I was very sorry to learn of the death overnight of one of my
predecessors, W.D. (Bill) Pritchett, who was Secretary to the Department of
Defence from August 1979 until his retirement in February 1984.
I barely knew him at the time he was Secretary as I was
working in the Department of Trade and Resources/Trade during those years but I
suspect I met him a couple of times in the early 1970s when he would have been
a Deputy Secretary and I was working in the National Assessments Staff
(forerunner of the Office of National Assessments) under Garry Woodard.
After I left the public service, however, Garry arranged for
us to meet. I enjoyed a couple of very pleasant and interesting lunches with
him during some of my visits to Canberra, and we corresponded from time to
time.
He also had a special place in my heart as a direct link
with my mother, who died in 1973, a few weeks before her 51stbirthday.
As Bill and I were getting to know one another on the first occasion, it emerged
that he had done an Arts Degree at Sydney University just before the war, and I
commented that my mother had done the same. On ascertaining who she was, he
exclaimed, “I remember Shirley Egan! I used to sit behind her in Psychology
class!”
Fortunately for posterity Garry Woodard interviewed Bill in
2002 and 2003, for the National Library’s audio archives, an audio file of which
there is a 308 page typescript.
William Pritchett, retired
diplomat & career public servant was born in Sydney, N.S.W. and graduated
from University of Sydney with an Arts Degree specialising in history and
anthropology. After service in WWII he was appointed as a diplomatic cadet in
the then Dept. of External Affairs in 1945. As well as service from time to
time at the Dept.'s head office in Canberra, Pritchett served at posts in
Jakarta, Berlin, Boon, New Delhi, Singapore and London. He joined the Dept. of
Defence, located in Canberra, A.C.T. in March 1973. Pritchett was appointed a
Deputy Secretary in 1978 and in Aug.1979 Head of the Dept. on the retirement of
Sir Arthur Tange. William Pritchett retired from the position in Jan. 1984 at
age 63.
Rest in peace, Bill, it was an honour to have known you.
In an interview with Lyndal Curtis on ABC NEWS 24 on 22
November 2011 (see here)
Defence Minister Stephen Smith commented on the need for Defence to contribute
to the savings necessary for the government to bring the budget back to
surplus:
LYNDAL CURTIS: If there are savings found in Defence will there be real
savings or delaying spending? And could, if there is a delay in spending, could
that create a capability gap?
STEPHEN SMITH: Well two things. Firstly, again I won’t get into the
detail; people should wait until my MYEFO comes out or, in some respects
more importantly, wait until the budget comes out next year before descending
into the detail.
But in terms of capability as we know because you’re dealing with a big
capability program and you’ve essentially got a capability plan which covers a
span of a decade or more, there’s always movement, there’s always moving
around. We’ve seen that in the past and there are no surprises there. And that
always occurs not just under this Government but under previous Governments – I
suspect it always will. What we don’t want to do is to do things that have an
adverse impact on capability or on operations and I’ve consistently made it
clear as Minister that if Defence does make a contribution to a general budget
outcomes then that will not in any way adversely impact upon our operations.
Firstly whether that’s Afghanistan, Solomon Islands or East Timor and secondly,
we are always very conscious about capability; but there’s always movement on
the capability front either as a result of action by industry or as a result of
technical or other difficulties. There’s always movement at that station.
The Minister’s assurance that the savings will not have an adverse
impact on operations is entirely appropriate and in the short run at least is
entirely achievable, but that is only part of the story:
(1) The corollary of the protection of
expenditure required for operations is that the savings will come from a
mixture of the capital equipment program and the budget for through life
support (maintenance) of valuable, complex equipment, both of which are an
essential part of capability. This has
an inevitable consequence for future operations and the military response
options available to future governments.
(2) As the Minister reminded us earlier in the
interview:
In the course of the last budget, Defence effectively made a contribution
of about four billion dollars over five years to help return the Government to
surplus and that was as a result of more effective work we were able to do
under our Strategic Reform Program.
