Martin Parkinson's fall is a lesson for departmental secretaries

On one account, Parkinson was a model public servant, extremely able and professional, who was unjustly sacked (or eased out of his position) by the incoming Coalition Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, perhaps at the urging of his chief of staff, Peta Credlin.

His main fault, apparently, was to have been a former secretary of Climate Change, a department the Coalition abolished and a policy area of which many in the Coalition were deeply sceptical. As Treasury secretary under Labor, Parkinson also skirmished occasionally with the opposition, for instance over claims in 2012 that the Treasury had been involved in costing Coalition policies outside an election campaign and leaking them to the media. In response, Parkinson had defended the Treasury's obligation to cost any polices referred to it by the treasurer and had angrily denied responsibility for any leaks. No doubt, the leaks emanated from the minister's office, which was keen to invoke the Treasury's authority to score points off the opposition. On any fair reading of events, Parkinson and the Treasury were blameless.

From this perspective, Parkinson's conduct had been exemplary throughout and his dismissal reflected a serious breach of Westminster conventions of a politically neutral public service. For critics of the Coalition's disrespect of these conventions and its readiness to dismiss incumbent secretaries, Parkinson has becomes a symbolic martyr for an apolitical public service.

An alternative assessment of Parkinson's performance is more ambiguous. While his capability as a policy analyst and departmental leader are unquestioned, he always had a tendency to speak out publicly on controversial policy issues. For example, in 2008, not long after his appointment as inaugural secretary of Climate Change, he wrote a lengthy opinion piece for The Australian, discussing various options for reducing greenhouse emissions and supporting some options over others. Such an open and relatively contentious intervention in policy debate was an unusual initiative for a departmental secretary.

Under the normal conventions of an apolitical public service, public servants avoid open discussion of contested policy options. They may help the government formulate policies and frame arguments to justify them. But public articulation is usually the role of ministers. Similarly, when answering questions from Senate committees, public servants are usually careful to refer controversial matters of policy to ministers, keeping clear of any suggestion of partisan commitment.

Parkinson's 2008 article marked him out as a public servant willing to breach traditional conventions of anonymity and to engage publicly in policy advocacy. By 2010, with the breakdown of bipartisan discussions on climate change policy and Abbott's defeat of Malcolm Turnbull for the Coalition leadership, climate change had become a highly polarising issue. As such, it was an area in which politically cautious public servants knew to watch their step. By all accounts, however, Parkinson, who continued as Climate Change secretary until early 2011, made little attempt to hide his support for the Gillard government's carbon tax against the criticism of the Abbott-led opposition.

On this view, whatever the rights and wrong of Parkinson's eventual dismissal, a case can be made that he overstepped the proper bounds of political neutrality as Climate Change secretary. The opinion, now firmly embedded in much of the gallery and the commentariat, that Parkinson was penalised simply for being in charge of a policy area of which the Coalition disapproved is therefore open to question. It applies much more clearly to his successor, Blair Comley, who was later snapped up by the NSW Coalition government, than to Parkinson himself.

As Treasury secretary from 2011, Parkinson continued his readiness to speak out on policy issues. In 2012, for example, in a widely reported address to a business lunch, he argued that current fiscal settings were unsustainable and that governments needed to be prepared to significanty increase revenue or severely cut public services, a theme he repeated on several occasions. In 2013, while defending the objectivity of Treasury budget forecasts, he questioned the overall reliability of medium-term forecasts, which had become so central to political debate. He suggested individual items could be given "confidence levels" indicating how much credence they should be given, as a means of increasing public awareness of the inherent uncertainties in budget forecasting.

After the election of the Coalition, Parkinson, now branded as a lame duck, became even more outspoken. In July 2014, he publicly attacked critics of the Coalition's first budget who used "vague notions of fairness", a blatantly partisan remark considering the opposition parties' claims that the budget was unfair. His comments raised the ire of Paddy Gourley in the Informant of August 2014 and were described as "an almost unprecedented intervention in political debate" by former Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Michael Keating. A former public service commissioner, Professor Andrew Podger, also considered Parkinson to have gone too far on that occasion.

In August, Parkinson told a public gathering of young economists it was "unfortunate" that "we" did not spend more time talking about tax and spending changes as part of the budget process. On this occasion, he not only criticised the government but also accepted joint responsibility for its decisions and political salesmanship, both clear breaches of public service conventions. In September, he called for reductions in direct taxation as a boost to productivity, again a politically controversial proposal.

Given the compromised position in which the Abbott government had placed him, Parkinson can perhaps be personally forgiven for speaking his mind in his last months. However, his actions must also be considered from the point of view of public service ethics and professional practice. Does his readiness to enter the fray of public policy debate represent an example for others to follow or to be avoided? This question is particularly relevant at a time several influential public service commentators, including former PM&C secretary Terry Moran, are urging senior public servants to be more willing to engage in public debate. The traditional cloak of public service anonymity, it is claimed, is out of kilter with the new era of contestable policy and open government.

As is often the case, competing principles are at stake and their application calls for sensible judgment. A strong case can be made for encouraging senior public servants, particularly secretaries, to adopt a higher public profile and to help the public understand the issues underlying policy debates and decisions.

The Treasury secretary has a particularly important public function stemming from the Treasury's dual role as a normal government department under ministerial direction and also a recorder and analyser of the national economy. In exercising its recording and analysing functions, the Treasury operates at arm's-length from government, more like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the secretary rightly takes public responsibility, for example when explaining the methodology behind budget forecasting.

In commenting on government policy, however, like other secretaries, the Treasury secretary should leave partisan arguments to the minister. For this reason, it is a mistake to treat the Treasury secretary on a par with the Reserve Bank governor as someone officially entitled to criticise publicly the direction of government economic policy.

How outspoken secretaries should be is ultimately determined by politicians and their advisers (together with gallery journalists on the lookout for evidence of internal disagreement in government). Ministers and their staff do not take kindly to public servants who appear to undermine them in public, while oppositions mark down those public servants whose excessive support for ministers suggests possible disloyalty to a future alternative government.

At the present, critical time for the future of the public service, the imperative is that senior public servants win and maintain the trust of politicians on both sides of politics. Only if trust is secure will ministers start to make better use of departmental advice and improve the quality of government decision-making. On a change of government, incoming ministers should have no good reason to distrust the loyalty of any current secretary. Only then can ministers be fairly criticised if they breach the principles of a professional public service by summarily dismissing incumbent secretaries

In such a climate, secretaries can be forgiven if they reserve their frank and fearless advice for confidential exchanges with ministers and tend to keep their heads down in public. By all means, they should venture more into the public sphere, but only with the consent of ministers and without provoking opposition parties. In analysing these issues and deciding where to draw the line, the career of Martin Parkinson will continue to offer rich material for discussion.

Richard Mulgan is an emeritus professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. richard.mulgan@anu.edu.au