From Postbox to Powerhouse: A Centenary History of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet 1911-2010

FROM

POSTBOX

TO

POWERHOUSE

FROM

POSTBOX

TO

POWERHOUSE

A centenary history

of the Department of

the Prime Minister and Cabinet

1911–2010

PATRICK WELLER,

JOANNE SCOTT &

BRONWYN STEVENS

First published in 2011

Copyright © Patrick Weller, Joanne Scott and Bronwyn Stevens 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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CONTENTS

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

A note on sources

INTRODUCTION: The Department of the Prime

Minister and Cabinet in context

PART I

PART II

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Terry Moran, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the department for joining us in May 2008 in an application for an Australian Research Council Linkage grant to write a history of the department to celebrate its centenary on 1 July 2011. The application was successful and we would like to thank the Australian Research Council for the Linkage grant that funded much of the project. We thank Terry Moran and the department for the support given to the research and the final publication.

The department established a reference group to work with us. It included Terry Moran as chair, former Secretaries John Mena-due, Mike Codd, Michael Keating, Max Moore-Wilton and Peter Shergold, and former senior officers Barbara Belcher, Peter Bailey, Steve Sedgwick, Ian Watt and Helen Williams. Between them they provided experience from 1964 to the present. The members of the reference group read our drafts and responded to our queries. We thank them for their patience, time and wisdom.

We interviewed many former and current members of the department; their service in the department took us back to 1950. We thank them for their time. Often interviews are cumulative, with one person’s experience endorsing another. In selecting comments to quote, we looked for the representative insight; each comment cited could have been replaced by several others. Even those whose words do not appear directly added immeasurably to our understanding. There were many others we would have liked to interview. Some agreed to talk but time caught up with us and we were not able to make an appointment, for which we apologise. Listening to staff is constantly fascinating. We can only add that there is a case for the department systematically collecting the experiences of PM&C officers and maintaining an oral history archive.

The department, working through Peter Rush, aided by Liz Hickey, provided us with an office and facilitated access to resources. That made the task possible. Teresa Giuca and the staff in the department’s Records Management Unit assisted our task by meeting our endless demands for files. Nick Goss in the Corporate Services Division handled with aplomb the multifarious challenges of hosting academic researchers within a busy and very security-conscious organisation. We would also like to thank the PM&C staff who helped us in the location and identification of departmental photographs. Frank Boyle generously lent us his copy of the 1955 departmental photo to copy. We worked in the Manuscript Room of the National Library of Australia and the National Archives of Australia. We appreciate the support of Anne McLean in the NAA and the staff in both places. Mrs Yeend kindly gave us access to the papers of Sir Geoffrey Yeend in the National Archives. They were as full of the insights and wisdom that anyone who knew Geoff Yeend would expect, and we thank her for that access.

At the University of the Sunshine Coast, Professor Pam Dyer consistently encouraged and supported the project. That has been valuable and much appreciated. David Trudinger at USC and May McPhail and Tracee McPate at Griffith have assisted in collecting, sorting, reading and managing the data at different stages of the project. At Allen & Unwin we thank Elizabeth Weiss and Siobhán Cantrill for their work in the production of the book, and freelance editor Susan Jarvis for her careful editing.

Jamie Shanks and Tony Levy assisted us in Canberra. Jamie used his organisational skills to keep our filing in order, to unearth particular gems and to find sources and lost references. He always ensured we locked up after we consulted the files. Tony Levy drew on his long experience as a senior officer in PM&C to identify the most useful documents to illustrate our themes.

Peter Hamburger was appointed by PM&C as our liaison officer. We cannot overstate our debt to him. He facilitated the processes, assisted our access to former members, pointed us to useful sources, and provided advice on our drafts that drew on his wide reading in Australian political history. He did the analyses on the later careers of former departmental staff and on the appointments of Sir John Bunting that appear in the text. Above all, it was his calm and positive presence that was of great help.

We also remember the enthusiasm and commitment of our co-researcher, Dr Ross Laurie, who died in 2010. He made a significant contribution to this project, especially through his determined exploration of file after file after file at the National Archives of Australia.

This book is not an authorised history. We were never told what to write. We had the support of the department but the final text, for better or worse, is our responsibility.