(3) The savings garnered under the Strategic
Reform Program were to have funded the very ambitious re-equipment of the
Australian Defence Force outlined in the 2009 Defence White Paper, but as the
Minister’s remarks make clear, they have instead been harvested as savings.
(4) …The
notion that savings merely “delay” defence expenditure (“slip everything to the
right”) is a spurious one – in plain English, any savings represent a reduction
in expenditure. In last year’s Budget
Defence had its budget reduced by an average of $800 million per annum for five
years. That sounds like real money to
me.
(5) Those
savings and the prospect of more in the next Budget make a mockery of the “certainty”
that the Rudd Government gave to Defence, in the context of the White Paper, that
the Defence budget would increase in real terms by 3.3% until 2018 and 2.3%
after that.
Some over-arching comments about the state of the Defence
re-equipment program:
(2) Even if they were, nowhere does the Defence
White Paper demonstrate that the combination of the $20 billion in savings plus
the then projected growth of the Defence budget would be sufficient to cover
the cost of the ambitious re-equipment program, let alone the increase in
through-life support and personnel costs for an expanded and modernised defence
force.
(3) The reductions in Defence outlays only
serve to take the re-equipment program even further from being achievable.
(4) Delays in decision-making at the National
Security Committee of Cabinet are further compromising the program. To take just one example, as I remarked
almost two years ago in Future
submarine: no time to waste, the Government was even then bumping up
against some severe timelines if it wishes to bring a replacement submarine
into service in 2025. In order to do
that we would need to be undergoing sea trials in 2022, and working back from
there we would need to be cutting metal in 2016. That is no longer achievable, so the delays
have already committed the Australian public and a future Australian Government
to a multi-billion dollar refit of the Collins class submarines, in order to
enable us to maintain a submarine capability at all – and that will be a 1990s
submarine operating in the demanding environment of the 2020s. These delays have real consequences.
I think we have arrived at the stage where we need to go
back to the drawing board on the Defence White Paper and re-define what it is
that we want the Australian Defence Force to do, what capabilities it will need
in order to perform its allotted tasks, and what funds Government is prepared
to commit to that end. Above all, the stated requirements must be backed up by
the necessary resources, or they are just words on paper.
In the weekend Australian Financial Review, 16-17 April 2011, columnist Brian Toohey writes under the headline Wealth fund an unproductive idea about the notion of the proceeds of the mining boom being invested in a sovereign wealth fund.
I agree with him, and by implication my former colleague Ted Evans, all the way on the sovereign wealth fund idea:
Westpac Chairman Ted Evans is one of the most persuasive critics of sovereign wealth funds. A former Treasury head, Evans told this columnist last week that he has not changed his view that the greatest contribution governments can make to the living standards of future generations is to ensure that today’s policies are directed towards maximising future production.
He argues one effective way to do this is to spend more on education, which he says “can yield a higher return than even good private investments”.
Later in the piece it is made clear that investment in research and development and transport infrastructure are included in this productivity enhancing approach – standard “new growth theory”, which dates from the 1960s but is still new to some of our policy makers including, I fear, the present government.
As noted above, I am with Toohey and Evans all the way on this, but unfortunately Toohey cannot resist having a swipe at the Department of Defence and the case for Australian designed submarines, in ways which do nothing to enhance his case against sovereign wealth funds and for productivity enhancing expenditure:
The ill-managed and profligate Defence Department should no longer be exempt from the overall cap on spending.
I am not going to enter into a protracted argument in this post as to whether Defence is or is not ill-managed or whether it is or is not profligate. Suffice it to say that, while I would regard some areas as ill-managed (it would be surprising if it were otherwise in such a large and complex organisation), I do not regard it as being nearly as ill-managed as it is alleged to be.
