In order to identify and foster the "pipeline of future potential leaders", Professor Davis and Dr de Brouwer collect intel from the heads of 22 departments and agencies on an annual basis.
These little catch-ups are officially termed "succession conversations", and in 2023 included an "increased focus on behaviour in support of sustainable delivery, greater openness to external talent and consideration of longer-term SES Band 2 prospects".
In car-dependent Canberra, Glyn Davis chooses to walk as much as possible, often through the front doors of buildings such as the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which he leads, and Parliament House, whose political class he serves.
On mornings when cabinet is meeting or he has an appointment with the prime minister, Davis can be seen treading the 1000 metres up Capital Hill from his department to Parliament House’s main public entrance, passing unnoticed through security into the Marble Foyer, on his way to the desk he keeps in the cabinet suite at the rear of the building.
This is unusual. Other department heads enter Parliament House via a bunker-like car park that safeguards the executive wing. Many, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy and Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster, drive themselves. Some, including ASIO boss Mike Burgess and Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty, are driven.
“Having had the opportunity to work with a range of leaders and CEOs in the business and social purpose world, Glyn is one of the most genuinely ego-free leaders I’ve ever come across,” says Michael Traill, chair of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Australia’s largest philanthropic foundation, to whom Davis reported as its chief executive from 2018 to 2022.
Davis returns to his department the same way, sliding through the crowd of lobbyists, staffers and others with business before the parliament who tend to congregate outside Aussie’s Café. He then heads out the public exit and down the hill, his head bowed deep in thought.
What is he thinking about?
The vast number of complex issues facing the Commonwealth?
An upcoming session with the musicians he likes to jam with?
A line of verse that caught his eye while browsing the poetry section at Readings bookstore in Melbourne?
A Sydney art exhibition he dare not miss?
Any one of a number of pieces he has promised to Australian Book Review or Meanjin?
The latest Tom Stoppard play?
His grandson?
Such is the breadth of Davis’s passions and intellectual curiosity that all of the above are possible.
Ever mindful of Winston Churchill’s maxim – “We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us” – Davis takes his walks across Parliament House’s open spaces in part as an act of defiance against a building designed to prevent random encounters between its occupants, and part longing for a less guarded age when bumping into a cabinet minister couldn’t be avoided.
He got his first taste of Canberra politics – and first acquired the habit of walking through the front door of Parliament House – in the early 1980s, when he was undertaking his doctoral thesis at the Australian National University on the political independence of the ABC. Cycling over Lake Burley Griffin in the early evening, he would park his bike and climb the famous front steps of what is now Old Parliament House to linger in King’s Hall and watch MPs and senators dart to and fro, casually brushing shoulders with the public. Later, he would slip down to the non-members bar, buzzing as it was with backbenchers, ministers and journalists, to soak up the intrigue and perhaps contemplate the path not taken.
Before moving to Canberra for his doctorate, Davis was interviewed by the editors of The Sydney Morning Herald, at the John Fairfax Building on Broadway, and offered a journalism cadetship. Then under the spell of his first mentor, the famous Australian public intellectual Donald Horne, Davis must surely have been tempted by the cycle of observation, speculation and prolific writing that marked Horne’s own life in journalism.
Deciding instead on a career rooted in education and scholarship, Davis has nevertheless lived a life not unfaithful to the advice offered by the character named Horne in Frank Moorhouse’s 1976 novella Conference-ville, to “miss nothing and take one of everything”. “That is, be committed to the whole experience,” as Davis himself once interpreted Horne’s line. “The thinking and the journey are one.”
Journalism is in Davis’s blood. His Welsh grandfather was a newspaper reporter and chief subeditor on London’s Fleet Street, and his father, Pedr, who turns 95 this month, was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to journalism in 2018. Born in London in 1929, Pedr Davis showed an early flair for writing, selling short fiction pieces to a local newspaper from age 16. But his love of cars and motorcycles led him to an engineering apprenticeship at the Austin Motor Company.
