This proposition outraged not only those who cherished the bush myth but also fellow academics. Robert Parker, at the Australian National University, complained vehemently that Davies’ idiosyncratic assertion lacked any empirical base. In fact, Davies used observation and analogy to condense influential pre-war works by W.K. Hancock and F.W. Eggleston who had identified an Australian (and, in their view, enterprise-crippling) predisposition to expect state action as a cushion against all manner of challenges. Davies was also influenced by the analysis of his contemporary Noel Butlin regarding why our colonial economies had adopted a form of what Butlin deemed ‘colonial socialism’ – state borrowing to fund infrastructure for expansion and governmental control of development.

Those traits flourished with the remarkable growth of the public service following postwar reconstruction in the Keynesian era of ‘managed prosperity’. By analogy with the scholar–bureaucrats of imperial China, the cohort of senior public servants who dominated postwar development, most trained in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, were referred to as Mandarins: this was ‘the age of Mandarins’. Davies, in 1958, shared the critique advanced by Hancock and Eggleston, referring to ‘the great grey plain of administrative routine … the depreciation of politics vis-à-vis administration’.

Twenty-nine years later, Davies’ views had changed. In a manuscript left unfinished when he died in 1987, Davies revisited what he called the mobilising political periods – 1880–1914, 1941–49, and 1970–75 – and applauded Australian administrative experimentation and the achievement of ‘relative equality’ as the product of a civil service responsive to a shared belief in the government’s responsibility for promoting equitable life chances. The ‘talent for bureaucracy’, he now thought, had fostered bureaucratic innovation and initiative when parties had deadlocked or run out of ideas. For Davies, when parties faltered, it was bureaucratic talent that held the centre, that shaped how the ‘portentous tasks’ were done. His key message: don’t be deceived by the parliamentary theatrics, watch what is being done by bureaucratic policy professionals.

In following years, research by Patrick Weller and others on our Mandarins, and on public service departments, gave one reasons to sustain Davies’ optimistic view of the capacity of the public service to serve the national interest. Even during the early longueurs of the revolving-door prime ministerships of 2010–19, James Button’s discovery of the persisting dedication of public servants recounted in Speechless: A year in my father’s business (2013) gave hope. Yet it was then, too, that the deterioration in the productive articulation between politics and the bureaucracy began to become starkly evident, with former bureaucrats themselves increasingly figuring as leading voices of concern.

Ken Henry, former Secretary of the Treasury, led the charge, remarking in 2012: ‘I can’t remember a time in the last twenty-five years when the quality of public policy debate has been as bad as it is right now … I think it is quite serious … there was a time when we did have a better public understanding of the issues confronting Australia.’ More recently, Henry and others, including two former secretaries of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Peter Shergold and Martin Parkinson (who had also been Secretary of the Department of Climate Change), spoke out on the ABC’s Four Corners (18 May 2020), decrying the brutal politics that had derailed climate policy in Australia.

Now, Martin Parkinson has published A Decade of Drift, asserting that recent years of policy stasis and reversal are in stark contrast with the period of productive reform from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. In conjunction, Don Russell – an experienced leader in both federal and state public services, and Paul Keating’s closest adviser in the 1980s and 1990s – has published Leadership, again with an emphasis on an earlier period when the ‘portentous tasks’ were tackled effectively.

It is an illuminating pairing. These are policy professionals whose careers began when Davies’ positive view of bureaucratic innovation was drafted. Both have been exemplars of ‘the talent for bureaucracy’. Each was familiar with the confronting realities of contemporary politics, having both been sacked from leading positions in the Commonwealth public service by Tony Abbott in 2013. Russell then went to head the South Australian Public Service. Parkinson was brought back to the top Commonwealth job, Secretary of PM&C, by Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, and served until 2019. This is as close as we are likely to get to the inside story of our current malaise.

Much has been said elsewhere about the incremental paring back of the public service in the guise of efficiency reforms (and budget savings) by governments increasingly inclined to seek competing opinion from private sector associates and ministerial staff. Parkinson acknowledges the effects of this on policy capacity. Nonetheless, his argument goes deeper. Using the failure to settle on a coherent policy approach to the challenge of climate change, he reveals that governments have repeatedly been given the advice and options that expert analysis and evidence indicate to be best in addressing the problem. Yet even when furnished with this advice, they have failed to settle on specific objectives and viable means of attaining them. Why?

The characteristics of the earlier period of policy success, argues Parkinson, were relative political stability, more or less bipartisan support for general policy directions, and broad community acceptance of the need for reform. All of this has been vitiated in the past twenty years.

He canvasses exploratory work in the mid-1990s and after on climate change mitigation by successive environment ministers John Faulkner (Labor) and Robert Hill (Liberal). Resulting papers on potential emissions trading schemes (ETS) foreshadowed the Task Group on Emissions Trading, chaired by John Howard’s Secretary of PM&C, Peter Shergold. Shergold’s report persuaded a reluctant Howard Cabinet to adopt an ETS prior to the 2007 election, when Kevin Rudd’s Labor opposition was also vigorously championing the climate cause. Labor won that election.

Little wonder, then, that Parkinson, tasked by Howard with further development within PM&C of the ETS post Shergold and then appointed Secretary of the new Department of Climate Change by Rudd, assumed that his team had bipartisan support. But the trajectory towards consensus was derailed. The public manifestation was the toppling, in 2009, of Turnbull as Liberal leader by Tony Abbott when he was about to negotiate an agreement with the Rudd government on its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The Greens then joined Abbott’s opposition in voting against the CPRS on the grounds that it was less than perfect.

