Public Eye: Canberra's high-flyers mean business, BOM'd rebranding and the APS's anti-networkers

Nearly $500,000 has been spent carting top officials around the country in business class, freedom of information requests from the Treasury, Finance, Agriculture and Infrastructure departments show.

While the departments' secretaries landed a few $1000 in taxpayer-paid flights, SES band 1 officials racked up the most frequent flyer points.

According to our analysis, 87 per cent of the $408,170 spent across 278 flights booked over the last year were for SES bureaucrats. And of course, that's only covering four departments.

Former Infrastructure secretary, Simon Atkinson, hopped on six flights totalling nearly $5000 over a two-week period during the federal election.

Treasury boss Dr Steven Kennedy caught $5000 worth of flights over May and June, including a $2000 same-day return flight to Brisbane on the Sunday after the election.

Presumably, that was at the request of Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who featured him in a candid Twitter post at his home very shortly after assuming office.

High office means business, after all.

Like the schoolyard nickname that stuck no matter how hard you tried, the Bureau of Meteorology's attempt to rid its pesky acronym was always going to be a tough sell.

Never mind trying to launch your new brand amid some of the most devastating flooding in recent history to soak the east coast.

But now the "Bureau", as it would now like to be known, has to face another challenge: being the butt of every joke.

Even well-known defamation lawyer Bruce McClintock took a jab at the weathered media team during a parliamentary hearing.

"I hope you don't mind me calling it the NACC ('knack') ... [dramatic pause] ... it's not the BOM," he told committee members hoping to lighten up the dull drone.

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The weather bureau has since walked back its direction to media outlets, saying they can refer to it "any way they wish".

So, why exactly did it have to spend $220,000 first, then?

Public servants have always struggled to shake the image they're just sitting in office cubicles, shuffling papers and ticking boxes.

Even former prime minister Scott Morrison said bureaucrats in the nation's capital were just "looking at bits of paper" when he was pressed on why ministers were overriding departmental recommendations for a number of infamous grants programs.

But it doesn't help when you're publicly warned for your aggressive paper-shuffling.

Such a charge was handed to Australian Federal Police top cops, Scott Lee and Ian McCartney, who appeared before a parliamentary committee last week.

The senior police were asked to tone it down by Labor committee member Julian Hill.

"Chair, could you just ask the witnesses to try not to shuffle paper so much because it's almost impossible to hear?" Mr Hill said.

Committee chair Peter Khalil agreed, adding the committee room's microphones were "very good" and were picking up all the witnesses' movements.

We can attest to that, Mr Khalil. We overheard many interesting whisperings between committee members looking into the anti-corruption bill during the days following.

Things move slowly in bureaucracy, so it came as little surprise Wikipedia was quicker to the mark on former prime minister Scott Morrison's multiple ministry scandal than Parliament's website.

However, at some point in mid-September, about a month after the ministry grab was revealed, the Department of Parliamentary Services updated the Member for Cook's official biography.

It now lists how he was simultaneously the minister for health, finance, industry, home affairs while also balancing the books as Treasurer and being the nation's highest officeholder. We're guessing he hasn't heard of quiet quitting.

And while we're on the topic of outdated government websites, Mr Morrison is still the chair of Canberra National Memorials Committee, according to the very outdated government directory.

It also lists former Infrastructure secretary Simon Atkinson as a committee member whose term both begins and ends on July 4, 2099.

In the public service as in many careers, it's about who you know. Except, that is, if your dream is to become an auditor.

The Australian National Audit Office is making a virtue of being the ultimate non-schmoozers of the public service, rejecting invitations to every networking event coming their way.

A gifts and benefits register shows it has knocked back nine such invites since the start of 2021, avoiding events run by Ernst and Young, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, among others. It even received an offer to visit the RAAF Amberley site from the subject of many a scathing national audit, the Defence Department.

In all cases, the kind invitation was "declined at the point of offer". There you have it, to be an ANAO employee is to be an anti-networker. After all, it's easier to criticise wasteful, behind-schedule spending programs when you haven't spent an afternoon eating canapes and having drinks with the officials involved.

Should public servants' reputations and complaints follow them after leaving an APS workplace?

The new federal ICAC might have something to say, but public servants have long been able to resign before facing the music in a code of conduct matter, our colleague Harley Dennett notes.

What happens in the department, stays in the department. That's what one senior public servant - a medical adviser reporting to a departmental secretary - felt, after "concerns" about their behaviour to staff were shared with the regulator of health practitioners, APHRA.

Rejecting them as "false and malicious claims", the adviser fired off complaints of breach of both privacy and health practitioner natural law.

Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk recently decided on the privacy complaint, deciding in the circumstances the collection, disclosure and refusal to give access to the information held on the adviser did "not amount to an interference with the complainant's privacy".