Lyndon’s reflections on twenty three years in the public service
My first job was in the Affirmative Employment Programs of the Ministry of Employment and Training. I had a three month temporary employment contract to work with the Aboriginal community to establish a state representative body on employment and development. For several years I was on this sort of arrangement of being rolled over as a temporary, eventually becoming provisionally permanent, but acquiring the feeling of being permanently provisional – one that I’ve never been quite able to overcome.

I was recruited by the redoubtable Dr Cassandra Pybus, now a well know author and Tasmanian cultural figure. I reported to a remarkable figure in David Griffiths, who kept a string of interesting folks on his list of contractors – including Stephano di Pieri. In public service terms I was not fully acclimatised or tamed from my previous life as an activist. When I reached the conclusion that Minister Crabbe was not doing as much as he ought for Aboriginal programs, I wrote a letter to him that pointed out these deficiencies, signed by the Attorney General and Minister responsible for Aboriginal Affairs (Jim Kennan).  My then General Manager, Patricia Faulkner took a dim view of this and I was given a slap over the wrist for a flagrant lack of loyalty to my minister. 

I think I must have been a very deficient public servant, because, over twenty three years later I was still convinced that our first duty is to achieve something useful for the people whose interests we are supposed to be advancing, and by so doing, advance the cause and the reputation of our Ministers. 

I was lucky enough in those days to work with Aboriginal leaders of the calibre of Mollie Dyer, the founder of the Aboriginal Child Care Agency, and Gary Murray, who was and remains one of Victoria’s most outstanding Aboriginal entrepreneurs.

It was during this time that I first crossed swords with Dermot Lambe, the keeper of the public purse and renowned sheep in wolves clothing. Dermot refused to hand over the money allocated for the purchase of a bus for the Fitzroy Aboriginal organisations, on the grounds that they would waste the money. I am pleased to say that I had him over-ruled by the Minister, and the bus was duly delivered. No doubt Dermot would still argue that he was right, and it was after all his money. 
In 1988, I was brought into the Public Service Board by Jackie Fristacky, whom many of you will know as the eccentric cycling Mayor of the City of Yarra. I was appointed as Manager of the Aboriginal Employment Strategy for the Victorian Public Service, but with the firmly stated intention that I would be replaced by a Koori person in the life of the strategy. That person was Lois Peeler, a graduate of our management program, and I also worked very closely with many indigenous personalities, including Carolyn Briggs, now an elder and spokeswoman for the community. So although I became officially permanent, I was a niche specialist worker who had to adapt and find new roles to survive in the service. 

After a few side shifts and I was re-invented as an expert in Rehabilitation and Return to Work strategies, and ended up on the Industrial Conditions side, and supporting the Board as a Tribunal. I distinctly recall the then Chairman, Frank Honan, scheduling industrial disputes for hearing at 5pm on a Friday. No adjournments were allowed or granted for any reason. For those of us who were borderline alcoholics (a necessary qualification for work in IR), this was powerful motivation to reach a settlement, and several disputes were accordingly settled in record time. However, some were so pig-headed they went all night without any food or drink (as did the Tribunal staff) until they finally reached what could only be called agreement by exhaustion.

When the Kennett Government was elected, the Public Service Board – the last surviving member of its species – was unceremoniously abolished, and we were all looking for jobs. I applied to and was picked up by the Department of Premier and Cabinet, with a policy role in Commonwealth /State Relations in the Cabinet Office. My first role was assigned by the COAG – to review all of Australia’s Ministerial Councils – one of the most desirable of the perks of Ministerial office - the brief by the Premiers was to cut their numbers in half by the method of judicious amalgamation. Those of you who know of that peculiar multi-headed monster called MCEETYA, should know that I created it out of four pre-existing Ministerial Councils to the accompaniment of howls of protest. To meet the impossible deadline on that review, I worked for 12 hours per day throughout Easter, and achieved a thoroughly undeserved reputation as a demon for the work.

In Premier’s Kennett’s Department in that time industrial matters assumed a high profile, and all the staff were advised to move to individual contracts, and we were further informed that no appointments or promotions would be made without the person first agreeing to sign an individual contract. In response to this the unionists in the Department got together and applied for a collective agreement, as allowed under the new Public Sector legislation. The Department ignored us so we declared a dispute and the matter went to the newly created industrial mechanism. Michael Demetrious and I led the case, and to everyone’s amazement, we won the right to have a collective agreement in the Premier’s Department. However, the victory came at a cost, and not surprisingly shortly afterwards I was offered a “development opportunity” at the Office of Training and Further Education (as were called then), and was based there until my early retirement in 2007, due to ill-health.

