Richard Farmer’s Chunky Bits, Item 15, yesterday, makes a good point in principle about the need to reconstruct the Department of Defence in detail. But in recommending Allan Hawke, a former secretary of that department, to do it (perhaps tongue in cheek) Farmer misses two salient points. First, the department under Hawke remained thoroughly unreformed to say the least, and it was a previous secretary, Sir Arthur Tange, who created the bureaucratic monstrosity in the first place when given sole and unimpeded power to do so by Gough Whitlam.
The clear lesson (as with the recent Henry review of tax policy) is no head of a department (or former head) should ever be given sole or primary responsibility to review his or her own departmental structure, role or major policies.
On the broader subject of actually reforming the Department of Defence, this needs to start with a genuine first-principles review of its constitutionality, purpose and structure. It also needs to include re-instituting the appropriate constitutional relationship between ministers and the ADF (civil control of the military), and re-inforcing the appropriate professional relationship between the ADF and the Public Service — which is often institutionalised cultural poison under current structural arrangements.
Those who disagree with such a first-principles approach need to ponder three key questions left hanging by the 12 odd reviews of the department instituted since 1981 (following the amalgamations in 1974 there was a seven-year cooling-off period). First, why have so many reviews been needed (at fairly regular 2-3 year intervals)? Second, why do they keep being needed? Third, why have none of them ever solved the fundamental problem of ever-increasing departmental unaccountability despite every one of them claiming all the problems had been found and would be fixed?
Richard notes that Defence has grown into a “giant beast [that] has become wastefully unmanageable” since its incorporation of the three service (and supply) departments in 1974. Defence now has 13 deputy-secretary equivalents, up from four in 1997 and one in 1974. This is a bureaucratic record in Australia. It also now has a desk-bound public service strength many times larger than 1974 (as the 1974 total included the thousands of workers in the then Defence-owned factories and shipyards). The public service strength is now half as big again as the NSW Police Force and little short of the total size of the regular Army. While the defence force is some 30% smaller than in 1991, and 50% smaller than in 1974, the Department of Defence has kept growing, uncontrollably, into a gargantuan, top-heavy, tortuous, ponderous, self-regarding and unresponsive bureaucracy with institutionalised, insufficient, ministerial supervision structurally and numerically.
Assuming Farmer’s quip about reverting to four or five separate departments to be said in jest (because this should not, nor can be done), there are still some constitutional and practical lessons from that era, and from modern comparative practices overseas, that are worth examining and/or instituting and reinstituting.
First, proper civil control of the military in a democracy (rather than constitutionally inappropriate control by civilian bureaucrats) means Defence always needs at least three full-time ministers. There needs to be integrated civil control by a senior portfolio minister assisted by two junior ministers; one supervising the defence force and the other the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) and the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), following the UK model. None of them should have any other permanent or temporary ministerial responsibilities such as the veterans affairs portfolio (Bruce Billson, Warren Snowdon, etc) or helping fix stuff-ups in the Department of the Environment (Greg Combet)
Second, the department should be run by a statutory board answerable to Parliament as the three Service departments and the Supply Department (sort of like the DMO) were before 1976. There were no serious procurement stuff-ups caused by mismanagement under the old boards because someone, including ministers, was always accountable and made sure of it. As with the old boards, the ministers should be full members not pop-in visitors (indeed the Minister for the Navy chaired the Naval Board). Other members should be the CDF, VCDF, Service Chiefs, the Chief of Capability Development, the Secretary and the Chief Finance Officer. Two or three outside members from commerce (who were not retired ADF officers or public servants) would also help.
Third, a solid look needs to be taken at Defence’s unique, two-boss, diarchic structure, which no other governmental or commercial organisation in Australia, or indeed elsewhere, has ever copied. Not least because it doesn’t work despite every review since 1981 saying it is finally fixed. Moreover, even allowing for the differing strategic responsibilities, force and population sizes, for example, the NZ method of formally separating the defence force and the department (under the same minister) has resulted in much smaller and leaner defence force headquarters and department than in Australia.
No objective review of the diarchy is likely to recommend its retention. None of our other federal or state uniformed services (police, fire, emergency, customs, etc) or security agencies have diarchies in control. Even though nobbled by her restricted terms of reference, the last review of Defence led by Elizabeth Proust in 2007 recommended that if the diarchy was to be retained, then real accountability meant the respective responsibilities of the CDF and the Secretary needed to be defined in detail so that joint responsibilities and therefore the risk of institutionalised unaccountability (both structurally and culturally) would be minimised or abolished. Guess which two of the review’s 52 recommendations were rejected by the Defence hierarchy?
Picking an objective review team will be part of the solution as will it having broad, first-principles, terms of reference. Why not Elizabeth Proust again, assisted by Professor Peter Leahy from the University of Canberra (a former Chief of Army) and Dr Mark Thomson from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (a former Defence scientist and the only person in the country who fully understands how Defence’s finances work and should work)?