As for profligacy, I think that the Department and the Australian Defence Force are grossly under-resourced for the high technology capital stock that they are required to keep maintained in airworthy, seaworthy etc condition, and in which the members of the ADF are required to undertake inherently dangerous training.
Be that as it may, my main point here is that, even if Defence were guilty as charged by Toohey, any issues of mismanagement and profligacy should be addressed directly and rectified. Cutting expenditure is not an appropriate response: the size and shape of the ADF needs to be contoured around the Government of the day’s assessed needs for Australian defence, not whether or not Defence “deserves” the funds it receives.
On submarines, Toohey says:
Junking the proposed local production of 12 giant submarines to a unique Australian design would save $40 billion and let 12 proven, high performance German subs be imported for $5 billion.
Sure the German submarines are “proven”, but proven for what? German submarines are designed for short patrols in deep cold water. We want submarines that are suitable for very long patrols in warm shallow water – a totally different proposition. If we do not acquire submarines that are fit for purpose, an even better idea might be not to acquire submarines at all, but I am not going to sign up for that idea.
We need to get on with the Collins replacement with a greater sense of urgency than the Government is so far showing. We need to be cutting metal by 2016, and we have not yet settled a design or chosen a submarine builder. As I have commented before, we must be the only country in the world that would vacillate about whether to use its own submarine builder to build its submarines.
On the morning of Monday 11 April I received an early call from ABC Breakfast TV asking whether I could possibly make it to the ABC’s Southbank studio in Melbourne in time for an interview on the ADFA Skype case, before that morning’s program wound up at 9.00am.
This is the case of consensual sex being broadcast by Skype to a group of males in a nearby room, without the knowledge or consent of the female cadet concerned.
My interview may be viewed on Windows media player by clicking this link:
The government-owned submarine builder and maintainer ASC Pty Ltd is in the firing line again over the maintenance of the Collins class submarines; see for example Shake-up at navy shipbuilder by John Kerin in The Australian Financial Review, Wednesday 7 April 2010. Kerin says that ASC:
...has been under fire from the Rudd government and the DMO over the cost and adequacy of its maintenance of the Collins class submarine fleet.
Only three of the six Collins class submarines are capable of putting to sea, although this is an improvement on two at the end of the year.
ASC and DMO are renegotiating the terms of a 15-year, $3 billion contract to maintain the subs after accusations by DMO that ASC’s maintenance work was too costly.
It needs to be remembered by all concerned that ASC is a commercial organisation, albeit a government-owned one, which is no more than a service provider to the Defence Materiel Organisation of the Department of Defence. Defence can have as many submarines available to put to sea as it is prepared to pay to maintain and crew.
The facts of the matter are:
(1) The Navy has not trained enough crew to be able to man more than three submarines, and will not be able to in the short run – see Managing the submarine workforce.
(2) DMO has never budgeted for the maintenance of six submarines, so it is a bit rich to blame ASC for the state of the submarine fleet. Indeed last year DMO cut the budget for submarine maintenance, and was unpleasantly surprised to discover that ASC had to lay off desperately needed skilled workers. No doubt ASC could make improvements, all industrial organisations can, but any gap between its current performance and the best that might be achievable would nowhere near account for the current state of Australia’s submarine capability.
(3) The Defence Budget Audit made clear that maintenance program instability (in other words changing Defence requirements) were causing problems for ASC (see Future submarine and other matters).
Ultimately these factors come back to the size of the Defence budget, and the failure of Defence to manage the submarine fleet as a military capability.
Proximity is power when it comes to the bureaucratic blame game. DMO and Navy have constant access to the Defence Ministers, ASC cops the blame.
On 15 December 2009 the Minister for Finance announced the retirement (completion of term) of two directors of ASC, and the appointment of four new directors.
