This acknowledges the challenging and unpredictable nature of the issues the CoS will need to deal with everyday. It also acknowledges that if an issue has reached the CoS, it’s because no one elsewhere in the system has been able to solve it. So the stakes and the expectations are high. We know this because we watched Leo McGarry do the job for seven seasons of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Numerous books and articles have been written on the President’s CoS, including by people who have done it.

The phrase that participants in our study coined to characterise their work as Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff is “pest controller, shock absorber”. This vivid and quintessentially Australian metaphor captures what a CoS does to support and protect the Prime Minister – both the office and the person who holds the office. They run a Prime Minister’s office that runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year and which, under Tony Abbott, numbered 58 staff.[1]

The CoS works far from the public eye in the shadows of Australian politics, although in the past fifteen or so years, and much more noticeably in the past five years, CoS have become increasingly public figures. They attract significant media and public scrutiny; their performance is seen as inextricably linked to their prime minister’s performance and effectiveness. The PM’s CoS is the hub of a court or network that supports prime ministers. They are the pivotal point at which the political and the administrative meet.

Despite its undoubted significance, little is known about Chiefs of Staff or their work. Individuals appointed to serve as a PM’s CoS have had very little by way of advice and experience to draw on in contemplating how they might help their prime minister to make a successful transition to government and establish systems and arrangements that would enable them to govern effectively. Insights and advice have passed from previous incumbents, but this has been episodic and generally along partisan lines.

I am among a very small group of Australian scholars whose primary interest is the work of politics and governing. Some of you might have seen my earlier book on ministerial staffers. Among other things, that research introduced me to the presidential studies literature and the extensive work done to understand the Executive Office of the Presidency and the key staff positions that support the US President. I was impressed that there, former Chiefs of Staff had twice come together to discuss the job and its challenges. Those studies aimed to help an incoming president to make a successful transition to government and to “hit the ground running”.

In our terms, they were building the institutional memory of the White House staff. Institutional memory is assumed to exist in Westminster-style political systems; it resides in the career public service which, in theory at least, provides continuity of administration and knowledge and experience of what has gone before. Institutional memory is inherently absent in partisan organisations like the ones that serve American presidents. There are concerns that institutional memory has been eroded in Westminister-style political systems, particularly those that, like ours, have become “hybridised”. That is, where responsibility for advising and supporting decision-makers is shared between partisan staff in larger, more active private offices; and career bureaucrats in departments. I was interested to see whether the American methodology could be successfully adapted to the Australian context.

Our study aimed to build a nuanced understanding of the CoS role from the perspective of those who had held it. We – researchers and the CoS who participated – proceeded from the shared premise that what they learned about political leadership and governing might help future CoS. Given the gap between what is written and their first-hand knowledge of life in prime ministers’ offices, our study provided an opportunity for CoS to record in their own words what it was like to “be there”. They could also draw lessons to pass on to future CoS and others serving in, or aspiring to, a similar position. We hoped together to help build the institutional memory of the PMO.

In late 2009 then, with funding support from the ANZSOG Research program, eleven former prime ministerial Chiefs of Staff, spanning governments from Fraser to Rudd, came together to take part in two closed, round-table focus group discussions. Each session aimed to elicit participants’ views on the following topics:

• the development and evolution of the job of CoS;
• how different individuals approached the task of working with the Prime Minister;
• the key duties and responsibilities that they performed;
• the challenges confronting the CoS at different stages of the governing cycle;
• lessons that might be passed on to their successors.

Between 1972 and June 2013 when our study ended, 24 individuals held the CoS position (that number is now 27). Seven attended the first focus group in Canberra on 1 September 2009. These were Dale Budd and David Kemp (Fraser), Graham Evans (Hawke), Don Russell and Geoff Walsh (Keating), Grahame Morris and Arthur Sinodinos (Howard). A second focus group, held in Sydney on 11 December 2009, was attended by four former CoS: Sandy Hollway (Hawke), Allan Hawke (Keating), Nicole Feely (Howard) and David Epstein (Rudd).

