Arthur Tange, page 34
The other three submissions responded to specific requests from the Commission. The first commented on the Devlin Group report on the Irish public service. This floated the idea of separating, within a government department, the minister’s policy advisers from executive units that would handle day-to-day operations, with a statutory board as the link. Tange put forward cogent reasons why such a proposal would not work in Australia. His forceful arguments against ministers’ acting as presidents of boards, and thus sharing their decision-making powers with official subordinates, was based partly on the record of the pre-1973 service ministers and their respective boards. In his oral evidence to the Commission, Tange dismissed the Devlin report’s ideas on separating policy advice from implementation as ‘very simplistic’.
His next submission commented on interdepartmental committees. Tange contended that such committees worked best when supported by staff work, and that this staff work should come from a nominated ‘lead department’, not from a central Cabinet secretariat.
Tange’s final submission to the RCAGA was more varied in topic and less clear in argument. The Commission had requested his views on several issues relating to ‘central coordination and management of Australian government activity’. Although not spelled out, the underlying concern was that departments were acting too much as independent agencies, pursuing their own interests rather than what would later be called a ‘whole of government’ approach. Here Tange was put on the defensive, for this was a valid criticism of the system in which he had gained power and status. On one aspect of the problem, Tange was typically robust and forthright as he dismissed the claims put forward by Alan Renouf, whom Whitlam had appointed to succeed Waller as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Renouf had presented an ambitious submission, seeking to advance his department’s claim to coordinate—or, as it seemed to many, to control—all aspects of the government’s external policies. Tange’s loyalty was to his present, not his former, department. He displayed few qualms as he bluntly rebutted any claims by Foreign Affairs to ‘superior authority’ over other departments dealing with Australia’s security or trade interests.
On the wider question of coordination, Tange’s submission made general points, with little supporting evidence. Coordination, he said, was not a matter of departmental organisation, nor of devices such as interdepartmental committees or (taking a chance to make a quick thrust) non-career ministerial advisers, but depended on the authority and effectiveness of ministers. Making what he later came to regard as the fundamental argument in his submissions to the RCAGA, he said that there was no point in studying the public service without studying ‘how Ministers actually conduct themselves’. The public service, Tange contended, had to be seen as a national institution, not merely as a way of organising individuals to perform tasks as directed by ministers. It required strong leadership, which at the political level could only come from the Prime Minister. At the administrative level, it also required leadership ‘from its own ranks’, but he gave no more specific advice on where to find that leadership. He did not, for example, say whether the head of any one department should be regarded as the head of the public service as a whole. From 1920 to 1968 the Secretary to the United Kingdom Treasury was head of the civil service in Whitehall and under the 1999 Public Service Act the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet would later be given supervisory authority in Canberra. Tange seemed to realise that his own arguments were heading in that direction but, after years of fighting what he saw as the unjustified intervention of coordinating departments such as the Prime Minister’s Department into the realm of line departments like External Affairs and Defence, he could not bring himself to articulate the conclusion. He seems rather to have hoped that the most senior departmental heads, including himself, would be seen as the leaders of the public service ‘from its own ranks’.
Tange was much clearer in expressing the hope that the Commission would help the government to articulate the conventions governing the public service, helping gain greater respect for its ethos and its standards. While seeking a strong role for the Prime Minister, he wanted those conventions to limit the rights of individual ministers, not least on the appointment and removal of heads of departments. It seems likely that he still blamed Hasluck rather than Menzies for his removal from External Affairs nearly a decade earlier, and this comment reflected his continuing resentment. But these arguments were only sketched, with much less than his usual force or clarity, probably because he knew that the Royal Commission was heading in precisely the opposite direction—increasing the powers of ministers and reducing those of departmental heads.
In his oral evidence, Tange was pressed by Paul Munro, a member of the Commission with a background in public service unionism, on the appointment and tenure of permanent heads. Tange argued that these positions could be advertised and applications invited from the public, a suggestion that attracted media attention. The selection panel, he suggested, could include the Prime Minister, two other ministers and two or three public servants (thus representing one case where Tange did not object to ministers and officials sharing decision-making). But he disagreed with Munro’s suggestion that permanent heads might be sacked in the same way as leaders of industry. A way would have to be found, he said, by which change could be effected in the positions without ‘degrading’ the occupants or ‘disturbing the sense of leadership in the system’. Retirement could be made ‘more flexible’ but permanent heads ‘should not be demoted simply because they have grown older or cannot produce novel ideas to the extent that they did’. For the next quarter-century, culminating in the Barratt case in 1999, Tange expressed deep regret at the diminution of respect given to departmental secretaries (who lost their statutory designation of ‘permanent heads’ in 1984). He recognised that governments had, in the last resort, the right to move departmental heads who were not performing but he could not abide abrupt dismissals that seemed demeaning or ‘degrading’ to those individuals. Beyond saying that a system had to be found that was ‘more flexible’ but not ‘degrading’, he did not define a system that would achieve those goals.