The retiring directors are:
(1) Dr Bill Schofield AM, a lifetime defence scientist, having served in various positions in the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) from 1965 to 1991. From 1995 to 2001 he was Director of the Aeronautical and Maritime Research Laboratory at Fisherman’s Bend. In my time as Secretary, Department of Defence, he played a key role in the resolution of outstanding technical issues with the Collins Class submarine. As a member of the Kinnaird Review of defence acquisition which reported in 2003, he was instrumental in the recognition by government of the role which DSTO can play in minimising and managing technical risk in major defence projects. At the time of his retirement from the ASC board he was chairman of its risk committee, a function in which domain knowledge would appear to be critical.
(2) Mr Michael Terlet AM, who spent twenty years in defence industry before retiring in 1992 and becoming a professional company director. He was Chief Executive Officer and Deputy Chairman of AWA Defence Industries, prior to which he was Managing Director of Fairey Australasia Pty Ltd at the time of its merger with AWA.
The new directors are Ms Sally Pitkin, Mr John (Jack) O’Connell AO, Mr Bruce Carter and Mr David Miles AM. So we have replaced two engineers with four professional company directors, two of whom are lawyers and two of whom have an accounting background. None, as far as I can see, have any domain knowledge concerning the building and sustainment of submarines. In his media release announcing their appointment (see here), Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said:
... the appointees bring a range of skills and experience in legal and financial matters to the board, and will enhance the board’s high level of expertise and standards of governance.
The new appointees on the ASC board join its Chairman, Vice Admiral Chris Ritchie AO RANR (who has a background in surface ships), Director Mr Geoff Phillips (a company director with a background in finance and management), and newly appointed Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mr Stephen Ludlam (formerly President – Submarines for Rolls Royce (UK)), bringing the total Board membership from five to seven.
This means that the only person on the board as reconstituted who has a deep background in submarines is the Chief Executive Officer.
Several questions arise. None of what follows is to be taken as questioning the suitability of any single member to serve on the ASC board – each person individually clearly has the background and qualifications to make a contribution to the governance of ASC. My questions relate to balance of skills, where the Government thinks it is heading, and what is really going on here.
In no particular order my questions are:
(1) Why was it considered necessary to increase the size of the ASC board at this time?
(2) Given that the board was being increased in size, why was it decided to narrow the range of skills available? Why not, for example, retain Dr Schofield and Mr Terlet, and simply appoint someone with a legal and someone with an accounting background?
(3) What does this change signify regarding the Government’s approach to ASC? Does it see this wholly owned entity as a fundamental element of Australia’s defence capability, or is it just another company which the government still hopes to sell one day? Is the Government more interested in the sale price it will one day receive than it is in the defence value of the last remaining Australian-owned prime defence contractor? The Government’s ongoing refusal to commit to ASC as the designer and builder of the future submarine, the only sensible game in town, suggests that the defence value of ASC is seen to be of small moment.
(4) The key risks faced by ASC are technical risks, not the normal range of commercial risks. Now that the only person on the Board with domain knowledge of submarines is the CEO, who will ask management the hard questions? Who will evaluate the answers it receives? How will the board know what risks it is taking on? Who will chair the risk committee?
Given that the Government shows no sign of moving with the alacrity required to bring the future submarine into service by 2025, this is a more important question than it might appear. My guess is that we will be lucky to introduce the new submarines into service before 2030, by which time we will be managing Collins class submarines as aging platforms, managing a whole new suite of emerging risks.
(5) Where did the idea of letting Dr Schofield and Mr Terlet go actually come from – who recommended this to the Minister for Finance and why?
(6) Is this reconstitution of the ASC Board just another step in the Defence Materiel Organisation’s ongoing warfare against ASC?
(7) If so, why is the Government so cheerfully tolerant of, let alone complicit in, bureaucratic warfare between two wholly taxpayer-owned entities? Is it in on the game, or simply asleep at this particular wheel? Read Combet captured? before you answer that.
(9) Why is such a key defence asset as ASC run as an asset of the Department of Finance rather than an asset of the Department of Defence?