My Griffith colleague, Professor Patrick Weller AO, helped to facilitate the focus group sessions. At the time, we were doing research for our book Learning to be a Minister (Melbourne University Press, 2013). Participants agreed that we could record, transcribe and quote from proceedings.

Research design

Briefly for those who might be interested, our study of prime ministers’ CoS used methods drawn from the broad toolkit of interpretive political science. Interpretive political studies emphasise the importance of meaning. So our analysis focused on the beliefs and practices of those who have held the job of CoS; the practices they described and the stories that they told about supporting prime ministers, from Fraser to Rudd. Both books, the longer academic one and the shorter trade version, use the language of the CoS to convey what it’s like to “be there” and what they regard as important. That seemed to us a more credible strategy than imposing categories that we as researchers might consider significant, but that miss the subtleties and nuance of the CoS experience. The theoretical point has been lost on at least one generalist reviewer. It is not ours, but the Chiefs of Staff’s accounts of their experience and what they learned (see Rhodes and Tiernan 2015).

Findings

So what did the Chiefs of Staff tell us? What did we learn from more than nine hours of discussions and 230 pages of transcripts? I should note the focus groups were a key, but not our only research strategy. The “events of June 2010” had significant implications for the project and for the book as I had originally envisaged it. We had to do a lot of follow-up work to capture the development of the CoS job between 2010 and 2013. I can talk a bit more about that in the Q&A session if people wish. It’s canvassed at length in the book.

Because our time is limited, I’ll talk only briefly about the development and evolution of the job and its multi-faceted nature. That will give me time to share with you the lessons the CoS say they learned and the advice they thought worth offering future incumbents.

Evolution of the job

Our Chiefs of Staff identified six stages in the evolution of the CoS position. We argue that from 1905 to 1980, the “public service model” was predominant. There were sporadic efforts to redefine the work of the PMO under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. These early changes led to a more expansive conception of “supporting the Prime Minister” in Fraser’s final term from 1980 to 1983. Under Bob Hawke the CoS was still an experienced senior public servant, whose wider range of managerial responsibilities included ensuring that the advice provided by an expanded PMO complemented the advice from public service departments. In more recent practice, under Prime Ministers Keating, Howard and Rudd, the CoS assumed greater responsibility for coordination across government and developed a strong political rather than managerial focus. I’d venture that the same is probably true of the job under Tony Abbott.

Our respondents agreed that 1991 represented a “turning point” in the evolution of the CoS job, while the Howard period is seen as the “triumph of the political”. The CoS insisted that a broad connotation of political is essential to understanding the support needs of present-day prime ministers. Across the partisan divide, the CoS saw their job as supporting the prime minister to achieve their agenda. Their primary political focus encompasses coordination in the endless quest for coherence amidst the fragmentation and complexity of network governance and helping the prime minister to manage his or her many dependencies.

Our six stages in the development of the CoS role (see Figure 1 below) reflect the centralisation of authority and duties in the PMO and the politicisation of the appointment. They also reflect the pressures on PMs and efforts to evolve strategies to cope with domestic and international pressures and burgeoning dependencies.

But the reverse side of the centralising coin is dependence. Doing more means you have to deal with more actors and no matter how much central players might wish it to be otherwise, prime ministers cannot command compliance. Instead they have to bargain, strike a deal and get people on side. A key part of the CoS job then is to manage the PM’s dependencies.

Figure 1: Stages in the Evolving Role of the Chief of Staff

The work

There is no job description for the prime minister’s Chief of Staff. People have improvised and reinvented the job according to the needs, even whims, of their PM. Chiefs of Staff perform many tasks in supporting the prime minister. These include: protecting the prime minister, running the office, crisis management, controlling the agenda, policy coordination and political management. In the books we deal with the tasks in two chapters – one on protecting the prime minister; the other on managing the repertoire according to the personality and style of the PM and his or her needs at different phases of their tenure.