During his oral evidence to the RCAGA, Tange agreed that ministerial advisers ‘make an important contribution’, particularly in helping ministers to change policies, but he hoped that the government would ‘define the relationship between these advisers and the departments’. Coombs took the point and hoped that Tange would help to find the words that would define that relationship.
Tange’s concerns over the direction of the RCAGA’s deliberations and recommendations took time to mature and to be formed into a coherent argument. As a later chapter will show, the Garran Oration in 1981 represented his considered riposte to the Commission’s work. But Tange’s submissions to the Royal Commission, both written and oral, established a new position for him in the eyes of observers of governance in Canberra. He was now a respected contributor to debate on public administration, promoting some reforms and accepting others, but rejecting those that in his mind undermined the degree of independence that the public service as a whole, especially departmental heads, required.
Freedom of information
On one prominent issue Tange was an unapologetic defender of the established practices of the public service, opposing what he regarded as dangerous proposals for reform. The Whitlam government came to office with a commitment to ‘open government’, which was generally taken to include freedom of information legislation. No such legislation was enacted during the government’s tenure, nor until 1982, after Tange’s retirement. As Whitlam himself noted, in the only brief reference to the topic in his comprehensive account of the government’s record, ‘The Government devoted many hours of discussion to freedom of information legislation but not sufficient to overcome the resistance of its most senior and respected public service advisors’.478 A more detailed account of this topic by Greg Terrill portrays Tange and Wheeler as the most significant public servant opponents of the new concept.479 When an interdepartmental committee began deliberations on how to adapt the United States’ Freedom of Information Act to Australia’s governmental structure, Wheeler and Tange wrote strongly worded and highly influential letters defending ‘the traditional norms’ governing the secrecy of communications between ministers and departments, and within departments. Tange observed that the public disclosure of official advice could allow ‘partisan interests’ to foster conflict between ministers and departments. The American model was not necessarily relevant for, as he put it, governments ‘cannot fall in the United States over such an issue. They could in Australia’.
Tange succeeded in having the interdepartmental committee raised to the level of permanent heads. After months of deliberations, the committee eventually produced a report that essentially defended the status quo, based on the need to protect the confidentiality of Cabinet and ministerial discussions and to maintain ministerial responsibility for their departments. These were precisely the arguments mounted by Tange and Wheeler. Terrill observes that ‘Tange’s depth of feeling … was more than may be explained by simplistic theses about bureaucratic self-interest’.480 He offers no further explanation, apparently unwilling to accept Tange’s and Wheeler’s contention that confidentiality was essential to permit frank discussion and impartial advice.
Some of the radicals of the 1970s probably regarded the ‘depth of feeling’ that Tange displayed, on this and other issues, as an expression of a self-centred commitment to the institutions, responsibilities and privileges of the public service as it had operated throughout his career. He, it seemed, was a beneficiary of the public service revolution of the 1940s. With the radical changes of his youth now the established orthodoxy, Tange had become their defender against the new challenges that were emerging in the 1970s. But his views were not mere knee-jerk reactions. It was notable, for example, that the freedom of information legislation that was eventually enacted omitted many of the features that Tange regarded as disturbing or dangerous. Later governments, both Labor and coalition, have regarded it as essential to maintain the confidentiality of official advice to ministers and of interministerial discussions. Without that protection there could be no ‘frank and fearless’ advice from public servants to ministers.
November 1975
By late 1975 Tange had acquired an ambiguous reputation among those in and around the Whitlam government. He was clearly the strong right hand for Whitlam, Barnard and Morrison as they set about reforming both strategic policy and defence organisation, adopting directions that Tange had long favoured. But he was simultaneously being portrayed as a conservative, or even reactionary, critic of some of the proposed changes in the relationship between ministers and public servants. Unsurprisingly, some found this distinction hard to comprehend. The confusion between reformer and conservative was crucial to the allegations that would long be levelled against him, concerning his activities in late 1975.
After several years in Defence, Tange was now adopting what might be called ‘the Defence line’ on the Australian-American alliance. This was not incompatible with the ‘External Affairs line’ that he had done so much to initiate and develop in the 1950s and 1960s. As noted in the previous chapter, he effectively defended the Whitlam government’s intention to remain loyal to the alliance, even while challenging the American position on the Vietnam war and demanding that Australian sovereignty be respected over the administration of the joint facilities. But the emphasis was a little different. The joint facilities, for which Defence was the responsible department in Australia, were now central to the operations and purpose of the alliance. There was no clear and imminent strategic threat to Australia, like that posed by Japan in the 1940s, and the emphasis in defence planning was to detect and prepare for possible threats in the medium- or long-term. Consequently Tange and his colleagues in Defence, both civilian and uniformed, were placing less emphasis on the ‘strategic guarantee’ implicit in the ANZUS Treaty—that is, the promise to assist a party under attack—and more on the day-to-day benefits of the alliance at a time of Cold War stalemate and relative stability in the region. Prominent among these benefits were access to American intelligence and access to advanced technology. The price was to continue to make available the sites of the joint facilities and to protect what the Americans regarded as the essential security surrounding their functions and operations. It was therefore not surprising that Tange became deeply disturbed when it appeared that the curtain of secrecy around the joint facilities seemed likely to ripped open in late 1975.
