HMAS Conservative Anchors Itself On A Nation

Mike Seccombe - Sydney Morning Herald

The ship of state is a lot like any other big ship. Once it gets up a bit of speed, even if you throw the engines into reverse, there is a lot of forward motion to overcome.

Likewise, when a government has been propelling a country in a certain direction for a long time, it develops a momentum which makes it hard to change course.

The comparison is made in view of the recent news that a couple of senior officers of the HMAS Conservative Australia have recently left their posts. First officer Max Moore-Wilton has quit the bridge; chief engineer Lynton Crosby has abandoned the engine room; there is speculation that Captain Howard himself could be next to go.

Let's leave the metaphor there, before it gets too tortured. The point is, the longer a government is in power, the more lasting and pervasive is its legacy.

The point was starkly made this week when, on the same day as Moore-Wilton announced his resignation as the head of the Public Service, cabinet appointed a new judge to the High Court.

Justice Dyson Heydon, considered by his peers in the law to be both a fine legal mind and a "capital C" conservative, had more or less advertised himself for the job by decrying "judicial activism" (that's code for liberal interpretation of the law), at a dinner held by the right-wing Quadrant magazine.

So Heydon, 59, got the gig. Assuming he stays until he's 70, that means there will be another conservative presence on the bench of the land's highest court for another 11 years, regardless of what happens at intervening elections.

And simply because the Howard Government has been so long-lived, it has now appointed the majority of the seven High Court justices.

One of them, Ian "Tubs" Callinan, was the most controversial appointment to the bench since Lionel Murphy. And Murphy is mentioned to make the point that both sides of the political divide have historically been equally prone to trying to stack the court.

But there is no precedent for what John Howard, using Max Moore-Wilton as his axe, did to the Public Service. Effectively, he changed it into a government service, headed by people whose considerations were at least as much about politics as policy.

To be fair, the relationship between the government and the bureaucracy had been evolving since the time of Gough Whitlam. Where once all advice to government had come from immensely powerful traditional career bureaucrats, Whitlam provided his ministers with small staffs, employed quite separately from the Public Service. And so the practice of second-guessing the bureaucratic advice, via in-house partisan experts, began.

Malcolm Fraser retained this practice, but went one step further, creating a structure within his office which could second guess not only the bureaucracy, but also the staff of his ministers - which had oversight of every area of policy.

In the latter part of the 1983-1996 Labor government, departmental secretaries lost their tenure, a "reform" which even Paul Keating's most important adviser, Don Russell, acknowledged earlier this year did more than any previous change to "reduce the willingness of secretaries to speak up, even within the confines of the Public Service itself". However, what Howard did following the 1996 election was revolutionary.

Instead of simply keeping a second set of advisers in-house to check on the advice coming from the bureaucrats, he began sacking the career bureaucrats and parachuting in a whole new breed, of which Moore-Wilton was the archetype.

Six departmental heads were sacked straightaway - the biggest single change in the Public Service. More than 11,000 lesser public servants quickly followed.

They were managerialists, the new lot, many with backgrounds as staffers or the private sector. They were in government, but did not really believe in the role of government. Above all, they were political partisans.

The power shift was complete; the days of the frank, fearless and independent mandarin were over. The code phrase was "making the bureaucracy more responsive".

But what it was really about was making government unaccountable. With the bureaucracy now nobbled, even more power was accrued by ministers' staff. And those staff could not be called to account by Parliament.

The lasting legacy of John Howard and Max Moore-Wilton is the destruction of the vital checks and balances between the bureaucracy, Parliament and the government.