There are continuities in the job from one PM to another, but equally, there are important differences associated with prime ministerial style. Further, each CoS brings his or her conception of the job to the task. The challenge and the art is to “manage the mix”. There is a premium on getting the right fit for a particular PM at a particular time.

Eight lessons

The West Wing television series popularised the “tradition” that an outgoing president writes a letter to his replacement. It is left in the Oval Office for the new incumbent to read on inauguration. We asked Chiefs of Staff to reflect on mistakes they had made and lessons learned from their time in the job and to “write a memo” to their successor. We asked them what advice and wisdom they would pass on.

The Chiefs of Staff identified eight lessons. I’ll cover them briefly here before turning to what we think (and recent experience suggests) is the most significant of these lessons – the urgent need to preserve institutional memory.

Lesson one: know the boss

The task of a Chief of Staff is multifaceted. There are many ways of supporting and protecting both the office of Prime Minister and the person in that office. Chiefs of Staff accounts of working with PMs stressed contingency, especially personality and working style, individual preferences and strengths. Always it was the leader who set the tone; the arrangements and processes described were framed as attempts to provide what the PM needed or wanted from his or her PMO.

Lesson two: run the office

Running the office has become more important as the PMO has grown in size, become more functionally specialised, dispersed and responsible for coordination. US presidents learned in the 1970s that growing personal staff capacities must themselves be coordinated and managed. Australian political leaders have been slow to recognise this organisational imperative (Tiernan and Pfiffner 2014).

Running the office covers the routines for managing the diary and paper; a clear allocation of responsibilities between the public service and the private office and among members of the PMO. It also includes recruiting the necessary array of talent and managing the resulting mix. But the first and most critical task for any prime minister is to choose their Chief of Staff.

Aside from Hawke, whose choice of senior officials as CoS was deliberate and effective in fashioning advisory arrangements that suited his personality and style, recent Australian prime ministers have appointed people they know and trust to the CoS position. Many of the Chiefs of Staff in our sample had some background and experience in government, although Arthur Sinodinos is the last CoS to have had much experience in the bureaucracy.

As we discuss in the book, the career path matters. The demise of the public service career trajectory has significant, but not well understood implications. Political parties provide no learning or preparation for government during the long years in Opposition, whereas for previous generations, working in the public service provided opportunities to grow and develop. No such grounding or pathway is available for the politically appointed CoS.

The demise of the bureaucratic career path has other implications that have become increasingly obvious under the three most recent Australian prime ministers. Chiefs of Staff with bureaucratic or management experience acknowledge the importance of administrative processes in helping the PMO to cope with the “sheer volume of work”. Alternatively, it might include developing processes for deciding the priority of briefs and correspondence with which a prime minister must deal. between them.

The Chiefs of Staff also emphasised the importance of clearly defined responsibilities not only in the PMO but also between prime ministers and their office and the public service. Dale Budd, Graham Evans and Sandy Hollway described the CoS job as being one of “co-equals” with other senior staff in the PMO. All three stressed the importance of “not getting in the way of the specialists” and the need for the CoS to adjudicate between some big personalities, all of whom are competing for the affection of the prime minister. It is a challenge for the CoS if specialists have differing ideas.

Lesson three: being here tomorrow: coping and survival

The PMO is political and shaped by perceived political imperatives. But no matter how much attention is devoted to developing support for the PM, events will prevail. As a political office, there is a core belief in coping with the changes that affect the PM, and with coordinating the networks across government. The Chiefs of Staff stress that politics is broadly connoted. The art is coping. The aim is survival and re-election.

Grahame Morris emphasised the need for continuity and calm. Other Chiefs of Staff agreed. Cool heads are needed, as is the ability to distinguish between an issue and a crisis.

