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Shergold panned in Never Never Land

By Brian Johnstone - posted Wednesday, 1 December 2004


If my memory serves me correctly Peter Shergold, now the most powerful Commonwealth public servant in the country once starred in a public service pantomime as Peter Pan.

The memory popped into my head as I absorbed Shergold’s first reactions to the rampant public debate that followed his decision to dispatch the Australian Federal Police to raid the National Indigenous Times on Remembrance Day, to recover a number of sensitive Federal Cabinet documents. Mr Pan was not a happy man.

The Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet delivered his message in a speech to the Australian Graduate School of Management and Harvard Club of Australia at the National Press Club in Canberra last week. The address was titled: A State of the Unit and delivered, according to the good doctor, to a “large gathering of people who have a professional interest, training and considerable experience in project management”.

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It was all about “joined-up”, or whole-of-government approaches: the latest Commonwealth public service buzz-words, along with “horizontal integration”. Well into the speech he accused NIT and others of democratic sabotage. This is what he said:

... A whole of Government approach relies on the sharing of confidential and sensitive material between the relevant central, line and operational agencies. It depends on trust. Sadly, too often in recent times, that trust has been misplaced.

The focus on implementation is essentially the fulfillment of an implicit contract between the elected representatives of the Australian people in government and their agents in the public service. The ability of Ministers and their advisors to have a robust and constructive dialogue in which options and strategies can be freely represented and debated is an essential element of that contract.

The theft of the documents through which that debate is conducted is not just a criminal offence, it is also democratic sabotage.

Leaking blows apart the Westminster tradition of confidentiality upon which the provision of frank and fearless advice depends. So if some people seem surprised that I have called in the police to deal with leaks, they shouldn’t be - I always have and I always will ...

Democratic sabotage? Turn it up. The leaked documents he was referring to - and duly reported in a series of articles in this newspaper - documented the political and bureaucratic sabotage of a democratically elected body: ATSIC.

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In the process Cabinet was misled and seriously underfed on the frank and fearless front. Those submissions helped consign the notion of a democratically elected body for Aboriginal people to a Coalition "Never Never Land".

It was at this point the memory cells kicked up the pantomime Peter Pan and his immortal line “... all you need is faith and trust... and a little bit of pixie dust”.

It probably sprung from my reaction to the good doctor’s view of a secret public service. It’s the stuff of fantasy. One assumes it was delivered to appease Shergold’s political masters. He can’t really believe it? Can he? Thankfully, others share my incredulity.

An article in last week’s Media section of The Australian, headlined “Police raid reignites debate on leaking”, nailed the fantasy.

Reporters Katherine Murphy and Elizabeth Colman reported that the Howard Government “is asserting its right to crack down on officials who leak confidential documents to the media”. But academics and the media union are posing the question: Will Canberra be prepared to police itself?

The article continued: “Australian National University political science professor John Wanna says governments only police the material they don’t want to see brought into the public domain. ‘These judgments can be very arbitrary and asymmetrical’, Wanna says. ‘They essentially want to police the stuff they don’t want leaked’.”

Mark Ryan from the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance puts it more bluntly. “Does this mean a cabinet minister will be prosecuted if they are found to be the leaker? Governments can’t pick and choose who they go after.”

The Australian reported the debate on leaked documents had been re-ignited by the Shergold-sanctioned AFP raid on this newspaper. Its readers were informed of the Shergold warning in State of the Unit, that the police would be called to investigate any unauthorised disclosure of material. Both Wanna and the dean of the Australian New Zealand School of Government, Allan Fels told The Australian the Government had a legitimate point.

Governments needed confidentiality in order to govern effectively but the need for secrecy needed to be tempered by the responsibility of the media to investigate the activities of politicians and officials with a view to protecting the public interest. Fels put the view that this was a fraught area and a difficult one in which to find the right balance. “The whole situation is extremely complicated by controlled and semi-controlled leaks from ministers themselves,” he says.

Mr Ryan from the Media Union was having none of this. “The public interest”, he said, “is paramount". Shergold, he said, was guilty of “a massive over-reaction”.