“Austin employed 42,000 people at the time, but I knew nothing about big corporations,” Pedr told Wheels magazine on receiving his OAM. “Early on I thought, ‘Well, gee whiz, I ought to meet the managing director, let him know I’m aboard.’ So I went and banged on the door.” Despite Pedr being called in minutes later to the apprentices office for “an industrial-sized bollocking”, Austin’s managing director never forgot him, and picked him for all sorts of assignments including starting a staff magazine.
Another consequential assignment was a trip to Australia in 1953, where Pedr met Wheels founding editor Athol Yeomans, as well as a young Sydney woman named Dolores. After discovering that he could earn more writing one story than in one week working as an engineer, Davis quit Austin in 1956 and moved to Australia, where he began writing for Wheels and other publications. He and Dolores married in 1958.
“He really was Australia’s first successful freelance journalist with a syndicated column,” says Pedr’s son Tony, who inherited his father’s passion for journalism and cars and now writes, among many other things, a motoring column for The Australian Financial Review. “At one stage it went to about 140 newspapers around Australia.”
Settling around Georges River in Sydney’s southern suburbs, Pedr and Dolores raised three boys: Glyn, Tony and Damian (who is head of comedy and entertainment at production company CJZ). They were always a close family, and both parents are still active. Pedr and Dolores were straight-down-the-line conservative parents – Pedr wrote the odd campaign flyer for the Liberal Party during the 1970s – who became less conservative as they aged. “But we all ate dinner together and there was always lively conversation,” says Tony, adding that the conversation continues, usually over a Sunday morning Zoom call, with their sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren chiming in from wherever they happen to be.
All three Davis boys attended Marist College Kogarah. “There was really no question about not going to a Catholic school. And the local Catholic school that went to Year 12 – because my parents certainly wanted us to go to Year 12 – was Marist,” says Tony, who recalls a pretty rough place that excelled at supplying the St George rugby league team with a lot of very good players. Other alumni included the cricketers Ray Lindwall and Kerry O’Keeffe, Olympic swimming gold medallist Robert Windle, current NSW Premier Chris Minns, and, just five years behind Glyn, future Commonwealth public service mandarin Michael Pezzullo.
At Marist, Glyn leant hard into the humanities. Less interested in sport than his brothers, he took up classical guitar and, later, the clarinet. “We all began learning instruments, but Glyn was the one that just put the hours in. Hours and hours into it. And he became very, very good, though he insists that it’s sheer persistence over talent in terms of his musical ability. But he’s a very good guitarist and a very nice clarinetist,” says Tony.
Tony adds that Glyn is also an extraordinary reader. “Even as vice-chancellor he found time to read and review books for newspapers because he just liked to be engaged in all sorts of stuff. We’re all big readers, but when we’re discussing books, it’s always hard to bring up something that he hasn’t read.”
An astute reader of people as well as books, a trait passed down from his mother, Glyn also has his father’s organisational skills. “In terms of being super organised, that’s something we got from our father. It’s a huge skill to have no matter what you are doing. And then my mother, who is very curious and a very good reader of people, I’d like to think we three got some of that as well,” says Tony.
The first member of his family to attend university, Glyn Davis enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of New South Wales, majoring in political science. It was there, in the political science department, that he first encountered Horne, the professor without a tertiary degree who had become a household name following the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964.
While Horne may have become famous as the man who “damned the nation’s elites as second rate”, as Davis himself wrote in a 2010 biographical essay, Horne was also known for “his love of food, wine and conversation”. By the time Davis was finishing his honours thesis in 1981, a dissertation on the fledgling radio station 2JJ (set up by the Whitlam government to extend the appeal of the ABC to younger audiences), he was an occasional guest at Horne’s Woollahra terrace, where the precocious undergraduate would dazzle other guests with the depth of his reading on abstruse topics such as French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of power.
