The Westminster Tradition

In 2016, the Andrews government settled a bitter, years-long dispute with the firefighters’ union in a hotel room, then spent the next two years pretending it hadn’t.

In August, Victoria’s anti-corruption commission IBAC tabled its special report on Operation Richmond. It made no findings of corrupt conduct and found no evidence for the blackmail allegation that started the investigation.

But most of its 120 pages are about something else: what happens to public servants when a Premier wants a problem fixed, and fixed quietly.

In Part 1 we follow Tony Bates, nine weeks into a Deputy Secretary job at DPC, as he’s told to keep it “very tight”. We cover the secret negotiations, the champagne photo, the staged handover of a “UFU proposal” that wasn’t really a union proposal, and the Cabinet submission written by the people who negotiated the deal.

Along the way:

• why Victoria’s fire services had a governance problem before any of this started
• what a 400-page log of claims looks like
• Treasury being told to “facilitate agreement today not spear it”,
• and IBAC’s answer to the squish between serving the Premier and the Code of Conduct (“comply with both”). Is that answer any use in the room?

Next time: the Fair Work Commission, the long tail, and who ends up holding the secret.

📄 IBAC, Operation Richmond special report, August 2026.

Corrections: Women made up 2.9% of the CFA’s career firefighters (31 of 1,082), not 3.7% as we said on air. And Peter Marshall handed the “UFU proposal” to an advisor from the Premier’s office during his meeting with the Premier, not to the Premier himself.

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

We are reliably informed that when this episode dropped a current Cabinet minister rang The Hon Amanda Vanstone and congratulated her. That’s a good enough reason for us to republish this during our hiatus! Note there’s also a follow up episode where we all chat about our takeaways from this episode. 

****

Former Senator Amanda Vanstone offers a masterclass in ministerial leadership, delivering sharp insights from her 21-year political career that are as relevant today as they were during her time in Prime Minister Howard's Cabinet. Cutting through bureaucratic excuses with remarkable clarity, she reveals how effective ministers must take full responsibility while developing practical strategies to uncover what's really happening within their departments.

Vanstone's approach to ministerial oversight was refreshingly direct—phoning junior staff who prepared briefs rather than accepting sanitized information from senior executives, making unannounced visits to government-funded programs, and consistently asking "how does that work?" until satisfied with the answers. "You get what you inspect, not what you expect," she notes, emphasizing that accountability requires hands-on leadership.

Her frank discussion of major reforms like the creation of Centrelink highlights how structural change requires both political courage and practical problem-solving. When departments maintained separate offices but required them to be within walking distance, she asked the obvious question: "Why not put them together?" This common-sense approach characterized her leadership across Employment, Education, Justice and Immigration portfolios.

What stands out most powerfully is Vanstone's perspective on ministerial responsibility. "That's why ministers sign on the bottom line. That's why you get paid," she asserts, rejecting excuses about inherited problems or departmental advice. Her experiences with Immigration Department failures—including the wrongful deportation of Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez—taught her that when you find one serious problem, you must look deeper: "When a mouse runs out of your fridge, you think that's a mouse. When the second one comes a week later, you bring the fridge out and clean it out."

Ready for straight talk about how government really works? Listen now to learn why Amanda Vanstone believes we urgently need another National Commission of Audit and how effective ministers must balance scrutiny with support to get the best from public servants.

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

You might like to get in the mood for AFL footy finals by revisiting this first episode of our three part series on the Essendon Footy club drug scandal! Meanwhile we will keep enjoying our late winter / early spring hiatus 😇

****

“Lack of good governance is why good people did bad things at Essendon Football Club”. So says Lindsay Tanner, former Minister for Finance, and President of the Essendon Football Club from 2015.

In this mini-series, Caroline tries to convince us there are lessons for public servants from the Essendon Football Club supplement scandal in 2013.

In this episode, we talk about what happened at Essendon itself., including the dangers of charismatic new leaders, new brooms through an organisation, and a failure to take controls and risk management seriously.

Referenced in this episode

• Ziggy Switkowski report into failures of governance at Essendon Football Club (May 2013)
• Dr Bruce Reid letter to Essendon Football Club about his concerns about the supplement regime (Jan 2012)
• Lindsay Tanner ‘Governance lessons from the Essendon scandal’
• The Long Haul podcast, Episode Two: Inside the Blackest Day

Intro grab is Lindsay Tanner, Governance lessons from the Essendon scandal.

Outro grab is Nathan Lovett-Murray and Emma Murray, The Long Haul podcast, Episode Two: Inside the Blackest Day.

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

In honour of forthcoming Victorian and NSW elections, we are republishing this episode during our late winter hiatus. Enjoy!!

****

The starter's gun has gone on Australia's national elections for 2025 and Parliament has been prorogued.

In this episode, former head of Cabinet Office and keeper of the Caretaker Conventions, Alison answers Caroline and Danielle's increasingly pointed questions, and we end with arguing about the importance of formatting.

Stay tuned to the end for some fabulous insider advice for managing caretaker period and elections as a public servant. 

This episode is dedicated to the significant birthday of Sandy Pitcher, a public service legend (read more about her here).

Intro grab courtesy of the Hon Nat Cook MP, Minister for Human Services (SA).

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

Danielle talks with Georgia Heath from Yup Yup Labs about what becomes obvious when you design services from far away, and why remote communities expose the hidden assumptions baked into policy, technology and “digital by default”.

We also dig into who gets excluded when the public service recruits narrowly, and what changes when we treat people with lived experience as genuine partners with real power.