(10) Why is there no-one in the mainstream media with the wit to ask these questions?
Former Labor Member for the Federal seat of Kingston, Gordon Bilney, has an op-ed piece in today’s Australian Financial Review in which he outlines the challenges facing the Rudd Government in the year ahead.
One of these is tackling “the monstrous waste and inefficiency” at Russell Hill.
It is remarkable how many people seem to “know” that there is monstrous waste and inefficiency in the Australian Defence Organisation. Equally remarkable is how few people seem to be able actually to identify where this waste is and how it can be eliminated without impacting upon the capacity of the ADF to fight and win. Many of the solutions I see bandied about sound to me a bit like attempts to repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the one which explains why only about a quarter of the energy in the petrol we buy is actually used to propel the car).
The Department of Defence, a complex organisation that consists of both its civilian staff and its “members in uniform”, receives an almost uniformly bad press. Yet somehow the civilian and military leaders of the Department manage, when requested by Government, to put into the field the right people, with the right kit and the right training, who have performed outstandingly on every deployment. Someone must be doing something right.
Waste is inevitable in every large organisation. No-one should be complacent about that: every organisation should have in place effective continuous improvement programs that seek to find better and more cost effective ways of performing all of the organisation’s functions. But as I have commented previously, the notion on which the Government’s defence capability development plans depend, that there is an annual $2 billion of waste sloshing around the corridors of Russell just waiting for someone to harvest it, is an absolute fantasy – see Defence savings: the impossible dream and More on the Defence Savings Program for reasons why the savings are not there.
I do, however, have one very constructive suggestion for markedly reducing our defence expenditure: leave Afghanistan. No-one can articulate a convincing reason why the allied forces are there or what outcome we are looking for, and the way it has developed it has just turned out to be a very expensive way of destabilising Pakistan, a country which has never needed much help from outsiders in order to mess up its present or its future.
There is no good outcome on the horizon for the Afghanistan adventure. The most likely scenarios are a Pashtun-dominated regime led by the Taliban, or a Pashtun-dominated regime led by the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) warlord of choice, someone like the appalling Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Anyone who thinks that there is a third outcome should think very carefully about the probability and sustainability of that. If history is any guide, any non-Taliban leader in Kabul who is not ISI’s preferred option will be systematically undermined by ISI, using diverted US military assistance funds to do it, in the interests of their fantasy of becoming the dominant power in Central Asia.
Withdrawing gracefully would be a tricky business. It must be done in a manner that does not make a bad situation worse for our allies, and that does no harm to the alliance with the United States.
That suggests that the preferred option would be to seek to persuade the United States that it is high time for everyone to recognise the realities and withdraw sooner rather than later, in as decent and orderly a manner as we can – just the topic to enliven the forthcoming Ausmin talks between our Defence and Foreign Ministers and the US Defense Secretary and Secretary of State.
The bottom line would have to be that we are going sooner rather than later whatever the US decides to do: while we can seek to negotiate a decent and orderly withdrawal, we cannot be held hostage by our allies – and everyone understands that. If we think it is a bad idea, we have to act on that assessment, subject to decent management of the process of implementation.
The principal obstacle to moving in this direction is probably the fact that the Prime Minister has said that the war in Afghanistan is the right war, the war we have to win, and as recently as his surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan in November declared that Australia “would remain in the conflict for the long haul”.
So the Prime Minister would have to admit that he got that one wrong, and our Prime Minister is not a person who has ever been renowned for his willingness to admit error.
Then he would have to try to convince his very good mate Barack Obama that he too had got it wrong, and we have not yet seen many signs that our Prime Minister is prepared to burn up political capital in Washington telling President Obama that he is mistaken about anything.
But how long should we tolerate having young Australians put in harm’s way in the interests of politicians’ vanity?