The two stayed in regular contact until Horne’s death in 2005, by which time Horne regarded Davis as one of his brightest students. The feeling was mutual, with Davis coming to share some of Horne’s political passions, including republicanism (prime minister Paul Keating appointed Davis to the 1993 Republican Advisory Committee chaired by Malcolm Turnbull), and viewing Horne as one of his favourite teachers.
Towards the end of 1981, Davis drove down to Canberra to explore the idea of undertaking a PhD at the Australian National University. After meeting with one professor in the deathly quiet Research School of Social Science who seemed faintly bored with Davis’s ideas, he ventured over to the Faculty of Arts, which was by contrast a noisy, chaotic place where students crowded the corridors and staff gathered in small knots to gossip.
“It was an easy choice but the chance was nearly lost when I was invited to meet senior lecturer Pat Weller,” Davis wrote later in The Craft of Governing: The contribution of Patrick Weller to Australian political science. “I dutifully outlined my plan for a doctoral study of how prime ministers govern in a Westminster environment. Dr Weller smiled and said ‘It’s a good proposal. Indeed it’s an excellent proposal, which is why I’ve just finished writing a book on the same topic. Got any other ideas?’”
Some other work Davis had done on the independence of the ABC caught Weller’s eye, and Davis was soon working on his doctorate in the office opposite, with the supervisor–student relationship developing into a warm friendship in the decades that followed. A British expatriate who came to Australia for two years in 1966 and never left, Weller says Davis was, in 1981, the same quietly spoken man who knew how to listen and ask good questions that he is today.
Now a towering figure on the Australian political science landscape, Weller nominates current treasurer Jim Chalmers as his best ever undergraduate, and Davis as his best doctoral student. “When you’re supervising PhDs, sometimes they’re hard work, but he never was,” Weller says of Davis. “He produced a really nice PhD.”
Armed with his doctorate, Davis immediately took up a position in the public policy program at Griffith University in Brisbane at the beginning of 1985. The city was still in the grip of the state’s longest serving premier, notorious National Party leader Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose 19-year reign collapsed in December 1987 under the weight of mounting corruption allegations. It wasn’t until December 1989 that voters finally swept the Nationals from power.
Looking back on Queensland in the mid 1980s, author and academic Julianne Schultz, the founding editor of Griffith Review and currently a professor emerita at Griffith University, says anyone who lived through the Bjelke-Petersen era was scarred by it one way or another. “It was a very volatile political situation, and I think people now have got no sense of how it shaped that generation,” says Schultz. “The way the state was behaving towards First Nations people, the way the state was behaving towards women, the way it was behaving towards unions. The corruption of business and the police. Many, many people had left.”
Navigating his way through this febrile environment, Davis cut his teeth as a lecturer and began developing friendships that would last a lifetime, the most important of which was with Sydney economist Margaret Gardner, now the governor of Victoria but also then at Griffith, whom he married in 1986.
“I was the best man at the wedding, and Professor Geoffrey Blainey had rung me the night before and dictated a telegram which said that Glyn had won the Harkness Fellowship, which I read out at the reception,” says Tony Davis.
An American equivalent to the Rhodes Scholarship – but without the sporting component – the Harkness gave Davis the opportunity to take up postdoctoral appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Gardner, who received a Fulbright Scholarship to the United States, went with him – a team play that has continued – as did their six-week-old son.
An important influence on Davis at Berkeley was the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, founding dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, while the rest of his time in the US gave him, says Pat Weller, “an education in the process of education”. It was an experience that Davis would draw on later in his career as an academic administrator when he began implementing his own vision of what an Australian university should look like, in particular the idea that undergraduates should first complete a generalist degree before embarking on a professional course such as medicine, law or engineering.
Returning to Griffith at the start of 1989, Davis threw himself into every aspect of academic life, contributing regular opinion pieces to The Courier-Mail and making connections off campus, including with former diplomat Kevin Rudd, then chief-of-staff to state Labor opposition leader Wayne Goss. Following Labor’s landslide victory in December of that year, Goss appointed Davis as one of three members of the Queensland Public Sector Management Commission.
