Joe Hockey no Paul Keating, Martin Parkinson no John Stone New Treasury secretary, Martin Parkinson. WHEN the young, energetic and decidedly ambitious Paul Keating became treasurer on the election of the Hawke Government in 1983, to the surprise - and indeed raging dismay - of many, most, of his Labor colleagues, he kept John Stone as his treasury secretary. At that time Stone was probably the most hated figure on the left, of those in or around government. Treasury was at its peak as the totally dominant department, and defender of the conservative status quo. To say nothing of its perceived role in bringing down the Whitlam government. Actually, nothing more than trying to advise against acts of escalating insanity, culminating in the Loans Affair. In 1983, the Reserve Bank was just a distant, subservient, branch office in Sydney, processing requests from budding tourists for foreign exchange, and precious little substantive else. A strong secretary like Stone, was the implacable gatekeeper of policy. Those in the new government urgent for change, for `reform,' saw him as a major problem. A very raw Keating, though, saw Stone very differently, as a - the - source of the knowledge about economics and policy he lacked and so desperately sought. But also as precisely the excellent bureaucrat to manage policy implementation. For the first six months or so, like a speed-reading course, Keating sucked everything he could out of Stone, including through the turbulent days of deregulating the financial system and floating the Aussie dollar. And then barely a year into the government Stone would be gone. Thirty years on, the times and the people are very different. Incoming treasurer Joe Hockey is no neophyte Keating. He has been around the policy and governing blocks a few times. Soon-to-be-departing treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, is no Stone. He well and truly wandered off the (old) treasury reservation when he headed the Climate Change Department. There is nothing quite like the fundamental, country-changing deregulation policies of the mid-1980s, vital for implementation now. Which is NOT to say we don't need urgent, significant and wide-sweeping reform. And the underlying economy is in better shape now than then, thanks to both the reform policies of the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments, and the ascension of a China, seemingly made just for our benefit. Further, the treasury of 2013 is a pale shadow of its 1983 parent. Both in terms of its quality and its policy and governing relevance. In both it is now the `branch office' to the RBA, doing little more than preparing budget documents and getting their big numbers consistently wrong. It is the gateway to nowhere. A consequence, in part, no doubt, of pouring Climate Change Kool-Aid into the computers in its basement. The public service and especially departmental heads are very different animals now than when Alan Bond was on his way to his first hundred million, Newport Maine and the America's Cup. The concept of lifetime appointment and full and fearless advice behind closed doors has given way to employment contracts, KPIs and very public appearances before Senate committees. Some have relished the exposure. It's somewhat less public, than now, managerial service. So a Hockey would not be looking at a Parkinson as an ideological friend or foe, but simply as his likely effectiveness as his chief operating officer. And indeed, vice-versa. In May, Hockey was inclined to actively keep Parkinson as his COO. I doubt that anything that happened since then and especially through the election campaign altered that perception. Either positively or negatively. The extraordinary, arguably necessary and unavoidable, intervention, by Parkinson and the finance department head David Tune, in the campaign was read in some quarters as the duo sniffing the winds of coming government change. That suggestion is grossly unfair to the duo. They were simply doing their job, when they publicly denied the government's claims that Treasury had costed the opposition's policies and found a $10 billion budget black hole. They also had little choice, after Hockey phoned Parkinson and put the government's outrageous behaviour to him. For it was Labor - and disgracefully not only prime minister Kevin Rudd but their own then political masters, treasurer Chris Bowen and finance minister Penny Wong - that had put them in the invidious position. Where arguably, a Hockey should have pre-emptively lost confidence in Parkinson as an ongoing-COO, was in Treasury's PEFO - it's independent pre-election budget and economic update. What the PEFO did was misleadingly validate the government's own pre-election economic and budget update. Not because it was rigged or for ideological reasons, but because Treasury showed a lack of awareness of the need to approach its budget and economic forecasting on a more holistic and granular basis. The PEFO was quite simply useless rubbish. And not a good advertisement for what either Treasury or its head could deliver to assist the new government in turbulent times. In a broader sense it showed a still important department locked in an analytical time warp. To draw an analogy with 1983, it was almost like Treasury was figuratively back on Bond's Australia II, when the America's Cup in 2013 has moved on to super-fast catamarans.