The pen-pusher is mightier than the soldier.(Department of Defence's administration)

IF NOTHING ELSE, the report of the Board of Inquiry into the fatal crash of a navy Sea King helicopter in Indonesia in 2005 revealed that the persistent problems in the Defence Department of the past thirty years remain. At the time of the crash in which five people were killed, knowledgeable commentators pointed out that the Sea Kings had been in service for some thirty years and were too old to be safe. The board found that the crash resulted from short cuts in maintenance procedures brought about in part by funding shortages and too high a tempo of operations for the personnel available. That comes as no surprise; critics have been commenting on these issues for at least two decades.

But there are other elements in the report and its reception that reflect the excessively bureaucratic and blame-avoidance culture that rules Defence. For example, the widely respected Chief of Navy, Vice-Admiral Russ Shalders, publicly accepted personal responsibility for the failures. This is silly; he can't be responsible for the work of every mechanic servicing helicopters. On the issue of budget cuts, he is hardly responsible for what are systemic failures within the Defence Department. On the other hand, if he is truly responsible, he is also accountable and should have offered his resignation which, of course, a sensible minister would decline to accept.

Regrettably, our multitudinous bureaucracies are rarely accountable for anything. They peddle the myth embedded in the political theory of the Westminster system that ministers are accountable. Ministers are certainly accountable to the parliament for the performance of their departments but no one in his right mind considers that such accountability reaches down to the performance of individuals. Assertions to the contrary represent nothing more than political posturing.

There are however more serious manifestations of Defence's problems. The defence organisation has been under constant scrutiny by parliamentary inquiries, appointed reviews and internal examinations since at least 1979. All have been critical of many elements of the department's performance and recommended what must now amount to a thousand changes. Yet the more the department "reforms" itself, the bigger it becomes without becoming obviously more efficient. While there are no precise figures readily available, occasional comments in Budget papers and annual reports indicate that administration is one of the fastest growing elements of the defence budget.

In the most recent review, ordered by the then Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, the review committee, chaired by leading businesswoman Elizabeth Proust and including a former navy chief, Vice-Admiral Chris Ritchie, urged a review of what many see as the crux of the problem, the so-called diarchy which requires that the military Chief of the Defence Force and the public service Secretary share responsibility for the administration of the defence force. Not only does this monster exist at the top, it is also replicated at many levels in the Russell Hill defence headquarters. Public servants claim equivalent ranks to their military counterparts and there are constant struggles for authority, usually resolved by a bargaining process but also in a costly multiplication of senior official positions as the management gurus create more jobs to "fix" what are fundamentally systemic problems.

The various justifications for the "system" include the alleged better education and analytical capability of public servants compared with their military counterparts, but this superiority is asserted rather than demonstrated. Indeed, if it was ever true, it is less so now given the better education and wider experience of middle to senior military officers.

Some six years ago, on behalf of the Australia Defence Association, I recommended to the CDF and the Secretary a proposal that the diarchy be scrapped and that the public service department be left responsible for no more than support of the defence force, which had the prime responsibility for the military defence of the nation. In his response, the then Secretary asserted that the diarchy was necessary because he had responsibility for civil control of the military. This is a monstrous claim by an appointed official which has no basis in law or custom. In fact, the necessary function of civil control of the military in a democracy rests with the defence minister, who is in turn responsible to parliament. Regrettably, ministers have for many years effectively abandoned their responsibility and left the running of defence to the public service, which lacks the skills and training required.