There began more than a decade of flitting back and forth between the political science department at Griffith and various roles inside the Queensland government, putting Davis in the unusual position of being a practitioner, student and analyst of public administration all at the same time. He served as director-general of the Queensland cabinet office under Goss, and later as head of the Queensland Department of Premier and Cabinet under premier Peter Beattie. One person familiar with Davis’s management style at the time says his great skill was his capacity to orchestrate large groups of people: “He was the maestro.”
James Walter, now emeritus professor of political science at Monash University, who was effectively Davis’s line manager at Griffith for a time and recommended his elevation to professor in 1996, says he is one of those people who can read and absorb information incredibly quickly. “Not only could he read something 10 times faster than I could, he was also very retentive … As a teacher, that was just a terrific asset, because he was so well versed in political science and public policy literature,” says Walter.
With Gardner’s academic career advancing even faster than Davis’s, the couple balanced the demands of raising two children, as well as a host of extracurricular activities including his appointments to the board of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
By 2002, Davis was back at Griffith, this time as vice-chancellor, where he managed to establish a medical school within 18 months – a long-held dream of the university’s governing council that many people had told him was impossible. That singular achievement attracted the attention of the University of Melbourne, Australia’s second oldest university and arguably its most prestigious research institution. With their children still finishing high school, Davis initially refused the offer. To his surprise, the university came back with a counteroffer, agreeing to hold the position for 18 months and appointing an acting vice-chancellor in the interim. Davis accepted.
What astounded Melbourne’s academic community was not Davis’s appointment as Melbourne’s vice-chancellor, but the announcement a short time later that Gardner would be the new vice-chancellor of RMIT University, a direct competitor to Melbourne located a few hundred metres down the road.
“I said to Margaret once, ‘How on earth do you handle that?’” says Walter. “And she said, ‘Chinese walls. We just don’t talk about those sorts of things.’ But how they managed the incredible time demands and so on, and still have two by-now adult children, who both appear to be quite normal, is astonishing.”
Then aged 45, Davis was perfectly placed to embark on a major restructuring of Melbourne University and its academic program. Five years on, in 2007, Davis was sounded out by newly elected prime minister Kevin Rudd to head Prime Minister and Cabinet. Rudd and Davis had developed a close and enduring friendship in Queensland in the 1990s, with the two families regularly going on holidays together. Davis demurred, feeling too committed to his work at the university that was only just then taking shape. By the time Davis left the University of Melbourne in 2018, he had left his mark not just on that institution but Australia’s entire tertiary education sector.
Peter McPhee, whom Davis appointed as the university’s inaugural provost in 2007 – standing deputy to the vice-chancellor as well as the university’s chief academic officer – divides Davis’s impact on Melbourne into three key areas. “He inspired the move to the graduate school ‘Melbourne Model’, the most profound change in Australian higher education curriculum structures; he led the billion-dollar ‘Believe’ philanthropy campaign to fund new academic positions and infrastructure; and he oversaw sweeping infrastructure improvements, especially in student learning and study spaces,” says McPhee.
McPhee says the reforms have stood the test of time, with a key outcome being that students no longer need to get an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank score of at least 99.0 to get into elite professional courses. Instead, after completing a good undergraduate degree, they can apply for graduate entry to law or medicine, thereby creating a pathway for students who didn’t go to exclusive secondary schools.
“There were many difficult and confronting situations, some of which I shared with him. Universities are conservative institutions and Glyn had a vision of transformational change,” says McPhee. “The most significant lesson for me from Glyn’s vice-chancellorship is that successful leaders are those who know how to embrace consultative decision-making and to encourage initiative without sacrificing the need for strategic planning and decisiveness.”
Davis’s capacity for constructive, purposeful consultation rather than top-down imposition of change is extraordinary, says McPhee, recalling him as unfailingly courteous in difficult personal situations, and always striving for an outcome that would leave aggrieved or unsatisfactory colleagues the chance of moving on with dignity.
