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In some cases, very little time elapses between being offered a ministerial position and your first meeting with senior department officials. You may only have a couple of hours.
This page is designed to be a quick-reference guide to support you in your initial interactions. A more comprehensive guide to Ministerial-Departmental relations can be found under Key Relationship: The Department.
what to expect
A barrage of information and a sea of new faces. Some new ministers describe this as like ‘drinking from a firehose’.
Particularly when there has been a change of government, officials will be anxious to demonstrate their professionalism, impartiality and loyalty to the government of the day - i.e. you as their incoming minister. The Department will have spent the caretaker period preparing an Incoming Government Brief (IGB). An initial meeting with the Secretary to set expectations and preferences for how and over what timeframe you want to receive advice and briefing can help mitigate the potential for officers to over-prepare and over-share in their efforts to establish a trusting relationship.
Don’t panic if you can’t take it all in. There will be multiple opportunities to ask questions, and you can always request written follow ups. As one experienced public servant who had onboarded many ministers said:
You have to have that first chat a number of times. The first time you have it, ministers are tired. They've just been campaigning. They don't know what's happening. They've just been told they're going to go somewhere. They're not absorbing the detail. They're just trying to work out how to get going. But also the anxiety of ‘I have to retain all this information, and I don't know what's happening’. So I've tried to over time give them the material and say, ‘Don't worry about it. This is all going to be written down. We'll come back’.
The other key change is the way people see you. Since you now inhabit the role of Minister, you need to adjust to the scrutiny and focus that comes with it. As one Chief of Staff put it, “A weird thing happens at that moment: a guessing game starts. What does the Minister like? Departments will be obsessed with what you like. Your office with be obsessed with what you like”
What should you be trying to achieve?
The ultimate goal of your interactions with your department should be to set the foundation for a productive partnership and to earn the ‘discretionary effort’ of the public service - to inspire your department to go the extra mile for you as minister. It is an opportunity to set the tone, cultivate mutual respect and demonstrate that honest interactions will be valued.
Whilst a formal briefing must wait until you have been sworn in, an initial meet and greet may be able to take place as soon as the first minister has announced their intention to appoint you, assuming this is approved by the first minister and the secretary of the Department of Prime MInister and Cabinet/ Premier and Cabinet.
Note also that there may be uncertainty on the department side, pending possible high-level reshuffles or dismissals.
The purpose of this first meeting is to establish the relationship, have a first brief discussion around your and your government’s priorities, and seek to understand if there are any time-critical matters that the department believes you and your office need to be aware of. There is also the more mundane but pressing question of the logistics: the physical set-up of your office.
If you feel underprepared to discuss any of these matters, or need to consult with the leader’s office or portfolio colleagues, you should feel free to hold them over for a day or two while you formulate your thoughts.
Sorry if that’s a bit blunt, but this is a question that comes to us time and time again. There is a more comprehensive discussion here, but the dot points are:
The presumption is that your Secretary stays, it being the part of the role of a Westminster public service to provide continuity
That said, they can and do leave all the time. Sometimes of their own volition; sometimes not
Secretaries’ employment contracts are held by the leader. That means it's not your decision. If you want to move someone on, you need to influence the leader
We strongly advise you to take some time and make your best efforts to try and make it work before you start lobbying the first minister
Agenda for the first meeting
The first meeting will generally involve only a small group: you, your Chief of Staff if you have one, the departmental secretary and - in the event that there is an area of the department for which you have particular responsibility or is especially salient to your agenda - the relevant deputy secretary. You can set the terms of this initial engagement. If you want only a small room or limited attendance, say so. The department will accommodate your preferences.
The question at the front of all participants’ minds will be “how can we make this relationship work most effectively?”, so the initial session will, explicitly or implicitly, be about feeling each other out. Expect them to be watching you closely for clues about your preferences and style, and determining how best to work with you.
It is important to understand your responsibilities and powers as Minister - the agencies, legislation and frameworks (e.g. intergovernmental or international policies or funding agreements) that shape the work, and to think about the process for becoming oriented to and, over time, building a deep understanding of the issues and players.
This awareness, together with routine briefings and engagements with the department, portfolio agencies, stakeholders and your ministerial colleagues, will help you identify the three to five big things you want to achieve during your tenure. Draw from your Charter Letter and the Administrative Arrangements Orders when available (see the pages on Getting Across the Brief and What to Expect When You Become a Minister for more detail on these) but also be informed by the election platform and the broader priorities and direction of the government. Where there has been a ministerial colleague in this position prior to you, an early conversation with them (and indeed predecessors from both sides of politics) is valuable about the status of priorities to guide early decision making and where your attention is required.
Your Secretary should ensure that anything that needs to be addressed immediately is brought to your attention, alongside options or recommendations for how to deal with it. Make clear to them that you expect them to do so.