Lesson four: focus on priorities

This covers ensuring that prime ministers have an opportunity to focus on the things they want to do and establishing a limited number of priorities to act as a strategic guide for the government. Allan Hawke enjoined his successors: “Make sure that you and the prime minister get to do at least one thing per week that you want to do, so you don’t get overtaken by events.”

Lesson five: control the agenda

Unexpected events and crises are inevitable. Day-to-day pressures and demands overwhelm efforts to take a longer view. Nonetheless, agenda control is paramount. Arthur Sinodinos told us the Howard Government learned from the setbacks of 1997 that it had to keep dominating the agenda, using the power of incumbency to do so. Other Chiefs of Staff agreed. Controlling the agenda requires a Prime Minister to maintain a delicate balance between priorities and commitments. The lesson for the CoS is to find ways of striking this delicate balance and refocusing and reorienting when the government has been blown off course – of “recovering the initiative”, as Arthur Sinodinos described it.

Lesson six: get the right people in the room

Sandy Hollway’s advice to a future CoS was “Never be the sole point of contact to the Prime Minister. It’s about turning the switches and letting the right people in the door at the right time.” Of course, it is not just about getting the right people in the room. It is also about keeping others out. Sometimes, it is ministers who need to be reminded about what they can and cannot do – but this can be risky for the CoS, if he or she is seen to overstep the bounds of acceptable behaviour for an unelected official.

Lesson seven: manage dependencies

Again the lesson is easily illustrated, this time by Grahame Morris: “He used to place great importance on the party room meeting, on the Cabinet, on the leadership meetings and on the tactics meeting. So you sort of had three big touch points most days, or certainly most weeks with the colleagues.” The Labor caucus is one example. As Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard learned, its factional leaders cannot be ignored. But we know now that the same is true for the Coalition where colleagues in the Liberal and National party rooms need to be kept on-side.

Lesson eight: preserve institutional memory

The need to preserve institutional memory is our contribution to the lessons for Chiefs of Staff. Its importance was noted by some, but only in passing. Grahame Morris observed: “I think a sense of corporate history is important in the office.” Kevin Rudd, when reflecting on his torrid experience in office, also thought he should have paid more attention to “institutional wisdom”. We believe much more needs to be done to preserve institutional memory.

The decisions of Australian prime ministers to shift their main source of advice and support from PM&C to the PMO and to staff the PMO with personal loyalists, often from outside the public service, have had marked effects on the centre’s institutional memory. Partisan organisations like the PMO are inherently, indeed deliberately, temporary. They exist to serve a particular prime minister and are staffed mostly by people selected by them. PMO staffers’ backgrounds and preparations for the job differ from the traditional career pathway. Besides, their tenure in their position is bound to that of the prime minister who chooses them.

Partisan organisations lack the storage locations for institutional memory available to those that are more stable and continuing. Pollitt (2009: 202–3) notes that these include: the experience and knowledge of existing staff (what’s in their heads); technical systems, including electronic databases and various kinds of paper records; the management system comprising organisational routines and standard operating procedures developed and refined through experience. Nor do they inherit the beliefs and practices of a long-established organisation, which provide some certainty and an element of continuity. Instead, they rely on the aspirations and beliefs of the prime minister and other key individuals, and perhaps the partisan traditions about how a Labor or Liberal prime minister approaches the tasks of governing.

At the change of government, each new PMO starts afresh, perhaps not even aware that “institutional amnesia” is built into their design. The likelihood of pathologies associated with “organisational forgetting” (see Pollitt 2000: 13–14; 2008) have increased because the flow of departmental officers to ministerial offices has declined. The Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 did not remove, as intended, the taint of partisanship that came from working in PMO. Public servants began to fear that working in the PMO could limit their future public service careers (see Tiernan 2007, chapter 3). There may be more continuity in the PMO after a leadership succession, but even then only a few former staff are likely to remain to serve a new Prime Minister.

A lack of institutional memory is a problem that recurs. With the move away from public service to political appointments, there has been a loss of institutional memory in departments about the court, which no longer have staff with court experience.