Below is the text of a Defence Media Release of today’s date reporting on the return from Padang of HMAS Kanimbla following the completion of its humanitarian mission:
KANIMBLA RETURNS FROM HUMANITARIAN MISSION
Six weeks after sailing for the earthquake affected region of Padang, Indonesia, Royal Australian Navy ship HMAS Kanimbla has returned to her home port of Garden Island, Sydney.
From Padang, Kanimbla transported 446 ADF personnel back to Australia and arrived in Sydney with 256 aboard, having disembarked some personnel in Darwin and Townsville. Many of the families of those still aboard were dockside for reunions with their loved ones.
Kanimbla deployed as part of the Australian Government’s response to the earthquake, transporting two Sea King helicopters, nearly 145 Army Engineers and construction personnel, equipment and 15 pallets of reconstruction stores.
While in Padang, the combined ship’s company and embarked force of around 350 ADF personnel completed a number of remediation tasks.
“The engineers embarked in Kanimbla undertook a range of tasks which enhanced safety and helped the community re-establish itself,” said Commanding Officer HMAS Kanimbla, Commander Timothy Byles.
“Tasks included clearing debris and making safe two local schools, repairing a bridge to allow safe passage through town and access to the local market, diverting water back into the rice field irrigation system and building a temporary road to facilitate safe access through landslide affected areas.
“The ship’s company were proud to work alongside our Indonesian counterparts and to make a difference to the Padang community in their time of need,” Commander Byles said.
This is what the Navy’s website says here about HMAS Kanimbla:
HMAS Kanimbla was built for the United States Navy as USS Saginaw and was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy in August 1994. She has under-gone extensive modifications for her new role as a helicopter capable amphibious transport ship.
Kanimbla's primary role is to transport, land and support a force of up to 450 personnel, their vehicles and equipment. Kanimbla is fitted with a helicopter hangar capable of supporting up to four Army Black Hawk or three Navy Sea King helicopters. Army landing craft can also be carried on the forward flight deck to provide ship-to-shore transport. Accessed through a stern door, storage space is available on the vehicle deck for Army vehicles and other large items of equipment.
The ship has operations and planning rooms and a comprehensive array of communications equipment to support joint operations. Kanimbla is fitted with the largest and most comprehensive medical facilities in the Fleet, with a 40-bed hospital incorporating full surgical and recovery facilities.
The point of commenting on this is in the post, apart from noting the sterling humanitarian service that the Australian Defence Force invariably provides to our regional neighbours in natural disaster situations, is to make a point about the looming obsession with acquiring military capabilities “off the shelf”, rather than acquiring purpose designed equipment, as a way of stretching the defence budget to fit the Government’s ambitions.
The project to commission HMAS Kanimbla and its sister ship HMAS Manoora was in its later stages when I was Secretary to the Department of Defence in the late 1990s. It was what in today’s parlance would be called a “project of concern”, with over-runs of both cost and schedule.
The facts are:
- Manoora and Kanimbla were decommissioned US Navy ships which were purchased on an “as found” basis, which meant that they came with no warranties, express or implied. The price paid reflected that.
- When their refit began they were found to have somewhat more rust than had been anticipated by the Navy survey team that had inspected them prior to purchase, which inevitably added time and cost – but again, the price reflected the fact that they came on an as found basis.
- The planning and operations rooms, communications facilities supporting joint operations and medical facilities were not part of the original platforms that were purchased. They were, very sensibly, added to the scope of the refit in order to give us a much more flexible capability for the variety of circumstances our relatively small Navy might encounter in our theatre of operations. The United States can afford to build large fleets of highly specialised ships; we need to maximise flexibility of operational capability.
The capabilities that were added to these transport vessels mean that Manoora and Kanimbla have served the ADF well in a variety of operations, and it is hard to imagine some of our operations being conducted without them. The press had a field day at the time, revelling in yet another tale of Defence’s incompetence, but this is a story that turned out very well in the end.