PW, JS, BS Brisbane, January 2011

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The quantity of material consulted in preparing this manuscript makes listing every source unfeasible. It could easily become a bibliography of 100 years of federal politics. Instead, significant sources are given in endnotes. When a paragraph is based on multiple sources, we have sometimes consolidated them in a single note at the paragraph’s conclusion.

We interviewed a number of present and former officers, some of whom shared recollections of the department which extended back to 1950. Interviewees are identified in the text where we have their approval to attribute comments from the interviews to them. These quotes have not been individually referenced in the endnotes.

Material from the National Archives of Australia is identified by the prefix NAA, followed by the series and item number of the file (for example, NAA A2, 1919/326, Part 1). Although not every document in the National Archives contains dates or other identifying numbers, where possible and relevant these are given in sufficient detail to identify the specific folio. Two particular collections of papers in the National Archives were invaluable to this research and are cited extensively: the Bunting ‘Pinks’ collection at NAA M319, and a set of papers in NAA M4797, NAA M4799, NAA M4805 and NAA M4810, collectively referred to in the text as the Yeend Papers.

Material from the National Library of Australia manuscripts and oral history collections are cited with the prefix NLA, followed by the library’s catalogue number (for example, NLA TRC 503/9).

We had access to some more recent files through special arrangements with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. These are cited with the prefix PM&C, followed by the department’s file number (for example, PM&C 2005/0350). We have been judicious in our use of recent files, writing about how the department worked, rather than identifying any controversial advice it might have given. Many of these documents will become available for public access in the future under the National Archives legislation.

INTRODUCTION

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in context

Sunday, 25 November 2007. One day after the election, the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Peter Shergold, catches a plane to Brisbane to meet the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. With a set of detailed files, he is ready to brief the incoming government. One file explains the routine of transition: when the Prime Minister will resign, when new ministers can be sworn in, when Rudd wants to move into The Lodge. Another explores machinery of government plans; departmental officials have identified commitments made in the previous year and developed proposals for their implementation. A third folder contains the Labor Party’s electoral promises and suggests how they might be implemented.

The folders delivered that day to the incoming Labor government were not the only files that PM&C had prepared. A second set, on similar topics, had been created for a returning Liberal– National Coalition government. The department had to be ready to serve whomsoever the electorate chose. However certain the electoral outcome might have seemed, detailed work was required for both sides, just in case there was a surprise. Legend has long asserted that the Coalition folders are blue and Labor’s red. In the past that had not been true; this time it was. Practice had caught up with myth.

Shergold and his officials met on the day of the election to ensure that all the papers were adequately prepared in triplicate. The files were jam-packed into the ASIO-approved secure case for the trip to Brisbane if Labor won. Realising that one paper had been left out, they tried to add it to the folders. To their horror, the case would no longer open. ASIO-approved locksmiths were not easy to find late on a Saturday night so, using scissors, a hammer and brute strength, and amidst the rising anxiety of some young male public servants, the case was levered open. The papers were taken to the Prime Minister in ordinary bags and ASIO was never informed. Rudd has expressed publicly his satisfaction with the extent and quality of the advice that was so nearly not presented to him at that first meeting.

PM&C had not always had so positive a welcome from an incoming government. Thirty-five years earlier, in 1972, Whitlam won the election after 23 years of Labor opposition. When he met his officials for the first time, he knew what he wanted. He was not interested in the department’s preparations; instead, he relied on his personal staff for administrative arrangements drafted on the lines that he, as opposition leader, had proposed. Four decades before that, in 1929, the defeated Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, escorted his replacement, James Scullin, around the department to introduce him to all the staff. In 1901, when the first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, was sworn in, there was no department—indeed, there was no public service. Barton worked with his private secretary, Atlee Hunt, to establish a new government.

The Department of the Prime Minister¹ was created in 1911. Over the course of a century, it developed from a small, limited agency to a substantial powerhouse with a sophisticated capacity to serve the Prime Minister of the day. By 2007, it was able to deliver a substantial briefing for the new Prime Minister within a day of the election. This book is the story of how it happened.

Prime Ministers need help. PM&C serves Prime Ministers in their official capacity. Most departments’ activities are driven by the legislation for which they are responsible—be it customs, health, defence or post and telecommunications. Their functions are relatively stable. Even when there is a change of government, they still have services to deliver. PM&C is different. It is sensitive both to the personalities of individual Prime Ministers and, more broadly, to the changing context and style of national politics.