Soon after I came to OTFE we quickly organised a competitive process for the allocation of curriculum development projects, and I promptly took long service leave. Several people told me this was a bad move as I would most probably be shafted in my absence. In fact, thanks to Sonnie Hopkins, I was made Acting Manager of Curriculum Services in my absence. On my first day back after six months off, Patricia called a managers meeting straight after lunch, and I sat with my back to the nice warm sunny window and promptly fell asleep. I was lucky enough to be sitting next to my future wife, who gave me a kick under the table each time the nodding became too obvious.

One of my forms of amusement, when there is nothing pressing to do, is to thumb through the Government Directory. I discovered there was an officer called David Niven who was simultaneously acting in four different positions. After several of us had been acting as managers for over three years, I decided we should contact Mr Niven and ask whether he would join us in applying to become members of Actors Equity, as the union most appropriate to our employment situation. At least it was continuing the persistent theme of being permanently provisional - just in case you were inclined to get complacent. We’d just got the system for managing state curriculum into some sort of shape when along came national training packages and gazumped the process.

In 1998 I was invited to join the enemy and took up an offer to work for the national training authority, ANTA. I had dual roles, one was as State Liaison Officer (colloquially called “Patricia’s spy”) and the other was sorting out the National Training Materials, otherwise known as the “non-endorsement components”. The first role seemed to work for ANTA, because after I’d done it for a year they duplicated it and pulled in one from every state & territory. The second role was more onerous – I was confronted with a room full of paper, representing an investment of over $10million that no-one had done anything with. 

As I worked through this stuff, trying to make sense of it and evaluate it, I started to drown under the sheer volume of it, and devised an evaluation and quality improvement strategy and promptly outsourced the role to a team of experts, who continued to advise developers and allocate the quality tick to the resources, until late 2011.

From ANTA I was lured to the Business Services ITAB (following the pathway of Janet Sutherland and Leslie Shaw) and took over the development and endorsement of the Business Services Training Package. What might have been an interesting challenge turned into a nightmare when I discovered that the money supposed to be allocated to completing the project had been spent on other things, so the million dollar Training Package with 1,000 stakeholder groups and an obsessive bunch of interested parties who were hitting the website at the rate of 10,000 per week had NO resources to complete and a raft of consultants who had completed their work with NO MONEY to pay them. 

Don’t ask me how we did it, because it’s a long and tedious story.

The Business Services Training Package was designed to be used to improve the performance of businesses, and is now being used by some thousands of training providers across Australia for just this purpose. The Business Services Training Package was being delivered in China before it was even endorsed in Australia, something to do with the consequences of development as public access on the net. 

At the beginning of 2002 I received an ultimatum. Return to OTTE forthwith or resign from the public service.

I decided not to resign, but took up an offer to spend some time in the Consulting Branch of VETASSESS. This was yet another “interesting” time - one curious occurrence was a major project we did for ANTA regarding the production and distribution of the National Training Materials, which was quietly shelved by our client, only to be dusted off and implemented by DEST after ANTA’s demise.

Eventually I returned to OTTE after five years of relevant experience exploring as they say in the great book of euphemisms: “further development opportunities” to find that I had been demoted to the position I had not occupied for 8 years. You could say I was not overjoyed with this treatment, but what the hell, I had a job.

And the job was a particularly fascinating one, as I spent the last several years unravelling the mysteries of “New and Emerging skills”, and what they might be. During this period I had ample time to contemplate how lucky I was to have stayed in the public service when I had to have a major operation and ended up needing to use every one of my accumulated 265 sick days. 

I have to thank OTTE for the medium through which I met my wonderful wife. 

I also like to acknowledge the many people across the training system with whom I’ve worked for the last decade or so and record the high regard that I have for what many of them do and have achieved. I had the pleasure to hear a presentation by a group of TAFE Consultants at the completion of a program run by the TAFE Development Centre in 2007, to be informed that the Echuca Campus of Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE is delivering Hospitality and Business training to clients in Shangri-la, China. And I thought, that is impressive, that is really something, this system has got a hell of a lot going for it.

Moving on at this time, despite being called “disability retirement” is, of course nothing of the sort, but it does signify a break in employment modes, the closing of a chapter and a significant change of direction as my wife Sherinda and I launch Shea Business Consulting on an unsuspecting world.