From Defence apologist to critic, why has it taken James and the Defence Association to embrace the need for accountability and reform? Could it be that the extent of the problem can no longer be ignored by Department of Defence boosters without loss of face and credibility.
Bruce Haigh
after the word Association and before the word to, add SO LONG.
I arrived in Canberra in 1983, and from that day onwards scuttlebutt around town has been that THE most inefficient, top heavy government department is Defence. For nearly thirty years… I’ve worked in it twice during a long IT career and been underwhelmed by it both times.
If Bruce Haigh ever bothered to keep up with current affairs on defence issues he would know that the ADA has campaigned for thorough reform of the Department of Defence for decades. Not only do numerous documents on our website testify to this but so do numerous other sources such as Hansard.
Naturally enough, our critical monitoring of the Department of Defence is what you would expect of the national, independent, non-partisan, public-interest watchdog in such matters.
That Bruce oddly thinks the ADA is somehow an apologist for the Department of Defence simply proves how extremely out of touch he is. Or perhaps he is still smarting because his fairly extreme ideological and inaccurate claims about our defence force in the past have earned him detailed factual rebuttals from the ADA?
Can I also recommend that Bruce reads Australian Defence Studies Centre (UNSW) Working Paper Number 59, May 2000, “Real Reform of the Defence Management Paradigm: A Fresh View”. This relatively well-known paper in strategic policy and defence circles may be a revelation to him.
Neil James
Executive Director
Australia Defence Association
Never was I a fan of the ADA, which I consider a “beltway bandit” organisation, created largely to provide a soapbox for ex military officers and defence related academics whom whilst serving either added to the problems facing the DoD today or did nothing to alleviate them. However Neil James has put up for discussion his solution to solving the endemic problems within those catastrophic departments that pretends to be our defender. No one else seems to be prepared to suggest solutions and some of James’s ideas are worthy of detailed consideration.
I would suggest though there are a number of errors in his “history” and these somewhat colour his solutions. His somewhat limited experience in the logistics and DSTO fields also has him reinventing the wheel, and the wheel he proposes still squeaks.
PM Gorton who should have known better appointed Sir Arthur Tange, and from day one Tange actively worked to destroy any worthwhile relationship between the military and the public service. His legacy was a mutual hatred and inbuilt suspicion that exists to this day.
I fully agree with James that no head or former head of a department should be give unfettered freedom to review their own department and that the current diarchic structure is an administrative nightmare from which the department seems unable to awake from and the government is incapable of extricating itself from. I disagree with James when he suggests possible agents of review. Ex generals and ex senior defence public servants are not the best choice as they would only araldite in their own biases based on the systems they served and maintained.
James is also right in describing the defence beast as unmanageable and its bureaucratic growth as appalling. He is also right is suggesting a first principles review, but the difficulty of course will be defining what those principles should be. His consideration of returning to the defence administration of the 60s ie three military departments and a department of supply is I guess given tongue in cheek; for such was an administrative disaster which only a modern Sir Humphrey would appreciate. All departments hated each other, all fought tooth and nail for resources often sabotaging the national interest in their endeavours to outpoint each other, and the department of supply became a sinecure for inefficient industries and political boondocking. The scream in today’s papers from Thales, probably the greatest beneficiary of political and defence boondocking in this country’s history, is evidence that any attempt to influence changes to the DoD logistics system will be fought tooth and nail by those benefiting from today’s incompetent Defence arrangements.
James also suggests we look at the current UK MOD model, which I dare suggest, is just as incompetent as the Australian one, and one only has to ask where did we copy much of our current disaster from. The US model is also one to stay well away from. Eisenhower’s warning of the political/military/industrial complex has come to fruition in spades. One has to ask whether the US DoD protects the American government and people or whether the US government protects the US DoD from having its rapacious devouring of the US GDP scrutinised too carefully by the American people.
If we are going to have a meaningful review of Defence then it needs to be independent of our so called military and public service and academic experts, for as James has succinctly summarised, reviews from people such as this have been a nugatory and expensive lesson in the past. We need to bring in outsiders, not tainted with the US/UK/AUS systems and have them review what we are doing against how other “small militaries” from middle range economic and industrial powers run their systems. Countries that come to mind are: Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, France and even NZ. I have deliberately left out Israel as their system is almost totally funded by the US and as such is a biased model. The review assessment of such a study also needs independent military, organisational, scientific and academic review but not from this country. We have two many biases and there are too many local senior military, academic and public service gurus with axes to grind and scores to settle.
Anyway, well done Neil James for trying to bring the mess into the open. No one is going to thank you for opening this sewer, but the smell may make someone in political authority do something about it.
JJ Goold
Mudgeeraba QLD