As with other departments, PM&C has a set of core responsibilities, although they have tended to be procedural, rather than involving the delivery of services. PM&C provides support for Cabinet processes and assists in administrative arrangements. From the outset, PM&C acted as a clearing house for correspondence from the Prime Minister to London and to the states; federalism was always part of its agenda. Each of these responsibilities has developed over the last century.

The other work undertaken by PM&C officers in 2010 would be unrecognisable to the handful of staff who made up the department in 1911. PM&C is inevitably a hostage to social and political trends. It must now do things that could not have been envisaged when it was founded.

The challenge of policy

In 1911, the Australian government had limited, primarily administrative, responsibilities. Running post and customs was what it mostly did. The government’s policy agenda expanded gradually. World War I increased the scope of its activities, while the War Precautions Act extended the powers of government. The Great Depression of the 1930s illustrated the limitations of government capacity, then the industrial and defence mobilisation from 1939 provided opportunities for a further expansion of powers and roles. Economists increasingly influenced the agenda, with the White Paper on Full Employment a milestone. Thereafter, the government’s activities expanded into new fields, with PM&C acting as an incubator for new Commonwealth activities.

As the government agenda grew, so did the pressure on PM&C. Prime Ministers needed to know what was happening. Whereas the department typically provided a second, ‘inexpert’ opinion in the 1950s and 1960s, it was later required to offer greater depth and sophistication in its advice, often as a counterpoint to a line department’s position. Prime Ministers expected a comprehensive expert department. As issues transcended the neat silos of departmental policy, PM&C had to coordinate responses and act as a broker between sometimes divergent interests. As the one department without a specific policy interest, PM&C has often been mediator and catalyst. It can challenge traditional positions, and assist in looking at problems afresh.

The challenge of technology

Technology has changed the administrative world beyond recognition. In 1918, Prime Minister Billy Hughes—then in Europe—wanted to be informed of all Cabinet decisions. The department encoded and sent telegrams, then encoded and deciphered the replies. It took time and money. One telegram cost £100, when an inner city terrace in Melbourne was worth just £400. In 1937, officials spent several hours arranging a telephone link between the Prime Minister in London and his colleagues in the Cabinet room in Canberra. Today, communications are instantly available across the globe. Data can be retrieved and dispatched to a travelling Prime Minister within minutes. Modern technology has changed the nature of government, the form and speed of advice, the ability to direct from the centre and Prime Ministers’ expectations of their department.

The challenge of the media

Media, too, have access to immediate and constant flows of information. A travelling Prime Minister might once have been remote from the Australian press. Talking to the newspapers could be rationed and contained. The coverage was only in print, with the press reporting once or twice a day. Nowadays the media operates 24 hours a day, on radio, television and the internet, always in search of better stories. Governments feel they must respond, lest they be accused of arrogantly ignoring the Australian people whom the media claim to serve.

The challenge of globalisation

In 1911, Australia was a European outpost, part of the British empire. Three decades later, during World War II, Prime Minister John Curtin declared that Australia now looked to new friends for support. By the time Britain had withdrawn from east of Suez and then joined the European Community (EC) in 1972, Australia had become a more independent nation, necessarily concerned with its diplomatic and economic relations with the countries to its north. Trade increased, economic independence deepened and the abolition of the White Australia policy brought new groups of immigrants. Australia became the big brother of the small Pacific islands, a regional power.

These trends changed the dynamic of government. They made the processes of policy making and governing more complex, more rushed and more interdependent. Modes of operating that were once workable are no longer feasible today. These developments would have occurred regardless of who the Prime Ministers were and what they wanted. New ideas on the appropriate roles of governance, new capacities to develop and control policy and new demands from the media all require a central or coordinated response that is hard to generate and sustain within the policy silos characteristic of most departments. In Australian government, that means Prime Ministers must be involved and where Prime Ministers intervene, PM&C must be there to assist. In addition, PM&C has faced new administrative circumstances. For its first 75 years, it could leave the nominal leadership of the Australian Public Service (APS) to the Public Service Board (PSB). After the PSB’s abolition in 1987, the Secretary of PM&C became the senior figure within the APS, with responsibility for overseeing the future of the service beyond the tenure of any one government.

