No, Minister: So You Want To Be A Chief Of Staff?

By Allan Behm

Nothing prepares a person for the job of chief of staff to a Commonwealth Minister. There are no professional development courses, no specialist recruitment agencies and no training manuals.
It was into this vortex that Allen Behm became chief of staff to Greg Combet in 2009, the minister responsible for managing carbon pricing and the pink batts crisis.
A seasoned troubleshooter, Behm has an uncanny ability to anticipate and deflect political crises. By his measure success as a chief of staff is being an invisible force.

'Invaluable insight from an experienced insider into the closed world of callow political advisers and their disastrous impact on the performance of many Ministers.'—TERRY MORAN

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522868159

Allan Behm

Allan Behm worked in Australian public service for nearly thirty years. He was chief of staff to Minister for Climate Change and Industry Greg Combet (2009–13) and senior adviser to Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong (2017–19). He is the author of No, Minister an insider’s account of what actually goes on in Parliament House,. and is the director of the International and Security Affairs program at The Australia Institute, Canberra.

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2014

Preface

WHY WOULD a survivor of the shadowy confines of a minister’s office want to write a book about how things are done in the stale air and poisonous politics of the Commonwealth parliament? The answer does not lie in a wish to lament the manifest inefficiency and introspective purposelessness of the nation’s current political processes. Nor does it lie in a desire to apportion blame for the lack of discipline and focus that characterised the Rudd and Gillard governments, and increasingly distinguishes the Abbott government. And it certainly does not lie in any need to mourn the destruction of legislative successes, such as the Gillard government’s climate change package.

The answer actually lies in my strong conviction that the nation’s political system can be overhauled and improved by re-engineering the way that politics and public policy are brought together to enhance the lives of our citizens and the wellbeing of our nation. An obvious starting point is to examine one of the pivotal but largely invisible functions in the management of our parliamentary politics—the minister’s chief of staff—and to identify means by which performance might be significantly improved.

Like many Australians, I have long entertained a malaise about the way our political business is transacted at the national level. As a senior public servant, I saw only too often how political pragmatism could trump policy principle. And as a voter, albeit in one of the most privileged cities in the world, I was constantly disappointed by the triumph of contrived political spin over a substantive discussion of the issues that confronted us as a nation, and the options we might have had to create a more prosperous and resilient community.

But like most other ‘concerned citizens’, I had no clear idea of how to deal with this malaise. Following my departure from the public service in 2001, I maintained a steady stream of academic papers, media commentary and Senate Committee inquiry submissions on national security issues in the vain hope that I could influence the quality of the public policy outcomes by contributing to the quality of the inputs. Many other prophets have cried in the wilderness. My contributions, nicely crafted and well intentioned, disappeared into the political morass. The solution to my problem came from an unexpected quarter.

When Senator John Faulkner, then the Minister for Defence in the first Rudd government, contacted me on a Sunday afternoon in July 2009 to organise a meeting between us, I imagined that he wanted to discuss the emerging tragedy in Afghanistan—a matter on which I had been providing some rather gloomy commentary in the media. So I was surprised when he arrived at my home in Canberra late that evening to suggest that I join his junior minister, Greg Combet, as chief of staff.

As Senator Faulkner put it to me, the plan—agreed with Prime Minister Rudd—was for Combet to get on top of the personnel, materiel and science domains within the Defence portfolio prior to replacing Faulkner as Minister for Defence after the 2010 federal election. Faulkner, whom I had known and respected as a skilful and relentless inquisitor in the Senate Estimates Committee during the first and second Howard governments, recommended to Combet that he appoint as chief of staff someone who knew Defence well, had a good track record, was respected within the Defence Organisation, and was independent of any current alignment within the Defence Organisation.

The Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, and Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, was a new arrival in the outer ministry. With a formidable negotiating background in the trade union movement, Combet had transitioned from Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) to the federal parliament as the member for Charlton, a working-class electorate located between Lake Macquarie and Newcastle. But he had relatively little exposure to national defence policy and even less to the behemoth that is the Australian Defence Organisation. Moreover, he had the singular advantage of not knowing anyone in the Defence bureaucracy. And he knew nothing about me, apart from one brief meeting at a Submarine Institute dinner in 2007.