The urgency could be born of external factors (eg - a fast-moving issue in your portfolio), or could be generated by your government’s commitment to delivering something within a declared time-frame.
In either case, expect advice not only on what to do, but also on how to do it: which processes need to be undertaken, what mechanisms need to be engaged, which stakeholders need to be consulted. Much of this procedural stuff will later be the province of your ministerial office, but in the early days the department can cover it for you.
One of the most pressing issues will be getting your office set up. If this is not done promptly, it can impact your ability to get moving on your agenda. As MKI's Callie Zorzi, who onboarded many ministers during her time at PM&C observed:
"[In my experience of that first conversation] ministers don't want a big in-depth policy conversation, where the department is going to smash you with all its expertise straight away. They are literally looking to go. Where do I turn on the lights? Where you're the supporting portfolio, you have to set them up. “We're here to set up your IT equipment. We're here to get you going. What do you need?”
Everything from IT onboarding to office furniture to security access is the department’s responsibility. Senior officials will be mindful of the urgency and want to get some quick preferences from you. In the likely event that you need public servants seconded on an interim basis to fill any gaps, they will find experienced people to help you establish systems, administrative routines and connections.
Be prepared to discuss how you want to communicate. When would you prefer a text, an email, or a phone call? Which instant messaging platform do you prefer? Your APH email address for day-to-day correspondence or your ministerial address? The department will likely have a view on these things, and will help you to navigate the rules about, for example, what constitutes a public record and the accountability and oversight frameworks that govern your communications.
It is increasingly common for the secretary to nominate a transition lead within their department to be your main point of contact and liaise with the Ministerial and Parliamentary Support functions in the department (or your jurisdiction’s equivalent) on your behalf. This will save a lot of time and potential difficulty, so ensure you and your team maximises the support provided.
Setting the foundations
In the words of one Departmental Secretary, the initial phase of working with a new minister is about:
“...developing a relationship and a shared understanding of the issues…it is about how to work but it is also about on what you work.” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p 132)
As the minister, it is up to you to set the agenda and pace of the early meetings. Whilst the department will be eager to get clarity on key issues, you are quite entitled to delay conversations about key matters until you are sufficiently clear in your own mind.
In general, the early stages on the relationship include:
Tell your department how you work best.
Be specific: "some ministers are readers, others prefer oral briefings, some love, and others hate, visual aids."(Washington 2021)
Who do you want to talk to?: Some ministers prefer "to only have senior officials in the room for discussion, others want to hear from the person who actually prepared the advice…Former UK Cabinet Secretary, the late Sir Jeremy Heywood, was known for including policy worker bees in briefings to the British Prime Minister or cabinet. A former colleague noted: “Heywood would always involve the person actually doing the work. Generous, yes, but also more effective. Having the 20 or 30-something … (rather than her boss’s boss) there in the room both saved time communicating ‘down the hierarchy’ and was respectful of their policy work and advice.” … the upshot is that the minister gets the real oil and the official a great development experience (Washington 2021)
If/when you want to take this path, be mindful of department hierarchies and chain of command. These may seem painfully bureaucratic, but they are not there to be obstructive - they exist for a reason. There is a difference between bringing the junior officer into a larger conversation, where senior leaders are there to provide context and fill in the gaps, and “reaching into the department” - calling the contact officer who has drafted the briefing out of the blue.
This issue is explored further in the guidance on how to build a strong relationship with the department.
Whatever your preferences, ensure everybody is on the same page. Develop written guidelines that the CoS and Secretary are responsible for managing.
How do you want your office to engage with the department? You won’t have the capacity to sit in on every meeting with officials. When do you want to be there in person and who do you want representing you when you’re not there? What is the scope of their authority? Can they agree to things on your behalf? Commission advice? Or are they just there to relay information?
How often? If you don’t have a firm view on the cadence of meetings, one easy option is to roll over your predecessor’s schedule and set a date to review how well it’s working.
What do you want from meetings? Are they for information? Discussion? Decisions? Or all three? This will guide what form of meeting takes place, e.g. discussions can be a deep dive on a policy or program, whereas a decision will be supported by formal briefing (either ahead or following a meeting). An information session could be a presentation or include other stakeholders.
Show that candour is welcome: Ask: “What am I missing? What would critics say?”
How frank and fearless do you want your advice?
The phrase “frank and fearless advice” captures the expectation that career public servants should provide ministers with honest, unvarnished counsel - even when that advice is politically inconvenient, challenges the minister's preferences, or highlights risks in proposed policies.
Such advice is not universally welcomed, and therefore will not necessarily be immediately forthcoming. You may have to explicitly demonstrate that you give permission. In part this is about trust: you need to be able to have respectful arguments without anyone feeling threatened. The department needs to understand that you won’t take it personally when they disagree with you, and that when you disagree with them it doesn’t mean you think they’re idiots.
