James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No. I would rather keep talking about the Whitlam government and the illegal behaviour of former Whitlam government ministers when it came to the raising of funds outside of the appropriate processes that occur within the Australian Public Service. Because we are here to talk about frank, fearless advice from the Australian Public Service, and it is important that we the worst example of breaking that principle and that covenant, which is what Connor, Cairns and the Whitlam government were engaged in. They were found out, ultimately. It obviously was a significant scandal. Jim Cairns was ultimately sacked by Gough Whitlam, sacked from the Whitlam government. That takes some doing. You really have to hit rock bottom to not be good enough to be in the company of all those characters. But poor Sir Frederick Wheeler, the Secretary of the Treasury at the time, was left in the humiliating and embarrassing situation where he was informed, through established financial channels, that there were ministers of the Crown out there seeking to raise funds outside the proper authoritative channels, to encumber the Commonwealth of Australia. I don't think the full consequence of that was ever properly meted out against the two gentlemen involved there. That was a different era, when the change of government meant that sleeping dogs were left to lie in some ways. A proper full inquiry would potentially have identified conduct that could have even been criminal there, but we'll never know.

But it is such a salient and important reminder that proper, established channels are absolutely vital and that the Australian Public Service should always be empowered and supported by everyone to be frank and fearless and non-political. I believe that we have that circumstance with the APS. I think there is a lot of merit in aspiring to having the entirety of your career in the Australian Public Service. One of the great things about the Public Service is that you can enter it as a graduate, through an intake program, and expect to serve your entire career in the Public Service. I think that's a noble aspiration. We have the benefit of people with decades of experience in their departments and in the Public Service. When they ultimately enter those senior positions, they have spent a life serving in a variety of ways and gently developing and maturing their understanding of government areas of policy expertise.

I'll conclude on a point that is raised in this bill: the principle of re-empowerment of the Public Service, away from consultants and the outsourcing of decision-making. I think there has been a drift, over decades, across multiple governments, towards looking for opportunities to engage external providers to come in and do reviews and analyses of ways in which particular difficult problems can be addressed. I think politicians at times like to be able to say, for example, 'We got KPMG in, and they did this review and said we should do all these sorts of things, and their logo is in the top corner of this report, which means that it's got some kind of greater robustness than something undertaken internally.' I actually dispute and reject that, because I think the subject matter experts in these areas are well and truly within the Public Service. I think the Public Service is at its best when the political leadership has confidence in it and gives confidence to it and says, 'We don't need some external consultant at extremely high cost to come in and tell us how to address a challenge or a problem that you are actually an expert in.' Invariably, of course, the people working for the consultancies are former public servants, so we just engage them at much higher cost than we did when they were salaried to the Commonwealth, to give an answer that we could get from the Commonwealth.

There are certainly times when and reasons why external, impartial and independent sources of analysis and information should be sought, but I think that we should be re-empowering the Public Service at every opportunity. They should have our confidence that they will be the first port of call for developing and providing solutions and suggestions to government. To the extent to which this bill may be able to facilitate that, that would be tremendous, but, as the member for Bradfield, the Manager of Opposition Business, has said, we in the coalition, when it comes to this bill, would like to engage further with the government. We haven't had the opportunity yet to talk to them about not only what's in this bill but broader elements of the Thodey review. It's a review that we commissioned in government and that we have broad support for. We hope that we will be able to engage with the government, through this bill and other opportunities, to all work together to enhance and empower our Public Service.

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