The Gatekeepers: a cheesy reflection on prime ministers' chief advisers

Too much of the book is superficial and too many of its judgments are unconvincing. It doesn't help when, in the book's third sentence, the authors say the chief of staff "sets the tone of how the prime minister's office runs and how their boss works". This is what prime ministers do, of course. It takes a further 19 pages for the authors to set the record straight and say: "The CoS has to organise the advice and support to suit the personality and style of the incumbent [prime minister]."

Let's begin with the methodology.

In 2009, two groups of former prime ministers' chiefs of staff – from the Fraser government's Dale Budd to Kevin Rudd's David Epstein – were gathered into "closed round-table workshop discussions" to get their views on their duties.

About 2013, it seems, the authors "conducted a further round of 15 interviews with key respondents and with others" associated with the PMO during the first Rudd government and in the Gillard years.

The results of the 2009 "workshop discussions" are set out in chapters titled "Know the boss", "Coping and surviving", "The policy agenda and coordination" and "Political management". The interviews with those associated with the Rudd and Gillard offices are used, the authors say, to "road-test the lessons we have identified" from their summary and analysis of the 2009 discussions.

It's all very well to get people into a room with a recording device and the inevitable "facilitator", but the method has limits and they show up in the results. The chiefs' comments seem pretty much off the cuff. Some are acute and some are not. And the commentary Rhodes and Tiernan weave around the reported comments is often trite and opaque. For example:

Half a dozen of such cheesy observations would be excusable but their like is to be found on almost every page of the book.

It doesn't get much better when it comes to the "lessons" distilled from what the chiefs said. For example:

Again, these are typical of the "lessons" Rhodes and Tiernan draw from the material they gathered. With the best will, it's hard to see them as either especially helpful or interesting. A harsher view might be that most don't add up to a lot more than the bleedin' obvious, pace Basil Fawlty.

Then there are niggling factual errors:

These slips are not of great significance but they are a sign of carelessness and perhaps haste in putting the book together. It has a touch of the Twenty20 cricket about it.

Rhodes and Tiernan move onto rather firmer ground in the conclusions section, where they consider what they call "the need to preserve partisan institutional memory" – i.e. the experience of events in ministers offices. This, they say, "is our contribution to the lessons for the CoS".

"With the move away from public service to political appointments [in ministers' offices], departments have lost their institutional memory about the prime minister and his or her court," they write. There may be something in this point, although maybe not as much as the authors imagine. Departments' institutional memory of ministers doesn't depend wholly, or perhaps even greatly, on having a handful of officials, who usually return to their departments, serve in ministers' offices. Although ministerial staff may now involve themselves much more in policy work, there is a great deal of day-to-day dealing of varying degrees of intimacy between public servants, ministers and their advisers that adds considerably to departmental memory. So care should be taken in defining whatever problems may exist. But it's not credible to claim, as Rhodes and Tiernan have, that "departments have lost their institutional memory" about prime ministers and their courts in an absolute sense.

In making their point, the authors speak about the 1996 transition to the Howard government. They quote Howard's chief of staff, Feely, saying that when the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Michael Keating, visited Howard on the day after the election, he "handed over the incoming government brief and stayed for a few hours. Shook hands. He was gone." They also cite Howard as saying Keating "helped me with the initial stages of the transition in a very positive way". Rhodes and Tiernan say "weeks of confusion followed" and that only after someone told Feely that the department could deal with things like correspondence "did a relationship develop with the department". They conclude: "There could be no clearer illustration of the importance of institutional memory."

Rhodes and Tiernan did not check with Keating to get his version of events. He did not leave after the post-election meeting with the new prime minister. He remained as PM&C secretary for months after the election and had an extended handover period with Max Moore-Wilton, something almost unheard of in the changing of departmental secretaries. And there remained a large department brimming with institutional memory and eager to help. If there was a problem in this instance, it was that, within Howard's PMO, there was no memory of what a department could do, an extraordinary failing if so, given that Howard had extensive ministerial experience in the Fraser government. Indeed, the suggestion that Howard's office didn't realise his department could deal with correspondence is implausible.

In any event, Rhodes and Tiernan have drawn the wrong conclusion. This is not about departments losing their institutional memory of ministers' offices; it's about a minister's office allegedly not knowing what a department can do. That is, what they say is their prime example of departmental memory loss is no such thing.

Rhodes and Tiernan say there is "a widely held view that Australian policy capacity has declined", including in the public service. That is a moot point and, apart from a single endnote reference, no evidence is adduced in its support. The claim doesn't sit comfortably with the fact that:

If there is a failing in Commonwealth administration, it might not be so much with its policy capacity as with the willingness of governments to use it. For example, can it be imagined that the Abbott government has much used the substantial policy capacity that its agencies have developed on climate change?

The more likely difficulty is that, with what may be a greater preponderance of political staff in ministers offices, the policy capacity of the public service is not being exploited to the extent it should be. That is, politics may be dominating policy rather than working with it. Remember, Tony Abbott has said that if he had a choice between good policy and good politics, he'd chose the politics every time.

The personal offices of prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Howard seem to have worked pretty well. It's harder to tell with Gillard's, while Rudd's, reflecting his style, apparently descended rapidly into manic centralised control. If the many anecdotes about the workings of Abbott's office are anything to go by, the Prime Minister may be well on the way to repeating Rudd's disastrous habits.

To help overcome the problems they see or imagine, Rhodes and Tiernan suggest a review of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act. They're not the first to do so, nor are they the first to fail to make out a case for it.

They say a review could "ask, for example, whether a politically appointed senior executive service, in preference to staffers, could help improve links between ministers and the public service" and that, on a change of government, these political appointees could be "put in jobs outside the capital city". But the MOPS Act allows ministerial consultants selected by ministers to be placed in SES positions, with their tenure limited to the tenure of the minister in the relevant department; the provision has hardly ever been used. It's as if Rhodes and Tiernan have not refreshed their memories by reading the act, its second reading speech and explanatory memorandum.

More seriously, the wider opening-up of SES positions to political appointment (i.e. appointments not necessarily made on merit) would gravely damage the public service's efficiency and effectiveness. The idea that political appointees could be farmed out to the provinces when their sponsors lose government, or for other reasons, doesn't deserve a riposte.

All of this is not to say that the The Gatekeepers is without value; it lies, however, mainly in the extended comments it contains from those who have been chiefs of staff for prime ministers. It is to be hoped others can make better use of that material than has been within the power of professors Rhodes and Tiernan. Their contribution is superficial and their prescriptions are muddled. Their book looks like a rushed job brought forth under an academic pressure to publish, which has relegated sober reflection, careful analysis and thoughtful presentation to the shadows.

Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au