The development of PM&C over a century is not just the result of the ambitions of Prime Ministers or the successful empire building of bureaucratic leaders—although both have played their part. More fundamentally, it reflects the changing nature of government and the policy ideas that underpin it. Nevertheless, the personalities and ambitions of Prime Ministers have been significant in determining how the department has worked and the speed at which it changed.

A Canadian analyst has divided the activities of the Privy Council Office (Canada’s PM&C) into two: servicing the Prime Minister’s prerogatives and meeting the Prime Minister’s priorities. The prerogatives are the duties that Prime Ministers must undertake as a function of their office. They include the appointment of ministers, administrative arrangements, parliamentary activities and the chairing of Cabinet. No Prime Minister can avoid them; they come with the job. They are the functions that give Prime Ministers authority over their ministers and the ability to preside over their governments.²

The priorities are what Prime Ministers choose to do: the policy areas on which they focus, the international forums they attend, the campaigns they drive. Of course, some policy areas have become almost de rigueur; it would be difficult nowadays for a Prime Minister not to pay detailed attention to economic management or international affairs, but the degree to which that attention is sustained, the depth of involvement and the comparative attention to economic concerns, rather than other policy areas, will vary. PM&C has dedicated constant attention to the prerogatives, accorded sustained attention to a number of central policy areas—economic, defence and international affairs—and expressed spasmodic interest in other policy arenas. The determining factor has been the interests of the various Prime Ministers.

The style of operations within the department is also determined, in part, by Prime Ministerial preferences. Some Prime Ministers require a constant supply of advice and information, whether recommendations, detailed policy analysis or extensive data. The deadlines can be short, the pressure continuous. As the Prime Minister’s time is one of the scarcest commodities in Canberra, the responses have to be rapid and accurate. Some Prime Ministers are more relaxed, prepared to leave much of the policy development to their ministers, intervening only when they have a particular interest or when trouble seems to be emerging. Some Prime Ministers trust their ministers; others want to know as much as they can on particular topics because, as the leader of the government, they defend and promote all facets of government policy. Some work comfortably with the department; others are more distant and rely heavily on advisers in that post-1972 competitor, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Some Prime Ministers like to be briefed on paper and left to read and digest. Others prefer to discuss items in meetings. Some will test possible responses to questions in parliament; others will demand more data. There is no one correct way to undertake the role of Prime Minister. Each incumbent must decide his or her preferred strategy, what best serves their needs. Then PM&C must adjust from one Prime Minister to another, providing what each wants in a suitable form.

Thus for 100 years PM&C has served the Prime Minister and, through the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the government. During that century, the profile of the Prime Minister has increased. So have the pressures on the department. There has been a trajectory, uneven and often contested, by which PM&C has become more central. If it started as a postbox, it has become a policy powerhouse— partly from necessity, as a consequence of factors beyond its control, and partly because Prime Ministers and their officials saw advantages in driving national government from the centre. The department has become one of the principal sources of advice and support for Prime Ministers.

Yet in most political accounts PM&C is all but invisible. In the autobiographies of Prime Ministers, the department and its Secretaries make only fleeting appearances. Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs acknowledge advice on economic matters, particularly from Ian Castles and Eddie Visbord, but never mention Tony Ayers and Mike Codd—although both worked closely with him. Hawke pays fulsome but succinct tribute to his departmental Secretaries Sir Geoffrey Yeend and Mike Codd.³ John Howard praises his Secretaries: Max Moore-Wilton ‘brought the right combination of common sense, administrative skill and good humour to a difficult job’; Peter Shergold ‘had a wonderfully creative policy mind and was a consummate public service networker’. Howard believed that departmental staff were, like the whole Canberra public service, ‘tribal Labor’, but says that they ‘by and large, behaved in a truly professional fashion during my time’.⁴ His autobiography devotes much more attention to his private office staff than to the department.