The key point is that Defence took some risks to give us this capability – the risk in the original purchase, and the risks involved in the ambitious scope of the refit. We need to be very careful that the current pressures to place more reliance on off-the-shelf purchases does not leave us with capabilities that are less than we need. When it comes to putting people in harm’s way, we owe the ADF and ourselves equipment that is as fit for purpose as it can possibly be. Winning is everything in this game.
We are constantly being told that transparency is a virtue in the public sector, and generally this is true. It is particularly true in relation to remuneration of the holders of public office.We are entitled to know what public office holders are costing us, and those who draw the Queen’s shilling are not entitled to expect the sort of privacy that might be considered normal in the private sector.
Generally this admirable principle is observed.If you go to this website you will find a Prime Ministerial determination under Section 61 of the Public Service Act 1999, made on 1 July 2008, which sets out in detail what all Secretaries of Commonwealth Departments are to be paid, and their other conditions of service. You can find out, for example, that the base salary of the Secretary, Department of Defence is $390, 940 per annum and the total value of the remuneration is $488,560 per annum.
If you go to the Remuneration Tribunal website you can ascertain the terms and conditions for a vast range of public office holders – full time offices, Principal Executive offices (CEOs of Government Business Enterprises), judicial and related offices, part time offices and parliamentarians.
If you go to the annual reports of Departments, while you cannot find out the salaries of particular individuals, you can find out the salary range for all individuals at any particular level.
There is one striking exception to this admirable transparency, and that is the remuneration of the person who is reportedly the highest paid person in the Commonwealth Public Service – the Head of the Defence Materiel Organisation. This person is appointed under the Public Service Act on a salary determined by the Secretary, Department of Defence. If you wish to find out what that salary is at any given time, you will be in a certain amount of difficulty. If you download from here the relevant appendix for the DMO section of the Defence Annual Report 2007-08, you will be told that “the SES Band 3 salary has not been included, as it would enable the identification of an individual’s employee package”.
Defence is prepared to argue that the remuneration arrangements for Head, DMO are a matter of public record.If you go to the Defence Materiel Organisation’s Correcting the Record web page, you will find an entry for 27 February 2008 responding to Crikey commentary about the issue. This response states, inter alia, that “[Head, DMO’s] salary ...[is] a matter of public record]” and provides a link that does not appear to work – it returns an error message.
If you take the trouble to find that the information on the public record is in the Hansard for the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee for 18 February 2004, you will discover that the starting salary for Head DMO on appointment in February 2004 was $488,800 per annum, plus a car valued at $21,500 per annum and a parking space valued at $1,569 per annum, plus employer superannuation contribution at nine per cent, based on the $488,800. There is in addition a performance bonus of up to 15 per cent, determined by the Secretary, Department of Defence, on the basis of criteria that the Secretary was not prepared to make available to the Parliament.
This information might represent an acceptable level of transparency as far as the Department of Defence is concerned, but the information is five years out of date and it is hard to see why the taxpayer should not be able to look up the annual report and get a good idea of what this very senior public official is paid.
There is another aspect of this which reinforces the case for transparency.Head DMO was initially appointed for a fixed term of five years, expiring in February 2009, and one can assume that the salary level reflected in part the fixed term nature of the appointment.In May 2008, however, almost a year ahead of time, his employment status “was moved from a fixed term to ongoing Australian Public Service (APS) employment status”.
This is a pretty fundamental change, and we are entitled to ask whether this change of status was reflected in any way in reduced remuneration for the position; when the Keating Government introduced the opportunity for higher remuneration for Department Secretaries, in order to receive the higher salary level they were required to give up tenure.
We are entitled to better than this. On the face of it, this is the highest paid person in the Commonwealth Public Service: an SES Band 3 officer who on appointment in February 2004 had a base salary equal to the 2008-09 salary package (total remuneration) of the three most senior Department Secretaries (Defence, Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Treasury). We really ought to have ready access to information on what the deal is.