Other topics include:
• what remoteness reveals about telecommunications, emergencies and climate impacts
• where telehealth helps and where it breaks, including dental care and wet season realities
• what strong outreach models look like, including the Deadly Ears ear health approach
• why older non-university pathways created real mobility and better service design
• how class, schooling and workplace norms shape who gets into decision-making rooms
• what happens when job services misread capability and drain confidence
• how trauma-informed management, explicit rules and timely feedback lift performance
• why plain English writing improves access, trust and policy outcomes.

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

We talk with Eleanor Williams from the Australian Centre for Evaluation about making evaluation fast, rigorous, and genuinely useful for public service decisions. We move from a 40,000-person employment services RCT to the practical steps that make testing possible, then unpack why transparency and mixed methods matter when the stakes are high. Along the way we discuss:

• turning a mutual obligation debate into a 'fact question'  through a large three-arm randomised controlled trial
• why a null result can be a powerful policy signal
• the enablers that make responsive RCTs feasible, from systems to leadership to ethics and consent
• how ACE partners with departments through a hub-and-spoke model, secondments, and capability building
• planning evaluation from day one using program logic and theory of change
• separating program cost from evaluation cost to make smarter investment decisions
• publishing and normalising evidence through the ACE Evaluation Library
• using developmental evaluation and test-and-learn without getting stuck refining measures forever
• what decision makers value under time pressure, including “killer stats” plus narrative and qualitative insight
• improving services with small, fast trials like pre-call SMS nudges at Services Australia

Mentioned in this episode:

• Australian Centre for Evaluation
• ACE Evaluation Library, hosted on the Australian Policy Observatory
• The Magenta Book
• Anthony Costello, The Social Edge

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

Three-quarters of government evaluations are commissioned to improve implementation. Two-thirds are commissioned for accountability.

They're not the same thing, and building a system that serves both turns out to be harder than it looks.

This episode is about the structural tension between backward-looking accountability — did we deliver what we promised? — and the forward-looking question of whether we're actually learning anything useful.

Caroline argues the current measurement architecture is structurally bad at three things: it locks in categories at the moment of maximum ignorance, it treats evidence as binary when almost everything useful lives in the middle, and it has no way of capturing what you found out that you didn't know you were looking for.

There's also a detour through lifts, chin hairs, tattoo-level decisions, and Marie-Antoinette's diningware.

Referenced in the pod:

• The APS State of Evaluation report (2026) — the list of why government commissions evaluations
• Andrew Greenway's article on Sir Olly Robbins and The Accountability Act
• Adam Kucharski's article Do we need more 'aluminium-standard' evidence?
• Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein
• Tom Loosemore Universal Credit TWT episode 

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

Budget season is here — and it’s tighter than many public servants have been used to. Across Australian jurisdictions, governments are landing budgets with real constraints: restrained spending, savings packages, efficiency dividends, and the ever-popular one-in-two-out hiring freeze.

In this episode, Caroline, Alison and Danielle get into what that actually means for the people who have to keep delivering. How do you lead a team through savings without poisoning the culture? What’s the difference between a genuine moral injury and just disagreeing with a prioritisation decision? And is the blunt force of FTE targets and advertising bans the problem — or just a feature of a system that has tried everything else?

They also get into the real work: Danielle on essential vs lovely and what service redesign actually looks like when the envelope gets tighter, plus the Stockdale paradox, why constraints might be good for your team (sorry), and some practical advice for junior staff trying not to doom-spiral.

Budget constraint isn’t persecution. It’s elected officials doing what they were elected to do with taxpayer money. Suck it up, and here’s how.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Brené Brown and Adam Grant on the Stockdale Paradox — The Curiosity Shop
• David Epstein, Inside the Box: How constraints make us better 
• Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

In 1997, Tony Blair’s government inherited a problem: tuberculosis in cattle was rising, farmers were furious, and nobody agreed on whether badgers were responsible. The solution was to commission a gold-standard randomised control trial — 30 sites across the southwest of England, three conditions, run by an independent scientific group. Proper science. No cutting corners.

Eleven years and £49 million later, the trial produced findings that made things more complicated, not less. Reactive culling of badgers made TB rates worse. Proactive culling helped inside cull zones but increased rates in surrounding areas. Two expert panels reviewed the same data and reached opposite conclusions. And by the time the final report landed, the minister who commissioned the review had left office, the department had been restructured, and the politics had moved somewhere else entirely.

This episode is the first in our three-part series on evaluation in government. It’s not an argument against evidence — it’s an argument for being honest about what evidence can and can’t deliver, and what happens when government treats a long-run trial as a substitute for judgment rather than an input into it.

Also: there are quite a lot of badgers.

Referenced in the show 

• Angela Cassidy’s book — Vermin, Victims and Disease
• The New Yorker article on placebos in RCTs, The Power of Nothing by Michael Specter
• Australian Centre for Evaluation’s paper on RCTs

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!

Inspired by the new podcast The Curiosity Shop, Alison, Danielle and Caroline take on the things they might never agree on — welcome to TWT Fight Club. 

In the ring: 

• Do academic and conceptual frameworks actually help public servants do their jobs, or are they a privilege that most people simply don't have time for?
• Central agencies: great idea, but are they delivering? The trio debates whether they're connectors and coordinators — or arrogant secret-keepers who love a template.
• Delivery units get their moment in the ring too, with strong views on the difference between a compliance-heavy traffic light report and genuine brokerage between agencies.
• And the big one: would they go back to the public service? Caroline misses it in her bones, Danielle has a very petty list of reasons why probably not, and Alison is delighted to never write another bona fide.

Referenced in this episode: 

James Plunkett, The Centre is from Mars, the Edges are from Venus:
https://medium.com/@jamestplunkett/the-centre-is-from-mars-the-edges-are-from-venus-abca86f66bb8 

This podcast was recorded on Kaurna land, and we recognise Kaurna elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....

While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don’t guarantee that we’ve got all the details right.

Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at [email protected].

Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 

'Til next time!