HIST2227 Chap.4 Politicians, Bureaucrats and Diplomats
Politicians, Bureaucrats and Diplomats
Who served the state
Week 4 turns to the people inside government.
Lachlan Strahan’s memoir of a thirty-year diplomatic career shows a foreign service that was long male and Anglo-Celtic, shaped by a marriage bar until 1966, and slowly diversified.
Memoir and argument
The tutorial asks how useful memoir is as evidence, and whether Michael Pusey is right that a nation-building public service gave way to economic rationalism from the late 1970s.
What to look for in the readings
Read the memoir for three kinds of evidence: numbers that show who was recruited, episodes that show how the department worked, and judgements that show the author’s argument.
The 1987 merger of Foreign Affairs and Trade into one department, made to sharpen the focus on economic issues, links this topic to the arguments about economic rationalism that return in the reform era of Chapter 10.
A guest perspective
The Week 4 lecture brought a practitioner’s view of diplomacy into the course, and the memoir extends it.
Strahan’s closing chapter judges that Australian diplomats tend to be informal, approachable and egalitarian, and calls public service a noble pursuit, a view worth weighing against the critiques of the public service the tutorial raises.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Memoir as a primary source
- 02
Recruiting diplomats from 1929 to 1993
- 03
The marriage bar and its end
- 04
An apolitical public service in theory and practice
- 05
The 1987 creation of DFAT
- 06
Nation-building and economic rationalism
Worked example · free
Reading a trainee intake as evidence
- 11970: 3 divided by 23 = 0.13, about 13% women.
- 11993: 15 divided by 27 = 0.56, about 56% women.
- 1The intake changed sharply, but senior ranks did not: women held 18% of the Senior Executive Service in 1998, so entry figures overstate change at the top.
Key terms
- Apolitical Public Service
- A professional bureaucracy that serves any elected government rather than one party.
- Senior Executive Service
- The top tier of public service managers, where women held 18% of DFAT posts in 1998.
- Esprit de Corps
- A strong shared identity within a group, which Strahan says could tip into elitism.
- Graduate Trainee
- A university graduate recruited into the foreign service through its annual intake and trained for diplomatic work.
Politicians, Bureaucrats and Diplomats FAQ
Why read a diplomat's memoir in a political history course?
A memoir shows how government looked from inside, including recruitment, culture and the relationship with ministers. It is written with hindsight and a reputation at stake, so its most persuasive passages are those where the author admits something that cuts against his own account.
What was the marriage bar?
It was a public service rule that required women to resign when they married. Strahan identifies it as a structural barrier to women in the foreign service, where only three women joined as trainees between 1951 and 1959, and records that it was dropped in 1966.
What argument does the outline attribute to Pusey?
The outline frames Michael Pusey as arguing that the public service and the nation were transformed as the nation-building era, from the 1900s to the 1970s, gave way to economic rationalism, now usually called neoliberalism, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The tutorial asks whether you find this convincing.
How did the foreign service change after the 1980s?
Strahan records that women outnumbered men in the 1985 intake for the first time, that the 1993 intake of twenty-seven included fifteen women and five recruits with Asian ancestry, and that Peter Varghese, in 2012, became the department’s first secretary of Asian descent.
What stereotype of diplomats does Strahan discuss?
He quotes a former departmental secretary describing the popular image of diplomats as anachronistic figures hosting parties with a champagne glass in hand at taxpayers' expense, an image said to reflect nineteenth-century European diplomacy more than modern Australian practice.
What does Strahan think of the department today?
He finds it more diverse, with women making up half the Senior Executive Service, but more top-heavy than earlier in his career. He also worries that posts have less autonomy and that the line between the department and ministerial offices can become almost indistinguishable.
Assessment move
Learn the four intake figures and turn them into shares, then practise the three questions for any memoir: when written, what the author could see, and what it argues. Finish by deciding whether you find Pusey’s argument convincing, and name one piece of evidence from Strahan that bears on it.
Note too how the 1987 merger links this topic to the reform era, so you can connect the two in the Final Paper if your question allows.
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