With the exception of John Edwards’ constructive, if brief, comments on PM&C’s support for Paul Keating, the insider accounts are unrevealing. Stephen Mills on Hawke makes only passing comments on PM&C. Don Watson’s magnum opus notes only rarely the contributions of departmental officers. But then, none of them recalls having much to do with Watson; they seemed to live in parallel worlds linked only by the Prime Minister.⁵

There are few accounts from within the department itself. Two or three Secretaries have joked that they are keeping papers or stories ‘for my memoirs that of course I will never write’. John Menadue is the only Secretary with published memoirs; Malcolm Shepherd’s unpublished account is available at the National Archives. Sir John Bunting wrote a book on Menzies. The title, R.G. Menzies: A Portrait, is in part a misnomer; much of the book is a defence of the form of Cabinet government that Bunting preferred and sought to support. It tells us much about Bunting (although not as much as the 55 volumes of Bunting’s ‘pinks’, his notes and correspondence in the National Archives).⁶ Meredith Edwards, a deputy secretary, quotes from her journal in her published analysis of social policies.⁷ Over the past quarter-century, the heads of PM&C have spoken more openly about the role of the public service than did most of their predecessors. Geoff Yeend wrote explicitly about the department but in most other cases their focus has been the Australian Public Service rather than the specifics of their department.⁸

The department itself has made two contributions towards documenting its own history. Seven decades after its creation, PM&C issued its inaugural Annual Report in 1978. It included a brief history of the department:

The decision to compile a history of the department was not taken hastily. On 28 June 1906 a circular was forwarded from the Prime Minister’s office to all ministers. It requested that in future each department issue an annual report, and suggested that the first annual report might incorporate a departmental history. Seventy-three years later, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is itself taking up this suggestion.⁹

In 1983–84, the Annual Report included a second history, The Development of Cabinet Procedures in Australia, which detailed the department’s role in developing Cabinet practices.¹⁰

Perhaps the relative lack of public focus on PM&C is as it should be. Politicians take the credit and occasionally the blame. Public servants are anonymous, serving all governments. That is the bargain they strike. Nevertheless, there is a degree of narcissism in the pretence that ministers do everything, with the implication that public servants contribute nothing. If the department did not exist, some form of support for Prime Ministers would still be required. A study of the department does not deny the constitutional reality that ministers nominally make the decisions. It does accept that officers of PM&C provide a range of important services. Through their strategic position at the centre of government and at the shoulders of Prime Ministers, they exert significant influence—an influence too often overlooked in the traditional approach to understanding Australian politics and administration.

This book tells the story of PM&C in two parts. In Part I, we provide a chronological account of the changing roles and shape of the department. The chapter breaks are determined by the tenure of Secretaries, not of Prime Ministers. The two often coincide, but not always. Part II identifies a number of continuing themes through which we explore how the roles of Prime Ministers and the department have changed. The organising theme is how the department has served its Prime Ministers.

Our sources for the first 50 years are largely documentary, although the first of our interviewees joined the department in 1950. For the last 30 years we have relied heavily on interviews as the official documents are still protected under the Archives Act. We have used more modern files primarily to understand how the department works, rather than detailing the specifics of the advice provided by the department.

We cannot describe everything that officials did over 100 years. Instead, we seek to capture the flavour and the direction, the challenges and problems that confronted staff. Some activities have spanned almost the full 100 years; others are more recent. Many are continuous, spread across the tenure of Secretaries; we have generally dealt with those core functions just once, at an appropriate juncture. We use evidence by illustration, selecting particular events to show how the department worked. The chronological chapters therefore chart the fortunes of the department, the activities of some leading members, and the significant events in each period.

The thematic section begins with staff experiences in the department. The following chapter demonstrates how PM&C has supported Prime Ministers in their international role; Prime Ministers were always the centre of attention, but the expectations and frequency of their international commitments, made possible by modern communications and travel, have changed the way in which the department works. Two chapters analyse the department’s roles as they relate to two of the principal prerogatives of Prime Ministers and how Prime Ministers have advanced their priorities in those domains: Cabinet and the management of federal–state relations. One chapter explores the development of an increasingly sophisticated advisory capacity; Prime Ministers always got support, but it has changed in terms of content (procedural or policy) and depth of analysis; another situates the department within the broader context of the Australian Public Service, tracing the department’s transformation from a relatively insignificant agency to a powerful leader.

We seek to explain why. We want to identify how the officers of PM&C have contributed to the processes of government. This is both an account of the department and, inevitably, of those that have worked within it.