Hear, Hear.

The Media Union’s sentiments were picked up in editorials around the country and provoked the international press freedom organisation, Reporters Without Borders, to pen a letter to PM Howard pointing out that police had violated the principle of protection of sources fundamental to guaranteeing independent, investigative journalism. What’s the bet it gets spiked on a dead letter file?

The Howard Government has turned politicisation of the public service and contempt for the Parliament into an art form.

It also sanctions ministerial leaks.

The classic involved our old friend Monty Burns, aka Philip Ruddock. He was silly enough to tape himself conducting a briefing for a Queensland journalist on the confidential contents of an ATSIC Fraud Awareness Unit briefing on the activities of ATSIC Commissioner Ray Robinson and the Bidjara group of companies. The tape became public property, via a leak. Ruddock’s punishment? Appointment by John Howard to the post of Federal Attorney General, the Commonwealth’s chief law officer.

Little wonder the public service is leaking like a sieve. And the Australian Federal Police, it would appear, is struggling to keep up.

One of the most often asked questions post the Remembrance Day raid on NIT has been why the Government did not raid mainstream newspapers which had reported from some of the Cabinet documents which informed this newspaper’s coverage.

The Ruddock tape episode provides a partial answer. But that’s not to say the AFP has not been busy.

Victorian Labor Senator Jacinta Collins earlier this year sought to find out just how many investigations the AFP had conducted into suspected leaks of information in respect of federal government departments and agencies. She also asked, in a question on notice on May 12, how many AFP staff hours were spent on investigating these suspected leaks. The Government responded in August, informing her that a total of 111 investigations had been launched between 1997 and, to date, in 2004. The investigations had consumed 32,987 staff hours from the year 2000 to 2004 with no figures available for 1997/98/99.

We do not know how many prosecutions resulted from these investigations but there’s obviously a lot of democratic sabotage about.

Which brings us back to Peter Pan. My memory, as it turns out, did serve me well.

NIT editor Chris Graham provided me a copy of report from February 9, 2003 by the former public service reporter for The Canberra Times, Verona Burgess.

It was headlined: "Peter Pan lands his fairytale role". The article said Shergold’s ascension to the job of Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has been received “quite positively” in the Australian Public Service.

“There is palpable relief,” it continued, “that John Howard has chosen one of the incumbent Secretaries, rather than a party political operative. But a couple of PM and C wits said in alarm “Good God, does that mean he’ll want us to dress up?” Shergold will never live down his star appearance as Peter Pan in the Department of Education, Science and Training’s Christmas pantomime in December - not to mention the night he burst into song at Allan Hawke’s farewell dinner. “Shergold, in short, is impossible to shame.” Ms Burgess certainly got that right.

“It is interesting,” the article continued, “that John Howard, himself not exactly overburdened with charisma, should have chosen two such colourful, extroverted characters as Max Moore Wilton and Peter Shergold to lead the Public Service. In an interview on Thursday he said he would like to move to a more ‘collegiate leadership’ of the public service.”

Shergold went on to explain this meant the secretaries of each department working together on a whole-of-government approach to issues. Ms Burgess forecast it would take “significant leadership on his part to ensure that happens, especially since he is taking over the job after what has at least partly been a regime of terror at the hands of 'Max the Axe'”. Max Moore Wilton would have been proud of the Shergold-inspired Remembrance Day raid.

Different characters they may be but I suspect both have never understood that democracy dies behind closed doors.

I worked in the Australian Public Service during the reign of "Max the Axe". I survived one of his politically inspired witch-hunts at ATSIC. Others did not. That’s a story for another day. I’m glad, however, that I do not work in Shergold’s service. The ATSIC I joined was frank, fearless and creative. The one I left ruled by fear and loathing.

There was no faith, no trust and bucket loads of bull-dust.

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About the Author

Brian Johnstone is a columnist for the National Indigenous Times. He was Director of Media and Marketing at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission between April 1998 and December 2002. Before taking up that position he was a senior advisor to former Federal Labor Minister, Senator Bob Collins, and a senior correspondent with Australian Associated Press.

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