McPhee, himself a formidable intellect who later went on to chair Melbourne University Publishing and has written widely on the history of the French Revolution, is unequivocal in his estimation of Davis’s capacities. “Glyn is the most intelligent person I have met. He is also charming and stimulating company. He reads widely and voraciously and seems most content when exchanging ideas and insights. He personifies what a university should be: creative and brilliant in research; innovative and rigorous in teaching; respectful of difference; aware of history but clear-headed about the future; and an affable, courteous colleague.”
Still, as urbane and tremendously charming as he is, Davis hasn’t got to where he is just by being nice to people. Those who have rubbed up against him say the harder edges are there below the surface. “If you’re not sort of fully engaged in the way he wants, you just get frozen out,” says one person who has observed Davis closely over the years. “The people who have fallen out with him, they felt badly done by at the end because they had some sort of function, but they weren’t fully informed of what he wanted, and then when there was a problem, it fell onto them. He was, in some of these cases, pretty ruthless.”
Taking up a number of visiting professorships and other projects following his departure from Melbourne University – including having to cull 5000 books from his library when he moved out of the vice-chancellor’s residence residence to a nearby terrace – Davis was approached by Michael Traill to take over as chief executive of the Paul Ramsay Foundation. It was formed in 2014 by the gift of health entrepreneur Paul Ramsay, who bequeathed the lion’s share of his equity in Ramsay Health Care, then worth close to $4 billion. Traill says that in the four years he worked with Davis, he did an exceptional job building the team, establishing a strategy and putting in place the blocks underlying the foundation’s work.
“It was very clear how much of a talent magnet Glyn is. Good, smart people like working with him. And perhaps not surprisingly given the level at which he has worked, the capacity to engage at a leadership level across the sectors is really quite exceptional,” says Traill. “He is humble, sometimes to the point of pain, but the authority and gravitas he brings to a room and the preparedness when necessary to have the hard conversations and lean in on difficult issues and decisions is a hallmark of how he works.”
When Davis called Traill following the 2022 election to tell him that the new prime minister had asked him to become the country’s most senior public servant, Traill admits that his initial thought was, “Bugger, we have been gazumped!”
Davis, who was not interviewed for this essay, was not on the media’s shortlist, so his appointment was greeted with surprise. Yet, given Davis’s experience running big organisations, including the Queensland public service, and his closeness to Rudd, now Australia’s ambassador to the United States and a close confidant of Anthony Albanese, it shouldn’t have been.
He had also been part of a six-member panel led by former Telstra chief executive David Thodey to conduct a comprehensive review of the Australian Public Service in 2018. The panel’s 2019 report, buried by then prime minister Scott Morrison the week before Christmas, made 40 recommendations to transform a public service it deemed was not performing at its best and not ready for the challenges Australia faced in the coming decade.
Morrison eventually agreed to only 15 of its recommendations, so one of Davis’s non-negotiables in his conversations with Albanese about taking on PM&C role was that he be able to pick up where Thodey left off. It was a condition Albanese readily agreed to, especially in the wake of administration failures such as the robodebt scandal, and the government has accepted almost all of those recommendations.
“Scott Morrison bequeathed us a public service with too many external consultants and not enough frank and fearless advice,” says Albanese, via email. “Our opponents didn’t value the public service. They didn’t respect institutional norms and proper processes. There had been serious failures in public administration. We were determined to rebuild the APS after a decade of hollowing out.”
Not only did public servants seem out of practice with policy development, and with the concept of cabinet government, says Albanese, but collective decision-making had fallen by the wayside in the era of Morrison’s secret ministries. “I needed a leader with integrity, professionalism and a commitment to evidence-based policy. I needed a departmental head who would exemplify old-school public service values – a person who could bring the APS together and restore core capability after a pretty tumultuous period. That’s why I chose Glyn.”
Of the 22 secretaries of the Prime Minister and Cabinet since federation, the only woman, Stephanie Foster, served in an acting capacity for two weeks following Albanese’s dismissal of Phil Gaetjens the morning after the election.