PART I

CHAPTER 1. A separate department

Shepherd and Deane, 1911–1928

In April 1911, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher informed the Public Service Commissioner: ‘I am of opinion the work of the Prime Minister’s office needs a Dept directly under his control’ and recommended ‘Mr M.L. Shepherd . . . , for the office of Secretary with a salary of £540 per annum’.¹ The department formally began work on 1 July 1911. With the creation of the department came the selection of its first head by the Prime Minister. Shepherd had begun his public service career as a shorthand writer and typist in the New South Wales Postmaster-General’s Department in 1890, at the age of 16. He had become Alfred Deakin’s private secretary in 1904 and served Prime Ministers Watson, Reid and then Fisher in the same capacity.

Fisher’s decision to establish the department was greeted with scepticism. The Melbourne Punch claimed he was ‘flying in the face of the experience of all his predecessors’ and argued that Shepherd’s empire building was the real reason for the department’s creation. Shepherd, it asserted,

has been private secretary to so many Prime Ministers that he has become indispensable. He breaks them in, tutors them in their duties, bits them, curbs them, trains them to saddle and harness. He has had them all through his hands, and has used each one as a stepping stone, culminating in the creation of his own department.²

A later account proposed that Shepherd ‘had few qualifications beyond ambition and high shorthand speed’.³

The Prime Minister’s Department (PMD) was the first new federal department created since 1901. A year earlier, Fisher had declared that there was no need for a new department; a branch within the Department of External Affairs charged with managing the Prime Minister’s correspondence was adequate. Fisher had noted, however, that a department ‘may become necessary at some later date’.⁴ That time had now arrived. The department began with a core staff of six from the Prime Minister’s branch of External Affairs—Shepherd, J.H. Starling, J. Ulmer, C.J. Barnard, T.B. Lamb and Miss H.W. Taylor. The new department had an initial budget of £4150 and rooms on the first floor of the Commonwealth Offices, Treasury Gardens, Melbourne.⁵

Prior to 1911, support for Prime Ministers had been undertaken within the Department of External Affairs. As Prime Minister Barton ‘was wont to reminisce . . . he carried the whole federal archive in his Gladstone bag’ in 1901;⁶ registry stamps on government documents suggest that there was a nascent or intended structure called ‘the department of the Prime Minister’, but it was not implemented for a decade. Its activities were quickly subsumed within the Department of External Affairs. In an account of that department’s functions in 1903, its Secretary emphasised several roles that subsequently would become core activities for a future Prime Minister’s Department: communications between the federal government and the Governor-General, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the state Premiers, and ‘Governments of countries outside Australia’; and ‘Matters upon which the Prime Minister’s opinion is sought by other Departments, or in connection with which expression is required to be given to the general views of the Government as determined by Cabinet also pass through my hands’.⁷ As a future Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department explained, ‘in those days . . . well, there was a Prime Minister, but no Department’.⁸

Between 1901 and 1911, Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin during his first two terms and George Reid held the External Affairs portfolio while serving as Prime Minister. In 1904, when Chris Watson became Prime Minister and Treasurer, and when Fisher held the same combination in 1908, External Affairs serviced their needs. Within a month of Fisher beginning his second term as Prime Minister, in 1910, the Prime Minister’s Office had become a distinct branch of the Department of External Affairs. Shepherd, who had recently resigned his position as the Prime Minister’s private secretary and become chief clerk in the Department of External Affairs, headed the branch with the title of Secretary to the Prime Minister.

In a letter to Dr Willem Bok, private secretary to Prime Minister Botha as the new Union of South Africa was being established, Shepherd explained the rationale and operations of the branch. Through his choice of words, he also foreshadowed the creation of a new department. According to Shepherd, when work relating to the Prime Minister was performed by the Department of External Affairs before 1910, ‘much inconvenience and delay was inevitable’, there was ‘some friction in the other Departments’ and ‘the mixing of the Prime Minister’s records with others was found to be most unsatisfactory’. The new sub-branch received ‘all minutes for the Executive Council, answers to questions and Parliament and papers for Cabinet’:

The arrangements are that all letters, papers, documents, etc. for the Prime Minister or for submission to him come to me, are recorded and referred to the other Departments or brought under the