The dilemma is illustrated by the experience of Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. All three struggled to make a successful transition to government; to gain or retain control over their agenda; to coordinate their policies and project discipline and coherence across their ministerial teams. Such difficulties are often attributed to the pace and complexity of contemporary leadership and to the fragmentation and resource dependence inherent to network governance.

Rhodes and Tiernan (2014a and 2014b) acknowledge the contextual and contingent factors that undermine leaders’ efforts to assert central control, and the primacy of coping and survival in the face of uncertainty and the omnipresent threat of “rude surprises”. But we argue that a lack of institutional memory and the associated failure to learn from the experience of their predecessors together with their lack of organisational capacity are factors that must also be weighed in assessing leaders’ ability to make the most of the political capital available to them during the early stages of their tenure.

The problems and pathologies of a lack of institutional memory in the White House can cause an incoming President is well recognised among practitioners and scholars of the presidency (see, for example, Kumar, Edwards, Pfiffner and Sullivan 2003). A new White House’s need for experience has also penetrated the public consciousness. The penultimate episode of Aaron Sorkin’s much-loved television series The West Wing was entitled “Institutional Memory”. In it, the president-elect offered his predecessor’s Chief of Staff, C.J. Cregg, a position as Special Counsel in his fledgling administration. As she tried (unsuccessfully) to extract “transition memos” from outgoing President Jed Bartlett’s senior staff, the president-elect explained he wanted to avoid having to “reinvent the wheel”. It was fiction, but the sentiment was apt.

The lack of institutional memory available to Australian prime ministers is comparatively recent; and it is a problem of their own making. Rhodes and Tiernan (2014a and 2014b) argue the decisions of successive Australian prime ministers to shift their main source of advice and support from PM&C to the PMO, and to staff the PMO with personal loyalists, often from outside of the public service, have had profound consequences for the institutional memory of the prime ministership.

There is an energetic debate about whether to appoint public servants (the PPS tradition) or political staffers to the CoS position. A balance must be struck between public sector experience and expertise on the one hand and political (broadly defined) and communication skills on the other. Some of our Chiefs of Staff agreed the pendulum of responsiveness may have swung too far; some favoured changes that would see an increased focus on long-term policy and greater input from the public service. That has not been the trajectory of recent governments, so tensions remain.

We can be certain though that there can be no going back. The pressures to cope and survive are intense and public servants cannot do many of the things that modern Chiefs of Staff need to. But it may be worth considering alternatives to the current model. We think the next phase of public sector reform should explore ways of helping PMs and their CoS to preserve and enhance institutional memory.

I mentioned that the research with Chiefs of Staff was conducted in 2009. What accounted for the delay in publication? Quite simply, the Rudd and Gillard prime ministerships further highlighted the importance of the PM’s Chief of Staff and an effective Prime Minister’s Office. We devote a chapter of the book to “road-testing” our Chiefs of Staff’s eight lessons through the experience of the Rudd and Gillard’s private offices. Our aim here was to understand the importance of the CoS to prime ministerial effectiveness.

We concluded that, in different ways, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and their Chiefs of Staff offended, or failed to observe each of the eight lessons. In Rudd’s case this can be attributed to “extreme personality”; whereas for Gillard the issue was “extreme contingency”.

It is significant, I think, in light of recent developments, to appreciate that concerns about the operation of Tony Abbott’s private office began early in the Prime Minister’s tenure. As early as December 2013, just weeks into his prime ministership, there were rumblings about the operation and style of the Abbott PMO. We noted this at the time. Those of you who have read the book will know it begins with a review of criticisms that only grew, reaching a crescendo in February 2015, and in the bitter aftermath of Tony Abbott’s removal as PM a month or so ago.