At the end of July 2009, Combet had lunch with my wife, daughter and me at our home in Canberra. The conversation centred on values: what mattered and why; what we stood for; what was the purpose of politics; what was government really for; how did the public service fit in; and were his and my personal values and work ethics compatible. Combet, of course, was conducting an interview to establish whether he was prepared to act on Faulkner’s recommendation, or find another candidate. For my part, I was interviewing Combet, since I needed to be sure that a serious change to my lifestyle and business was worth the pain.

So I asked Combet the question, ‘Of all the things you have done, of what are you most proud?’ I thought that he might say ‘seeing Corrigan off’ or ‘defeating WorkChoices’. His answer was as revealing as it was reassuring. ‘Getting a deal from James Hardie for Bernie Banton and the mesothelioma sufferers.’ This answer went to the heart of the sort of person that Combet is: compassionate, with a deep sense of justice, and the courage to fight for the rights of those who are unable to do so for themselves. I decided on the spot to work with him, if he made the offer. And whatever he might have thought of me, Combet was a hit with my family, and his easy manner and evident wit were enough to get me off the hook for too many early mornings and late nights thereafter.

After completing some outstanding contract work (I was at the time an independent consultant), I joined Combet’s team on 1 September 2009.

This was not entirely without problems. My media critiques of the 2009 Defence White Paper were seen as implicit criticism of the government (they were) and, more significantly perhaps, some felt that the Opposition would use my comments against the government and the minister. This did not particularly worry Faulkner but, as he said, ‘in politics, truth is no defence’.

So a carefully crafted comment was filed with The Interpreter, the Lowy Institute’s blog site.¹ While noting the inherent deficiency of the White Paper in addressing how the proposed force structure was to be paid for, my comment accepted that this deficiency had been met through the release of the Defence Strategic Reform Program—Delivering Force 2030. My comment set out the basic premises on which I might be able to assist Combet as his chief of staff. Among other things, I said:

[The] SRP is deliverable, in my view. But it will require more than hard work: it will require strong and determined leadership, complete alignment within the senior hierarchy, governance arrangements that identify where accountabilities reside, and a rejection of the culture of ‘entitlement’ that affects so many parts of the Defence organisation.

This offering apparently made amends. But it also prompted the blog editor, Sam Roggeveen, to dub me ‘The bow-tied assassin’ in his 31 August 2009 post on The Interpreter website, warning Defence that it was in for a bumpy ride with me onboard. That did not turn out to be the case, since my normal approach is to fix problems instead of punishing those who caused them.

At about the same time, and quite unbeknown to me, one of my former Defence colleagues sent Combet an unsolicited email advising him against employing me. I had worked closely with this person during Kim Beazley’s tenure as Defence Minister. It was surprising that, after such a long time, someone would want to come crawling out of the woodwork to warn Combet that employing me would put him in jeopardy. ‘He will take you over a cliff’, was the advice. This rather puzzled Combet, as it did me, given that the reason Faulkner had approached me in the first place was the wish to hire someone with a good knowledge of Defence and plenty of ‘get up and go’. Combet ignored the advice, and subsequently developed a measure of disdain for the person who proffered it. Combet is no lemming.

To go back and work for government again involved a substantial drop in income, but for my family that was immaterial. We saw the opportunity and challenge of working with an outstanding minister to deliver critical security outcomes (climate change is as much a security issue as an economic one) as a means of serving the national interest and supporting a progressive government. And although my family’s hopes were disappointed in many respects—as they always are in politics—we have no regrets.

In my view, politics as played out in Australia too often resembles the puerile sledging, name calling and muckraking that distinguishes badly led sporting teams. For those of us with long exposure to public policy, the defining moment of politics is the ability to make decisions that affect the health, wealth and security of the nation. The confected aggression that characterises the ongoing battle between the government of the day and the Opposition is not what defines politics. While the more stupid political players, and elements of the media, employ a kind of ideological reductionism to trivialise significant public policy issues, the fact is that good policy decisions are not based on three-word slogans, the hip-pocket nerve or sectional interests.

