Public service, ministerial staff taking steps to improve working relationship, retiring Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott says

A panel was set up in 2021 to produce training and material to get the relationship working "at its best", and senior public servants were trained last year.

"We are at the moment talking to PMO [the Prime Minister's Office] about rolling out some training for ministers' staff around how to work better with the public service," Mr Woolcott told colleagues gathered at the National Press Club for his valedictory address.

The Morrison government established the Strengthening Partnerships Reference Panel in 2021, in response to the 2019 Thodey review of the public service. The review made 40 recommendations to modernise the APS.

The report by Mr Thodey, a former chief executive for Telstra, also recommended the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act be amended to establish a legislated code of conduct, with appropriate enforcement provisions, though this was not enacted.

Mr Woolcott, who spent 40 years in the public service, many of them as a diplomat, will leave the public service on May 10.

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The public service commissioner, who worked as a chief-of-staff for former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former foreign minister Alexander Downer and former former Liberal opposition leader Andrew Peacock, said a lack of understanding was hampering the relationship between public servants and ministerial staff.

"I've worked in a couple of ministers' offices and they are an incredibly talented and hard-working group of people," he said.

"The issue really is, it's a line between where their responsibility is and what our responsibility is ... and how you understand those lines.

"And that's probably more of an issue with people who have just started, just come into the ministers' offices without much experience in government," Mr Woolcott said.

"And it's also a problem for senior public servants who have never worked up in the minister's office and don't necessarily have a good feel of what sort of pace that they're subjected to and the different pressures that they're subjected to."

The relationship between the public service and ministers' offices is "absolutely crucial" to the functioning of government, Mr Woolcott said.

"I just think we can do a little bit better in terms of allowing both sides, or both ends to understand how the other works and the context in which they communicate," Mr Woolcott said.

He stressed the need for the "best" public servants to work in ministerial offices, in order to grasp the speed at which things happen and the pressures "that quickly bear down on ministers".

Departmental liaison officers, public servants working within ministerial offices, take on the role of conduit between department and minister.

"Now this should never undermine the apolitical nature of the APS," Mr Woolcott added.

"The reality is that ministers' offices are an integral part of our system and it is their work which helps keep the APS impartial.

"Nevertheless an understanding of the lines between their work and ours is crucial."

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