By a series of unfortunate coincidences, this arose at a time when political tensions and sensitivities on both sides of the Pacific were exceptionally high.481 The terms of the agreement on the Pine Gap station designated that the first opportunity for the Australian side to indicate that it would not be renewed came in December 1975. It became evident that some senior Americans, not least in the Central Intelligence Agency, held exaggerated fears that either Whitlam himself, or a left-wing Labor leader who supplanted Whitlam, might do so. This happened to coincide with the crisis in Australian domestic politics that led the Senate to block the Budget legislation, culminating in the government’s dismissal by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November. It was particularly unfortunate for Tange that the journalist who broke a crucial story in early November, linking the Pine Gap facility to the Central Intelligence Agency rather than to the Defense Department as the Americans publicly asserted, was Brian Toohey. Moreover, one of the minders who accompanied Morrison into the minister’s office in mid-1975 was William Pinwill, a like-minded journalist who later collaborated with Toohey on an unauthorised history of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Thus not only was the political atmosphere in general exceptionally tense, but the suspicion and animosity towards Tange was particularly acute among some of the minders and their allies in the media.
Tange’s known actions during this crisis were unusual but not improper. When Whitlam’s staff became aware that Defence had a list of declared CIA operatives in Australia that was different from the list held in Foreign Affairs, Tange immediately responded to a request to provide the list. He vigorously drew attention to the security implications of this knowledge being circulated. When Whitlam proposed to answer a parliamentary question on the matter in a way that would have confirmed the link between the CIA and Pine Gap, while also revealing that Tange had made this information available, he pressed very hard for the Prime Minister to change the terms of the answer. He was alleged to have stated that Australia was facing its greatest threat to national security. The answer was due to be given on the afternoon of 11 November; Whitlam was dismissed at lunchtime. It was, it seems, the manner in which Tange acted, particularly the extreme emphasis that he placed on the secrecy of the information concerning the joint facilities, that drew attention to his actions. Moreover, Tange believed that reports of his actions and statements were circulated by staff in Whitlam’s and Morrison’s offices—not by the ministers themselves—in a way that at first encouraged derision and later gave birth to a conspiracy theory.
According to this theory, Tange himself was the link between the ‘security crisis’ over the future of Pine Gap and the ‘constitutional crisis’ that led to Whitlam’s dismissal by the Governor-General. Tange was alleged to have informed Kerr of the Americans’ deep concern over the intelligence relationship, thus motivating Kerr to act as and when he did. (This theory, which did not surface until the late 1970s and then recurred at intervals in the 1980s, is analysed in the Appendix. There, too, belongs discussion of the other allegation later raised against Tange’s actions in the spring of 1975, concerning his supposed implication in the events surrounding the deaths of five Australia-based journalists in Balibo during Indonesia’s covert intervention in East Timor.)
Tange’s own account of this period emphasised that his priority was to attempt to apply to Defence, including the services, the system of vouchers by which the government proposed to pay its employees until the Budget legislation had been passed by the Senate. On 11 November, Tange recalled:
I attended the [Australian] War Memorial service [for Remembrance Day], returned to my desk briefly, and went to lunch returning to my office before 2 p.m. … While [I was] sitting at my desk catching up with accumulated papers, my secretary burst into the room to say that the Prime Minister had been dismissed and replaced by Malcolm Fraser. This seemed so improbable that I asked where she had got the information. ‘From my mum, listening to the radio,’ she said. I told her, no doubt with some acerbity, not to interrupt me in future with tales from her mother. Nonetheless, I switched on the radio. I heard Malcolm Fraser speaking from the Government benches. I do not recall whether I gave my secretary the apology for my disbelief that she undoubtedly deserved.482
It can safely be assumed that his secretary did not receive the apology, but there is no reason to doubt that the Dismissal of the Whitlam government came as a complete surprise to Tange.
Moreover, Whitlam himself publicly declared his confidence in Tange’s loyalty. A year after the dismissal, a press report alleged that Fraser, as Prime Minister, was deeply dissatisfied with the administration of the Defence Department. Rejecting the claim in the House of Representatives, Fraser took the opportunity to describe Tange as ‘one of the most distinguished public servants that this country has ever produced … [and] a man of great dedication, of immense integrity and great intellectual capacity’. Whitlam, now Leader of the Opposition, promptly associated himself with these comments, leading Fraser to assert, evidently with Whitlam’s concurrence, that Tange had served the Labor government ‘with complete and absolute loyalty’.483 At this time of extreme political tension, it seemed that lauding Tange’s ability, integrity and loyalty was one subject on which Fraser and Whitlam could agree.