My own experiences have reinforced the view that good policy decisions are based on analysis and consideration, and that the cockpit that is the Cabinet room is the place where the real political deals are done. While the parliament legislates these deals, the Cabinet handles the realpolitik that enables interests to be balanced, needs to be met, hopes to be realised, and resources to be allocated. This is the job of ministers, and their chiefs of staff are centrally positioned to support their ministers to do their job as efficiently and effectively as possible.

I saw that the chance to work as a minister’s chief of staff would provide a unique window into the operations of government. But, more than that, it provided a unique platform from which to contribute to the development and implementation of public policy in the decision-making environment that ultimately defines national politics.

Nothing prepares a person for the job of chief of staff to a minister. There are no professional development courses, no specialist recruitment agencies and no training manuals. There has, of course, been the occasional memoir, such as Jonathan Powell’s fascinating essay The New Machiavelli.² And Anne Tiernan began her long-term study of prime ministerial chiefs of staff with her Power without Responsibility.³ She has continued that work with her co-author Rod Rhodes in two volumes published in 2014.⁴ Rhodes and Tiernan offer valuable insights into the work of the prime ministers’ chiefs of staff, charting the more recent development of the position through a series of facilitated discussion sessions with some eleven former prime ministerial chiefs of staff. Their work is, understandably, more descriptive than explanatory. They examine what they correctly recognise as a powerful but little understood position within government through the lenses of its previous occupants. Consequently, their analysis and conclusions are coloured by the particular conceits of their interviewees. In my opinion, the six stage evolutionary pathway through which the position is deemed to have progressed since 1972, for instance, is contrived.⁵ It is an argument that fails to come to terms with two essential features of the position: first, the fact that both the relevant prime ministers and their respective chiefs of staff have fundamentally different personalities and ways of doing business; and second, the fact that chiefs of staff are recruited serendipitously, essentially on ministerial whim or, in the Abbott dispensation, at the direction of the prime minister’s chief of staff. Nonetheless, the study by Rhodes and Tiernan provides powerful insights into a little understood position, and remains the only detailed examination of the position hitherto available to a prospective or serving chief of staff.⁶

For the most part, the first draft of this book had been completed when the Rhodes–Tiernan volumes were launched. Accordingly, I have had the benefit of assessing their study on the basis of my own experience and reflection, not as a prime ministerial chief of staff, but as chief of staff to a strongly performing minister. I understand completely why no one who has been a chief of staff in the Commonwealth Parliament has written about the job from the inside, as it were. First, as we retreat from Parliament House, battered and shattered, to other careers and vocations, most of us like to leave the past behind us. Second, it is an enormous time commitment to put together a reflective piece that considers the position of the chief of staff from the perspective of what it is rather than what it does. Third, it is difficult to complete that analysis without becoming self-referential, or presenting one’s personal experience as normative. It is for the reader to judge how well I might have avoided those traps. And finally, there is the nagging doubt that no one will actually be interested in the thoughts of a political swamp dweller. The political heroes who, like the knights of old, spent their days in the jousting pits of politics, pen their biographies to set the record straight or to distort it further if they can. The political tragics buy them, flick through them, and then consign them to the next school fête. This book, however, is not about the record: it is about how the record is created. It is about the largely unseen and unaccountable people who manage a process in volatile and often unpleasant circumstances. And it is about the environment that, to a large extent, provides the chief of staff’s raison d’être.

Recent developments, of course, have cast a more public spotlight on the work of the chief of staff. The publicity surrounding Peta Credlin, Prime Minister Abbott’s very visible chief of staff, has brought into public view her apparently forceful counselling provided to ministers and parliamentary secretaries, her place at the table in meetings conducted by the prime minister and her energetic appearances in the advisors’ box during Question Time in the House of Representatives. But visibility has not generated a better understanding of what the chief of staff actually does.

