Speechless Updated Edition: A Year in My Father's Business by James Button

Author:James Button [Button, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, Political, General
ISBN: 9780522864724
Google: 8aQQAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-08-01T14:00:20+00:00

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Rudd was to launch Moran’s public service reform process in his Paterson Oration of August 2009. He had been due to give the speech a year before but did not. To help me prepare Rudd’s speech I was given the draft, written by Peter Hamburger, a semi-retired departmental employee who was helping to research a history of the Department. From the first sentence, I knew I was in the hands of a writer.

Hamburger began by citing a paper written by John Paterson, a renowned, unusually tough, public servant. If you want to understand organisational change, Paterson wrote, don’t read the guff that comes out of business schools, read Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war. In the battle to change an organisation, ‘peace only becomes possible when you have captured all the territory, re-educated all the prisoners who are willing to become loyal citizens, and put to the sword those who remain unreconstructed.’ They were strong words, Hamburger noted, to describe Paterson’s plans to reform the Hunter Valley Regional Water Board.

I asked around about Hamburger, and was sent a document containing excerpts from his dispatches of some years ago when, as head of Cabinet Division, he had sat in on government expenditure review committees. One decision, he wrote, was like a camel’s nose: bad policy that would lead to even worse policy, just as a camel pokes his nose into his master’s tent on a cold desert night before pushing his whole body inside. I learnt that Hamburger was a much-loved figure in the Department, because of his nature, and because he held so much of its memory. I rang and introduced myself. From then we spoke often.

In his late fifties, quietly spoken and droll, Hamburger showed me that public service writing did not have to choke in a sludge of key learnings, engaged stakeholders and joined-up policy initiatives. There was a public service writing style that was clear, understated, often wry. In a note on my draft of the Paterson speech, Hamburger warned that one section might be contested by many, ‘including some prone to public commentary’.

Part of my brief for the Paterson was to locate the APS in the Westminster tradition, stretching back to the 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report into the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service. I had never heard of this report but Google is a beautiful thing. Three mouse clicks, a whirring printer, and I had a 24-page document written in a heavy serif font, emblazoned with the British coat of arms and set by George Eyre and William Spottiswood, ‘printers to the Queen’s most excellent Majesty’.

Britain was on the rise, acquiring colonies and markets, becoming the global power. The nation and Empire needed a strong public service, but the one it had was shoddy, nepotistic and corrupt. In its twenty-four pages, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report set out the principles of a modern, impartial, accountable public service, with promotion based on merit, not on having a well-placed uncle.

Sitting in my favorite lunch spot, the Barton Café,

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