Sandi Logan: migrating flak from the minister The apolitical spokesman? ... The Immigration Department's Sandi Logan regularly fields media inquiries instead of his minister. Photo: CeBIT Australia The Department of Immigration and Citizenship's secretary, Andrew Metcalfe, found himself in the public eye recently. He was appearing before Parliament's joint select committee on Australia's detention network, which had been established with the support of the Greens and the Coalition. In his opening remarks to the committee, he seemed to be urging a rethink of government policy on mandatory detention. Metcalfe "respectfully" suggested that the committee address "a range of policy conundrums." He raised a number of questions, including how the issue of asylum should be managed, the balance between international obligations and strong border controls, how to manage the different cohorts with different risk features, and whether immigration detention was a deterrent. Sandi Logan's high profile as the Immigration Department's spokesman is unusual, as ministers are expected to answer for their departments, even on details of administration. Some commentators were quick to interpret these remarks as open criticism of government policy. If so, Metcalfe would have been in clear breach of conventions of ministerial responsibility and public service ethics. All public servants, and particularly department secretaries, are obliged to support their ministers' policies in public, whatever their personal misgivings and whatever warnings they may have offered in private. Fronting up (sometimes)... Immigration Minister Chris Bowen discusses asylum seekers last month. Strictly speaking, Metcalfe was only asking questions that were covered in the committee's terms of reference. He was not suggesting answers that in any way undermined government policy. His minister, Chris Bowen, claimed to be quite relaxed. "Mr Metcalfe was clearly referring to the inquiry's terms of reference in relation to mandatory detention," one of the minister's spokespeople said. The suspicion remains, however, that Metcalfe was at least hinting at official disquiet over current policy. Perhaps he had an inkling of what the High Court might decide and the disarray that would cause for government policy on asylum-seekers. A secretary of his skill and experience would surely know that posing the committee's terms of reference so sharply would attract media attention and would give the appearance of less than total support for government policy. The most newsworthy question he asked ("Is immigration detention a deterrent?") is not explicitly included in the terms of reference, which use blander officialese such as "impact" and "effectiveness." It seems almost designed to attract a headline. Metcalfe himself is rarely in the news. He normally leaves his national communications manager, the redoubtable Sandi Logan, to speak for the department. Logan's high-profile role as a departmental spokesman is unusual in the Australian Public Service, where ministers are generally expected to answer for their departments, even on details of departmental administration. Defence Minister Stephen Smith, for instance, regularly fronts up for every military casualty. Former environment minister Peter Garrett was asked to explain every failure in the ill-fated home insulation program, just as Julia Gillard, when she was education minister, was personally pressed on individual cost overruns in the school building program. According to standard practice, the immigration minister should be the one to comment publicly on every hunger strike or every rooftop demonstration in a detention centre. He should not need to hand the microphone to a departmental spokesman such as Logan. But he would not be the first immigration minister to avoid answering for the actions of departmental officials. Amanda Vanstone, for instance, when she was minister in the Howard government, notoriously refused to take responsibility for the shocking treatment meted out by immigration officers to Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez Solon. She turned the blame on to her department and its supposedly uncompassionate culture, even though that culture was in large measure a response to the Howard government's hard-line approach to asylum-seekers. The department's then secretary, Bill Farmer, was made to take full responsibility and later moved on (though generously compensated with an ambassadorship). Immigration is a portfolio with a constant stream of bad news. Ministers are naturally tempted to share the burden of regularly facing a barrage of hostile media questioning. Using a departmental spokesperson, though unusual, is at least better than directly involving the secretary. If the secretary is called on to answer, as the person responsible for all departmental administration, the minister is clearly ducking responsibility and passing the buck to the department. A departmental spokesperson, however, has no position of personal responsibility and therefore can report on behalf of the collective enterprise, including not only the department but also the minister as its leader. In this way, no public wedge is driven between the minister and the department and the broader Westminster conventions are maintained. In effect, Bowen and Metcalfe both use Logan as a lightning rod to draw some of the public criticism away from the minister. The minister's ultimate responsibility for the department is not undermined, even if he is shirking some of his accountability obligations. The minister still answers for general policy, such as the ill-fated Malaysian solution, which has brought more than its fair share of political headaches. But at least he can call on Logan to deal with the more localised incidents. In the meantime, Metcalfe has adopted the normally low public profile of a professionally competent secretary, quietly managing the department while supporting the minister with confidential advice. That he appears to have used the recent committee hearing to make a few discreet waves about government policy on mandatory detention remains worthy of comment. Importantly, his implicit criticism was aimed at both sides of politics and not just at the current government. Both Labor and the Coalition support mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum-seekers. For this reason, Metcalfe could not be accused of engaging in partisan debate or of giving comfort to the Government's political opponents. Instead, Metcalfe indicated disquiet with the general level of policy debate on these issues. His emphasis on evidence and balance served to underline how much these qualities are missing in the hysterical distortions that infect discussion about asylum-seeker policy in Parliament and the media. Metcalfe is not alone among the ranks of secretaries in publicly complaining about the intellectual poverty of policy debate. In July, the Treasury secretary, Dr Martin Parkinson, gave a widely reported speech on the need for governments to press on with further reforms aimed at improving productivity. He complained that bipartisan political support for economic reform had been undermined by "populist media campaigns." By implication, the blame cannot lie solely with the media but also with politicians who agree to play the media game by arguing in simplistic sound-bites and funny hats rather than with reason and evidence. A few weeks later, Terry Moran spoke out, in what was to prove his valedictory speech as secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. He used the John Paterson oration in Sydney to complain about the dumbing down of public debate. He, too, pointed to the media and the demands of the frenetic news cycle for "high-energy, low nutrition debates." He broadened the critique to include the role of ministerial advisers who are largely unaccountable and therefore, in his view, a threat to democracy. The two trends are connected. It is the advisers, many with training in public relations, who are the main architects of sloganising and spin. Each of these senior and experienced secretaries was suitably discreet and measured in his criticisms. That they raised the issues at all, however, surely indicates the level of their frustration and disillusionment with the current state of politics and policy debate. Public servants are well accustomed to the demands of electoral politics and the need for politicians to court public opinion. But they also expect ministers to leave space for the serious business of policy development in partnership with their departments. It is the steady erosion of this space that concerns them and should concern us all. Richard Mulgan is an emeritus professor with the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University.