This book, therefore, aims to offer some reflections on the nature of the job of a ministerial chief of staff. While it contains some anecdotal comment on the problems that faced the minister and his team from time to time, it is not a ‘kiss and tell’ book. Nor is it intended to be an academic treatise. And it is certainly not a political tract, since it is my firm opinion that, regardless of politics, a chief of staff’s job is largely the same whatever the political hue of the government of the day. The chief of staff is a political appointee, playing the game of political management and political advocacy. But, like the Australian Football League rucks or the Rugby League centres, the game is the same whether one is playing for the Hawks or the Swans, the Rabbitohs or the Bulldogs. So, whether the government is Labor or Coalition, the skills required of a chief of staff are the same. And the ultimate test of a chief of staff is also the same—the ability to offer counsel against the minister’s whims and fancies and say, ‘No, you cannot do that with my advice’.

Wisdom, it is said, is experience that has been reflected upon. If I have gained any wisdom during the four years spent in Parliament House, and during the first federal minority government in seventy years, then I am more than happy to share it with anyone who, as Sir Robert Garran put it, wishes to ‘prosper the Commonwealth’.

CHAPTER 1

What is a Chief of Staff?

He that has and a little tiny wit-

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain-

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

For the rain it raineth every day.

King Lear, III, 2

IN RECENT DECADES, the title ‘chief of staff’ has proliferated, and at many levels. Chief executive officers (CEOs) of corporations have a chief of staff, as do their division heads and various other functionaries down the line. Frequently, the chief of staff seems to be an over-promoted gatekeeper who protects a chief executive officer or other senior officer from unwanted intrusions by more junior staff or external stakeholders. Just as often, the chief of staff is a highly paid amanuensis who manages the senior executive’s incoming reports, briefing papers, diary and appointments in much the same way as private secretaries did in former times.

In Australia, senior executives of thirty years ago did not employ chiefs of staff. Rather, they mostly had a combination of personal secretary (who did the typing), private secretary (who managed the diary and ran the errands) and an executive assistant (who kept the paperwork in order and the desk tidy). Prime ministers and ministers had principal private secretaries who managed their offices and advised them principally on policy and occasionally on politics. And, in any case, their staffing levels were so low that a title such as chief of staff would have been taken for self-aggrandisement.

In the early 1980s, for instance, there were no chiefs of staff that I can recall. Yet by the late 1980s, the position had begun to emerge, partly influenced by the new management models of the US corporate world and partly by the ‘Chef de Cabinet’ position in European political and administrative practice. The combination of the new Parliament House in Canberra, which provided ministers with much more office space than the old Parliament House, the passage of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984, and the accelerating nature of the political cycle created a need for additional resources in the offices of ministers and parliamentary secretaries.

The new ‘value add’ would seem to be the chief of staff, usually a more highly educated person than the former private secretaries, with the ability to read and comprehend all the incoming material, provide summaries and identify non sequiturs, thereby generating a frisson of fear (and inevitably loathing) among the subordinates who provide the incoming material. For a lazy or over-burdened senior executive, a chief of staff can be a danger, eroding both responsibility and accountability as serious decisions are effectively devolved. If the chief of staff parades as the senior executive’s alter ego, the impact on leadership, management and communications can be disastrous.

So, it was important for me to define the features of the position that would best serve the minister’s political and policy interests, while at the same time meeting the professional needs of the other team members. The models I initially had in mind were the principal private secretaries I had encountered early in my career, when access to ministers’ offices in the old Parliament House was somewhat easier than it is today. John Ridley, Andrew Peacock’s principal private secretary in the late 1970s, was a confident, engaging and smart manager of the Foreign Minister’s policy demands and political interests. Richard Mills, Jim Killen’s principal private secretary towards the end of the second Fraser government, could have been the model for Bernard Woolley, Jim Hacker’s private secretary in Yes, Prime Minister. Mills was quick-witted, and an excellent manager of Killen’s sometimes relaxed habits as Defence Minister. Each Friday afternoon, after Killen had enjoyed a convivial lunch (no fewer than two bottles of red) and before the late-afternoon flight back to Brisbane, Mills would lead Killen around ‘the stations of the cross’—twelve in-trays ranging from the small-in-size (which Killen had to read and sign), to the slightly larger (which he had to sign without reading), to the larger still (which he had to note), to the huge piles of submissions that he had to be aware of, and finally to the cabinet submissions that he had to take home. I adopted a similar though less religious approach to paper management in Greg Combet’s office. But for real insight, I finally decided to turn to one who had the dramatist’s touch for complex relationships between powerful people and dispensable people.