The year 2009, argues Parkinson, was the turning point for Australia. Yet he and others battled on, developing the successful legislation for Julia Gillard’s alternative scheme; then, at Abbott’s direction, tearing down mechanisms that had been painstakingly constructed and that had demonstrably worked, trying other approaches, returning repeatedly to the fray right through to the collapse of the National Energy Guarantee that precipitated Turnbull’s second downfall in 2018.

It is a story of bureaucratic resilience and persistence against the odds, but more pointedly of what Parkinson sees as ‘the fracture of the political centre’. With the descent of politics into short-termism and an intensely partisan ‘gotcha’ mentality, abetted by crusading journalism and the splintering of public debate by social media, the possibility of reaching some form of consensus around the political centre became ever more difficult. The result: an absence of vision for Australia – and a failure of leadership.

This is where Don Russell picks up the story. Drawing upon a wealth of experience, he develops a detailed account of how successful leadership works. It entails leaders having a clear vision of their objectives; an ability to communicate this persuasively to opinion leaders and to the public; and ‘getting the governance right’ to ensure effective articulation between parliament, politicians, and the public service. Leaders have to be ‘doers’, initiating action and saying ‘this is what we will talk about’, rather than ‘pleasers’, reacting to polls and trying to guess ‘what you would like to talk about’.

Russell proffers numerous examples, but his constant point of reference is the Hawke–Keating governments of 1983–96, in which he was a key player as adviser to Keating as Treasurer, then prime minister (notwithstanding a stint as Ambassador to Washington, 1993–95). Before assuming, well, he would say that, one should note that a series of independent expert surveys have rated the Hawke–Keating governments as towards the top of the range in prime ministerial performance: ‘the gold standard’, as Gareth Evans is wont to say.

Significantly, Russell argues that we cannot rely only on gifted individuals, the ‘doers’; that ‘getting the governance right’ implies a leadership configuration involving ministers, the public service, and the structures put around ministers to help them in their work. Hawke and Keating promoted the vision, but ministers were allowed to do their jobs. Ministerial staff could have a powerful influence, but the senior staff were (like Russell himself) mostly drawn from the public service, knew how departments worked, and understood the essential role of departmental secretaries and the necessity of sustaining that relationship. It was a recognition of the importance of the public service.

Three things, says Russell, have changed since then. First, politicians and their staff have become preoccupied with the demands of the turbo-charged news cycle. This encourages over-attention to misleading current trends, and a scattershot attempt to address them. The consequence: an inability to formulate ambitious long-term targets and – most crucially – an incapacity to communicate what needs to be done, as ‘pleasers’ are favoured over ‘doers’. Hence, what Guardian columnist Katharine Murphy describes as Scott Morrison’s ‘shape-shifting’ prime ministership.

Second, the people responsible for strategy in ministerial offices have changed. Core staff, in the 1980s and 1990s, were seconded from the public service, familiar with its operational requirements and experienced in policy domains. Now staffers are largely political wannabees, ideologically driven, desperate to please the minister (or PM). Winning every argument is a step towards their eventual preselection.

Third, in consequence, the public service is seen as a competitor for attention, an antagonist prone to raising difficult questions. So there arises ‘a willingness to believe that the APS is a problem to be confronted and addressed’ rather than a source of expertise to be utilised.

The arguments of Parkinson and Russell are entirely persuasive. Yet one factor is underplayed. The major parties today differ in crucial respects from those of the late twentieth century. It was back then that the mass parties, sustained by relatively broad memberships roughly committed to party principles, began to wane. While they survived, and because such parties were ‘broad churches’, needing to reconcile many voices, there was restraint on ideological extremes and an impetus towards the centre.

Once the philosophical platforms on which such parties were formed lost their appeal, more professional parties emerged that were focused on electoral success above all. Party membership dwindled rapidly. Party organisations could no longer rely on mobilising people of shared principles, so they became more leader-centric. Leader appeal, and what leaders said, ‘stood in’ for a shared project.

Leaders were given more power and more resources, but their chief task was to deliver the vote. While they prevailed, there was virtually no restraint against capricious behaviour. However, once deemed likely to fail, defenestration was swift. Yet – and here is the rub – to deliver the vote they had to secure mass appeal. But to withstand challenge within the party, they must satisfy the party base – in each case, a very small membership cabal that research shows to be unrepresentative of the broader population.

For instance, CSIRO research on attitudes to climate change over some years shows Coalition party members diverging from public opinion on the need for mitigation. Further, research by Anita Gauja at the University of Sydney, and Max Grömping at Heidelberg University, demonstrates that in Britain and Australia, at each step along the spectrum – party voters, party members, party professionals, elected politicians – the pool becomes increasingly less representative of the general population in experience, views, and demands.

A consequence of such change is that today’s politicians differ from those in the past (and here I disagree with Russell). They have been funnelled through that narrowing, ever more partisan party culture. They embark on the political path earlier, entering into party politics at university, for example, or working in MPs’ electoral offices, aiming for advisory roles then political preference, unlike their forebears, who had careers and life experience outside politics before seeking election in their thirties or forties. So, they know nothing else. They will be less inclined to ask, ‘Will this proposal pass “the pub test”?’, than ‘Will this go down well with my branch or a preselection committee?’ – either of which is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of public sentiment. In short, they are divorced from community experience and community expectations.

As Parkinson and Russell demonstrate, despite the depredations visited upon the public service, the ‘talent for bureaucracy’ has not been lost. But the capacity to engage effectively with the ‘portentous tasks’ has been limited by a political class whose perception of public need is driven by media campaigns and volatile polling, leaving it unable to discern the national interest. This has been precipitated not by bureaucratic failure but by the parties themselves. They are wedded to leader-centrism, struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of their unrepresentative bases with what the public wants, and incapable of sustaining the relative consensus about policy direction necessary to repair ‘the fracture of the political centre’.