The secretary of the prime minister’s department has considerable hierarchical influence, but not the hierarchical power of a chief executive. They are the prime minister’s principal adviser, and work for the office holder but not his or her personal office (which is managed by the chief-of-staff). As chair of the Secretaries Board, which meets on the first Wednesday of every month and acts as a clearing house for information-sharing among departmental secretaries, the PM&C secretary is able to give a readout on where they think the prime minister is at, as well as the developments they are seeing in cabinet. The only power open to the PM&C secretary to direct their colleagues is that of persuasion.
Responsible for their own department, like every other secretary, and the handful of ministers that come with it, the PM&C secretary is the only non-elected official who sits in the cabinet room and so must have working relationships with all cabinet ministers. “If anything goes wrong anywhere in the service that can’t be fixed by someone else in the service, it ends up on your desk,” says one former PM&C secretary. “You have to be able to resolve issues with ministers without necessarily involving the prime minister. You’re the person the PM looks to for guidance on the enforcement of ministerial standards and caretaker conventions. You’re the principal policy adviser, which means being across all of the economic policy, national security, foreign affairs, agriculture, transport, all of it. Finally, and most importantly, you have to manage the relationship with the PM.”
Davis is neither a close mate of Albanese nor a complete stranger. One person who has observed Davis’s working relationship with the prime minister describes it as professional. “Which is a good thing, because if you are going to provide frank and fearless advice, then you’ve got to not be matey with someone.”
When he accepted the job, Davis was acutely aware of the hand fortune had dealt him. After spending so many of his formative academic years watching and analysing practitioners of Westminster-style government, he was suddenly in the game.
Some of the issues and policy areas that Davis embraced in his first year at the top of the public service reflect both his policy and personal interests, but his character as well. He worked quickly to restore capability and expertise across the public service, and strengthen its core values, with a package of reforms that were realised earlier this year with the passing of the Public Service Amendment Act. The first major legislative change to the Act this century, the reforms added a new APS Value of Stewardship; made clear that ministers cannot direct agency heads on employment matters; encouraged decision-making at the lowest appropriate level; made regular capability reviews a requirement for APS agencies; and required agencies to publish annual APS Employee Census results, along with action plans responding to those results.
At meetings of the Secretaries Committee on National Security, Davis backed the repatriation of Australian women and children stranded in internally displaced persons camps in Syria. While only 17 of the original near 60 people have been returned to Australia, Davis’s support for their return is based not only on national security grounds, but his belief that Australia has a responsibility to protect citizens abroad, no matter the circumstances.
Another cause that Davis quietly championed was Arts Minister Tony Burke’s efforts to restore the integrity of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Australia’s richest literary prizes, established by Kevin Rudd in 2008, that had fallen into disrepair after years of haphazard management and awkward political interference.
Nor have the demands of high office deterred Davis from the kind of intellectual pursuits that have long sustained him. Last year, he took leave from PM&C and flew at his own expense to London to interview his favourite playwright, Tom Stoppard, together with Stoppard’s biographer Hermione Lee, in Stoppard’s apartment, as part of an event for Adelaide Writers’ Week.
He has also maintained other scholarly interests. In the September issue of Australian Book Review, Davis reviewed a history of Oxford’s Christ Church college, opening the piece with a Yes, Prime Minister anecdote, a joke within a joke from the man who plays the antipodean Humphrey Appleby in real life, albeit without the tenure that secured Appleby’s employment and enabled his superciliousness. An exploration of the teaching of politics at an institution that has educated 13 British prime ministers, sundry leaders of other nations, and generations of civil servants, Davis’s review suggests that in addition to being a full-time practitioner, he remains a student and analyst of the art of statecraft.
Davis may not have Appleby’s knighthood, but he already has an Order of Australia Medal. And while he didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge (or even the London School of Economics), he has been a visiting professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. But in Canberra, where the stakes are higher and a level of strength and experience is required to pull national and international policy levers that are not part of running a state or university, is Davis providing what it takes to deliver Albanese’s policy agenda and transform the public service to the extent that many hoped?