Shakespeare offers key insights into most aspects of human behaviour. Strength, weakness, loyalty, treachery, love, hatred—all of these characteristics are portrayed with insight, drama and wit. But what about the portrayal of conscience, commentary and oversight, and the ability to challenge convention? The chief of staff cannot be a Hamlet, a Macbeth, a Richard III or a Lear. Even less can the chief of staff be a Romeo or a Julius Caesar. In holding up a mirror to thought and action, the chief of staff is more like Touchstone, the court jester from As You Like It, who comes close to the essence of the job when he says ‘the more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly’.¹

Lear’s fool, too, provides instruction. In some respects, King Lear is a political allegory: the leader is trapped in his own hubris and brought down by those who profess to love him. His chief of staff, the Fool, provides opaque counsel and comfort, but is ultimately unable to prevent Lear’s slide into insanity or, as Simon Russell Beale portrayed him in the 2014 National Theatre production, dementia. It was never my misfortune to have to deal with Goneril and Regan, though the former Howard government minister and current Speaker of the House of Representatives Bronwyn Bishop seems to remain in constant rehearsal for either role. But while Combet managed the vicissitudes of politics, though without the dementia, the Fool was never far from my mind. For the truth is, in politics, the rain it raineth every day.

Henry VIII’s jester was William Sommers, who was legendary for his ability to advise the king without crossing the boundaries that so constrained the more noble courtiers. James VI of Scotland retained Archibald Armstrong, who went on to be a moneylender in London. And Charles II promoted Thomas Killigrew to the position of Groom of the Bedchamber. His portrait was not only painted by Anthony Van Dyck but he was described by Samuel Pepys in his diary as holding ‘the office of the King’s fool and jester, with the power to mock and revile even the most prominent without penalty’.² He went on to become a deservedly lesser-known dramatist.

Contemplation of the past provides some guidance for the future. But we actually live in the present, so I needed to address the defining characteristic of the current operating environment for chiefs of staff. Now chiefs of staff are very serious people who would not want to be taken for fools and jesters, notwithstanding the long tradition of political advisors whose roles fall outside defined boundaries. Yet it is precisely the lack of defined boundaries that distinguishes the position of chief of staff, and explains why some chiefs of staff succeed (Arthur Sinodinos comes to mind) and others (too many to number) come to grief.

The absence of defined boundaries is neither good nor bad. It is simply how things often are. In the domain of strategic planning, for instance, ambiguity and discontinuity are constant features of an ever-changing planning environment. And politics is possibly more inherently chaotic than any other field of human activity. So the key issue for any chief of staff is not the absence of boundaries and protocols, but rather how to support a minister and a government in an operating environment where the imposition of boundaries would simply lead to undue caution, risk aversion and ultimate political constipation.

At various stages during my career as a public servant, I worked closely with each of the eight people who served as Bob Hawke’s and Paul Keating’s chief of staff. Sandy Hollway was one of the architects of Australia’s uranium safeguards policy in the second half of the 1970s, ultimately serving as a departmental secretary. Dennis Richardson went on to become Director-General of ASIO, Ambassador to Washington, and secretary of two departments. Allan Hawke went on to become secretary of three departments and High Commissioner to New Zealand. But the person who did most to redefine the nature of the chief-of-staff position was Don Russell, Keating’s chief of staff from 1991 to 1993, and then again from the end of 1995 to the 1996 election, which Keating lost. Their relationship began when Keating was treasurer, and Russell replaced Tony Cole as Keating’s chief of staff on Cole’s recommendation.

