Slipped disks, gamesmanship and elephants

Air Marshal Stoush wins again at bureaucratic games while others lose sleep over who will be the next Secretary of the Department of Defence.

 

My boss Barney (Air Marshal Barney Stoush, the VCDF) has copped his share of flak lately about departmental and defence force bungling. His consequent pronounced slough of despond was not helped when he was consulted, more as a matter of form than for any responsibility he has, on a proposal to renegotiate Defence’s travel contract with Qantas.

Slipped into the fine print was a clause that allowed travelling one-star officers to be readmitted to the airport Chairman’s Lounges they were summarily expelled from downwards in 1994. Barney, of course, has a good eye for fine print and soon spotted the plot although most had missed it. This discovery was followed sharply, in the VCDF’s inimitable manner, by the demand for an explanation.

The initial and quite plausible explanation came from the relevant staff officer, an ambitious up-and-coming wing commander, now at home packing for his upcoming posting to Woomera. He put it down to just the usual desire from the bottom of the top pile to avoid what some saw as slumming it in the standard Qantas waiting room.

Barney, to give him his due never a careerist or a rank snob himself, smelt a rat more strongly.

His suspicions (and posting decision) were confirmed when a smoking-gun email from this officer was soon uncovered. This argued that wearied but cosily relaxing business magnates were much less likely to go running to Derryn Hinch with any defence computer disks inadvertently abandoned among the cognac balloons and the caviar.

The VCDF’s mood picked up though later in the morning when he handed me DEFGRAM 295/2006 and claimed victory in our office’s monthly cannibal-defgram hunt.

Now, as all good personal staff officers know, defgrams are simply a form of internal bureaucratic memo that record decisions or other information that requires extensive promulgation. The rules of the game are simple. The winner has to produce a defgram that announces a decision cancelling something out within the previous 300 defgrams. (It started off at 500 but this was found to be too easy given the usual passage of time before the itch for managerialist fiddling is scratched).

Now 300 still might sound difficult but the Russell Hill monolith churns them out in large numbers at an average of two or three a day, or one and a half trees a month.

Barney had noticed that 295/2006 cancelled out parts of 82/2006, the latter being a big one whose subject was a traditional Department of Defence favourite, re-organisation.

I objected that his claimed examples (cadet policy and the location of the Chief Information Officer) were not really cancellations of note but mere re-arrangements. Now my boss is a hard man but a fair one and he agreed to adjudication.

We deferred, by telephone so as not to waste time, to the Inspector-General as he is the original inventor of the game. Alas he came down for Barney’s interpretation.

To his further joy Barney then noticed that 82/2006 also mentioned Joint Logistics Group. This is to be reinstated as a proper command at last and separated out from its latest bureaucratic foster parent, after being a bit of an organisational nomad for the last decade.

After a quick rummage in his bottom drawer Barney triumphantly pulled a coffee cup ring-stained minute he had written as a two-star recommending strongly against the original merger of the then Commander Support Australia with the then Defence Acquisition Organisation in 1998. ‘Was it so short a time ago’ he had mused?

I suspect his relish in this instance was magnified by him also being the one who had pointed out that the JLG had fallen off the new-beaut departmental wiring diagram promulgated in late February (and due to take effect on 01 July). This loss had been somewhat embarrassing for the department.

Fortunately, just before the end of the financial year, the Australian National Audit Office had managed to find the missing organisation and kindly returned it to Defence undamaged.

It was clearly a day where Barney’s luck had turned around. He went off quite cock-a-hoop for the regular afternoon coaching sessions on things strategical he provides the new DEPSEC–Strategy.

These apparently continue to go well because he is bombarding several floors with emails and minutes on such matters ? to the extent some have fled the bombardment. The new deputy secretary I mean. Bombarding is just not Barney’s style even though, like most senior Air Force officers, he has a touching belief in the universal efficacy of bombing as a strategic panacea.

But the elephant wandering around the fifth floor with ever-heavier tread is the succession to the mandate of heaven.

With the Secretary due to retire at the end of the year the under-mandarins are unusually nervous. Oddly perhaps, in a department of state with six deputy-secretary equivalents (a Public Service all-time record by the way Barney noted) there is not even the remotest prospect of an internal candidate.

Their nervousness apparently stems from not knowing who the next Shogun will be and, given the PM’s penchant for diplomats, fearing the worst.

None of this worries my boss of course. Like generations of Air Force officers he has long put considerable thought and effort into the comfort of his bed and has the thickest mattress money can buy.

The nightly discomfiture of tossing under-mandarins is not for him, physically or bureaucratically.