Among a small but influential circle of former departmental heads and other senior public officials who have spent their whole careers working side by side, shepherding their children through the same sporting carnivals, and spending time in one another’s houses on weekends, a degree of scepticism is emerging over Davis’s performance thus far.
The critics question whether Davis, an outsider who doesn’t live in Canberra full time and returns to Melbourne at weekends, has the deep networks and personal relationships needed to get the best out of the other people sitting around the Secretaries Board table. They complain that he’s too academic, too hands off, too fixated on the culture of the service and doesn’t pay enough attention to getting things done. That said, those present at the Secretaries Board note the strong collective work ethic that has developed under Davis, as well as the publication of the meetings minutes, for the first time.
Davis’s supporters say that the test of his strategy-driven, collaborative approach should not be his personal involvement but what is achieved collectively. Getting the best out of people, they say, is more about agreeing to a goal and encouraging initiative in reaching that target. This culture to a purpose, and leadership through shared objectives, is a long way from the more traditional Australian Public Service command-and-control approach, and Davis’s supporters believe it is more effective in the long run.
Another question mark over Davis is the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum, with his critics wondering why, given Davis’s political science background, the government wasn’t better prepared to respond to the negative campaign tactics deployed with such devastating effect by the “No” campaign.
“For someone who knows the literature so well, that failure seemed pretty extraordinary to me, because these are really well understood tactics,” says one Canberra observer. “Equally, there is a lot of research about how you actually communicate across that divide once it’s in play.”
There is grumbling around the pace of public service reform, and the failure to embed more consequential changes to the way the public service operates. Also, unhappiness that less than a month after committing to merit-based appointments for all departmental secretaries, Albanese broke with the practice by appointing Stephanie Foster to head Home Affairs without any kind of competitive process, and with her involvement in the Morrison multiple ministries affair overlooked.
“I think when it comes to public service reform, Glyn has left too much to the Public Service Commission. But the commission can’t do it on its own, and at some point he will really have to put his shoulder to the wheel if he wants to embed real and consequential change,” says one former department head.
Floating around Canberra since July is a discussion paper titled “Further Reform of the Australian Public Service” written by former Public Service Commissioner and departmental secretary Andrew Podger. Signed by 28 public service luminaries such as former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, former PM&C secretary Michael Keating, former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese, former Defence secretary Ric Smith and former Department of Human Services secretary Helen Williams, the paper is cri de coeur about what could and should be done.
Urging the Albanese government – and, by implication, Davis – not to waste a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver urgent reform, the paper outlines 13 proposals addressing the role and values of the Australian Public Service, relations between ministers and department heads, relations between ministerial staff and the public service, appointments to statutory offices and the appointment of ambassadors, the role of consultants and contractors, as well as number of other issues.
“I think a lot of us were encouraged by Davis’s appointment, not only because of his experience in Queensland and in running a big university, but also because he’s written a hell of a lot on public administration and he clearly knows the field extremely well, so that gave everybody a lot of confidence that things would be good,” says the former department head. “But as I say, it hasn’t turned out that way, and so far I would have expected more.”
Ultimately, judging what Davis advice Albanese listened to and assessing his true impact on the Albanese government and the Australian public will have to wait until the release of the cabinet papers that remain sealed for 20 years. “We won’t know what happened between Glyn and Albo for a long time, and that’s the way it should be,” says Pat Weller, the political scientist who has known Davis throughout his career. “Open government is all very well, but you’ve got to have a place where you can debate the issues, both their strengths and weaknesses, in private.”
Donald Horne never lived to see Davis’s appointment as PM&C secretary, but he surely would approve of the sight of him sitting in the chair of Australia’s most powerful public policy official. Given Davis’s deep faith in the human spirit, it’s hardly an accident that this intellectual man of letters has coupled poetry and power, for he likely sees poetry as a means of saving power from itself, to borrow John F. Kennedy’s summation of the poet Robert Frost: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”