Martin Parkinson says Abbott sacked him for following legally mandated directions of Rudd and Gillard governments

The head of Malcolm Turnbull’s department says he has no “personal animus” towards Tony Abbott, but he says the former prime minister damaged the public service when he sacked him for following the legally mandated directions of the Rudd and Gillard governments.

Martin Parkinson was sacked by Abbott from the Treasury department after he came to power in 2013, alongside a handful of other departmental heads. He was brought back to the public service by Turnbull to be secretary of the department of prime minister and cabinet.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Policy Shop podcast, hosted by Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Parkinson says the brutal treatment he experienced had a broader impact.

Abbott's removal of top public servants smacks of ideology, not values Read more

He says Abbott could have achieved the same outcome he wanted to achieve “far more subtly if people had stopped to think about it, and without the damage I think it did to the public service because there were instances after that happened of senior colleagues reporting their staff saying, well I’m not going to put my hand up for a controversial role because this is what happens”.



“You follow on the democratically elected, legally mandated directions of the government of the day and you get sacked as a result.”

From the tail end of the Howard government, through the Rudd and Gillard periods, Parkinson was prominent in bureaucratic efforts to implement an emissions trading scheme, setting up a climate change department, before returning to the Treasury.

Abbott, who was part of the Howard government at the time the then prime minister supported emissions trading, later campaigned vociferously against the so-called carbon “tax”, which was not a tax but a carbon price with a fixed period.



Abbott sacked Parkinson after winning the 2013 election, against the advice of senior Liberals, but Parkinson was asked to stay on in Treasury on an interim basis, serving for a further 15 months.

He says in the interview he had a “perfectly professional” and “very open and honest” relationship with Abbott, who listened to his advice, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing. “You couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Parkinson said the damage Abbott had caused by the sacking had been subsequently “ameliorated, but there’s no question that for the service as a whole, I think it came as quite a shock”.

The departmental head also reflected in the conversation with Davis about the breakdown in consensus over carbon pricing which has plunged the Australian parliament into a decade-long deadlock over climate policy.

Parkinson describes “almost a conspiracy of silence between the true believers of climate change and the true deniers of climate change”.

“The true believers did not want to talk about adaptation because they felt that that would take away from a focus on mitigation, and the true deniers didn’t want to talk about adaptation because to do so you would have to talk about the fact that climate change was real,” he says.

“So the debate became one around the merits of a particular approach to mitigation which was an emissions trading scheme.”

Parkinson says the global financial crisis prompted a shift in the position of the business community to carbon pricing. “Suddenly a lot of people in the business community who had been supportive of action on climate change, found themselves in a much more existential situation of trying to save their businesses ... In that environment, they were much more focused on that than on supporting action around climate change.

He also reflected on the disruption technology has caused to the media cycle, and how that has affected the public policy debate.

Parkinson says in the 1980s journalists had more time to write longer, more analytical pieces about policy debates, which helped inform public debates but “if you look around now, the journalists don’t have the opportunity, they don’t have the time to do those thoughtful pieces”.

A clean energy target is not 'unconscionable', Tony Abbott. Wrecking climate policy is | Katharine Murphy Read more

He says the media cycle is focused on “gotcha” moments and sensationalising routine internal processes. “You begin to try and have a conversation with stakeholders about an issue and all of a sudden the social media campaigns are running either for or against the policy option.”

Parkinson says stakeholders now take definitive positions on policy before it is finalised, and the tempo has increased as a consequence “and that makes it much, much harder to do this sort of thoughtful, careful analysis and policy design that in the past we were able to do”.

“Now it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it means we have to do it in different ways,” he says. “We have to find different groups of trusted interlocutors. We have to find different vehicles in which we can engage.

“I’m not sure that we’ve quite found our equilibrium yet. I think it’s still a work in progress.”