For those who know Russell, discretion and quiet brilliance sum him up. Although he has not said very much publicly about his relationship with Keating, there is no doubt that it was very close and very effective. As Rod Rhodes and Anne Tiernan have observed, it was for others to describe the dynamics of the relationship. Allan Hawke put it in typically direct language: ‘Paul [Keating] is still grieving the loss of Don Russell … It was simply impossible to fill the gap that Russell left; no successor could hope to learn the way he had of talking to the prime minister, or earn the respect that Russell had earned’.³ Hollway observed that Russell was more a political than a policy advisor.⁴ I am not sure that is accurate. Notwithstanding Russell’s immense skill and reflective demeanour, Russell and Keating were totally aligned on personal, social and political values, and that, as distinct from political convergence, essentially defined the relationship. It is really an answer in search of a question to describe Russell as ‘Svenagli [sic]: keep [sic] of the government’s story’ as do Rhodes and Tiernan.⁵

Values were also central to the relationship between Prime Minister John Howard and his chief of staff, who, I submit, defines the modern role—Arthur Sinodinos. As a senior defence official, my personal interactions with Sinodinos were few, occurring mainly during the lead-up to the deployment of peacekeeping forces to East Timor in 1999. He was a supremely professional, calm and well-informed chief of staff, who knew what questions to ask, and how to ensure that the prime minister’s intentions were clearly understood by those who had to implement them. His reputation both within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the broader public service was legendary: always polite, always respectful to his public service interlocutors, always punctual and never too busy to ensure that those who visited the Prime Minister’s Office felt that their trip was worthwhile. As Howard’s chief of staff from 1997 to 2006, Sinodinos supported him during his most successful and productive years as prime minister. Many have commented that the Howard government began to decline when Sinodinos departed.

It was evident that Howard and Sinodinos were in lock step around values and political style—albeit in a very conservative and conventional way. They were also united in the conviction that sound policy was at the heart of good government.⁶ The hallmarks of Howard’s office under Sinodinos were calm, order and measure. They were not trapped in the glare of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, but rather they managed the prime minister’s media appearances deliberately, and almost never reactively. In other words, Howard and Sinodinos did not permit the media to dominate and take charge, but rather employed the media to their own advantage. Sinodinos’s approach mirrored that of his prime minister—take charge and stay in charge.

Sinodinos was also careful to ensure that the Coalition backbenchers, members of the Senate and House of Representatives alike, felt that they had a connection with the prime minister and his office. Russell Trood, for instance, a one-term senator for Queensland, told me that not long after his arrival in Canberra, he received a call from Sinodinos inviting him to visit him in his cubbyhole of an office for a quiet chat. Trood wondered what he could have done wrong so early in his political career, but what Sinodinos wanted to do was welcome him, reassure him and tell him that the door was always open should he ever feel the need to talk. Trood was impressed that the prime minister’s chief of staff found the time to talk to a newly arrived senator and offer such positive reassurance. That was Sinodinos’s style as chief of staff.

Late in the afternoon on most sitting days, Combet and I would take a walk around the corridors of Parliament House, not far enough away to miss the division bells, but far enough from the office to get a change of air and a change of perspective. We often bumped into Senator Sinodinos. Sinodinos needed no explanation concerning our perambulation: he understood implicitly that a minister and the chief of staff needed to escape the confines of the office in order to maintain head space. Sinodinos was always pleasant and affable. It was always of interest to me that most of the people we met in our corridor walks felt the need for a smart remark or a bit of puerile repartee, reflecting the confrontational demeanour affected by the partisan dimwits who are all too present on both sides of politics.

In my view, Sinodinos set the ‘gold standard’ in both defining the role of chief of staff and demonstrating the personal and professional qualities to do the job. It is a tragedy at both the personal and political levels that he found himself caught up in the corruption inquiries conducted by the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 2014. His generally impeccable judgement appears to have deserted him at