I have argued elsewhere that criticisms of the “control freakery” of successive PMOs are so common to have become almost routine. That they persisted beyond the first year of government and have contributed to the demise of three prime ministers indicates a structural problem in our governance that warrants our attention. Rudd, Gillard and Abbott struggled I think, because of a lack of effective transition planning; difficulties in shifting from campaigning to governing; and an apparent incapacity to understand and find ways of navigating the realities of resource dependence in government.

If anything, the persistence of the difficulties of the Rudd and Gillard period into the Abbott years only reinforces my view about the problem of institutional memory and inability or unwillingness to learn from experience. There was evidence of a lack of priority-setting and agenda control; effective mechanisms for policy coordination and political management across the government. The symptoms of this deeper malaise was apparent in leaks, as well as in the numerous examples of ministers and officials being blindsided by decisions taken without consultation in an increasingly insular and isolated PMO.

Whether Malcolm Turnbull can give effect to the commitments that he has made to restore Cabinet government, to consult more effectively, and to use my words, to better manage his dependencies remains to be seen. He has made what looks to be a promising start, but then so did Kevin Rudd. The devil will be in the detail.

If we learned anything from this research into PM’s Chiefs of Staff, it’s that an effective CoS and PMO are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a successful tenure. They can help PMs with whatever they want to do and with how to do it. What they cannot do is stand in for PMs who do not know what they want to do or how to achieve it.

The CoS may be only one actor in the web of relationships surrounding a prime minister, but they are a crucial node in that elite network that makes public policy decisions, through setting the terms on which the rest of government interacts with the PM and his/her agenda. The job of the CoS is to help the Prime Minister to lead, but leadership has many faces. The CoS and the Prime Minister must share a common understanding of what kind of support they need in their particular context and in their particular time.

References

Kumar, M.J and Sullivan, T (Eds) (2003) The White House World: Transitions, Organisation, and Office Operations, Texas: Texas A & M University Press.

Pfiffner, J. and Tiernan, A. (2014) ’Chiefs of Staff to Presidents and Prime Ministers: A comparative perspective’. Presentation to the 110^th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association ‘Politics after the Digital Revolution’, Washington DC, 28^th-31 August. Available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475602

Pollitt, C. (2000) ‘Institutional amnesia: A paradox of the “Information Age”?’, Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, Vol. 81 Iss: 1, pp. 5 – 16.

Pollitt, C. (2008) Time, Policy, Management: Governing with the Past, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rhodes, R.A.W. and Tiernan, A. (2014a) Lessons in Governing: A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Rhodes, R.A.W. and Tiernan, A. (2014b) The Prime Ministers’ Gatekeepers. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Rhodes, R.A.W. and Tiernan, A. (2015) ‘Focus groups and prime ministers’ chiefs of staff”, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 4 Iss: 2, pp.208 – 222.

Tiernan, A. (2007) Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard. Crows Nest: UNSW Press.

Tiernan, A. and Weller, P. (2010) Learning to be a Minister: Heroic Expectations, Practical Realities. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Chiefs of Staff Focus Group, Canberra, 1 September 2009. From left: Anne Tiernan, Dale Budd (Fraser), Arthur Sinodinos, Grahame Morris (Howard), Don Russell (Keating), Patrick Weller, Geoff Walsh (Keating), Graham Evans (Hawke), David Kemp (Fraser). Image courtesy of Anne Tiernan.

Chiefs of Staff Focus Group, Sydney, 11 December 2009. From left: Anne Tiernan, Allan Hawke (Keating), Sandy Hollway (Hawke), Patrick Weller, Nicole Feely (Howard), David Epstein (Rudd). Image courtesy of Anne Tiernan.

[1] Department of Finance, ‘Personal Classifications as at 1 May 2015 Establishment Variances – Government, 1 February to 1 May 2015. Personal Positions as at 1 May 2015’. Answer to Questions on Notice from the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee, Budget Estimates Hearings. Tabled 28 May 2015. Available at: file:///Users/s294409/Downloads/tabled_finance_maps.pdf