‘"he thing I hate most is when I say, ‘What’s the department’s view on this?’ And someone will say, 'Well, what view do you want the department to have?’ "(Tiernan & Weller 2010, p106)
“...I said to the department, I’m old fashioned: I expect to get from the department frank and fearless advice. I expect that, and if I don’t get that, there is a problem. But equally if that frank and fearless advice is always agreed to then there is a problem of a different nature. So I expect frank and fearless advice, but don’t expect that frank and fearless advice is always going to be followed.” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p107)
What do you want from them?
Different ministers have different expectations of the public service. Historically these have diverged roughly along partisan lines. The general - though by no means universal - tendency since the 1980s has been for Labor governments to look to their departments for creativity and proactive policy suggestions as well as implementation, and for Coalition ministers to see departments primarily as implementers.
The prevailing Coalition view was most concisely captured by then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison in his foreword to Delivering for Australians. For Morrison, the job of the APS was to ‘deliver the government’s agenda. It is ministers who provide policy leadership and direction.’
Speaking in her capacity as Minister for the Public Service, Katy Gallagher encapsulated the traditional Labor view: on which the public service is:
“...not solely a delivery arm of executive government decisions, but…has a broader and just as important role as an independent institution that serves the Australian people, that's there to confront our most difficult problems, and to do so across the generations. To outlast governments and parliaments, and to always be there working in the interests of the nation.” (Gallagher 2024)
Leaders will often signal the approach they plan to adopt during election campaigns, as did David Crisafulli in 2024 (going against the general conservative trend by signalling an appetite for a more strategic role for the QPS ) and Anthony Albanese in 2022.
Departmental staff will be looking to you for hints about whether you are going to conform to type on this or depart from it. If you have firm ideas, by all means signal them. It will help the department meet your expectations. If you are still undecided, keep your powder dry.
Be aware, of course, that if your expectations differ materially from those of your recent predecessors, it may take time for the department to build the capability you desire. If you’re not sure if they have it, ask.
Note too, that when the public service has supported a long-term government, it may take time for it to both get on the new government’s wavelength and adjust to its philosophy and style. You can assist by being clear and consistent about how you approach the relationship with the public service and what you want from them.
The differing views on the role of the public service are explored in more depth here.
Ask questions. Take the opportunity to challenge your assumptions. There is no general presumption that a new minister has any pre-existing knowledge about either the policy area or the way the department works. Your credibility with the department rests on many things, but your pre-existing knowledge is not one of them. The imperative is to learn quickly and pretending you know things you don’t is a bad way to do that. Departments are living organisms - they have histories, professional cultures and stories about their role in policy and government. Get to know these features - including by speaking with former senior officials. This can be a useful basis for engaging their discretionary effort.
Generally, the department will try to adapt itself to your framings and adopt your language. But good communication is a two-way street - there will be technical terms and framings that are widely understood across your policy and stakeholder ecosystem. Your life will be easier - and you will be more credible - if you understand them too.
IGBs/ IMBs
When you become a minister, your department will provide you with a comprehensive brief. If you are appointed following an election, it is called Incoming Government Brief (colloquially a Blue Book for the Coalition and a Red Book for Labor). If you are appointed following a reshuffle, a retirement, a leadership spill or a resignation, it is called an Incoming Minister Brief.
These briefs are aimed at educating ministers in the business of government: their responsibilities, resources available to them, how to set up offices, who will knock on their door and ways in which they might deal with them; and reflecting on the big policy challenges and pitching ways to deal with them.(Tiernan & Weller 2010, p128)
The public service “regards the preparation of a book as a great opportunity to provide a brief. Even with a returning govt it is an opportunity to put a whole set of issues in front of the ministers in a coherent fashion.” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p128)
The briefs will include some or all of the following:
An overview of the department and its key functions
Plans for implementing the government’s formal election commitments….identifying formal election commitments can be harder than you might think. A post-election process is sometimes needed to confirm which statements made during the campaign represent a formal commitment. But once known, developing implementation plans for election commitments is a high priority for all secretaries.
The identification of early decisions and issues (including appointment decisions) ministers will be required to address in their new roles. Some delicacy and judgement is usually required for this. Secretaries generally try to avoid overwhelming ministers with overly anxious requests for ministerial decisions and actions from their department.
The practicalities of establishing a new ministerial office. New phones, new IT, briefing protocols, security requirements and new staff all need to be put in place. Often, it is the quality of this logistical support that determines a minister’s first real impression of the public service. It is an unwise secretary indeed who takes their eye off this part of the game.
Long-term issues that the secretary feels the minister will need to address. These may be accompanied by possible policy directions. (Innis 2025)
Re-shuffles in mid-term may be the hardest for secretaries to manage immediately. They often occur suddenly and no consolidated brief is immediately available. Further, secretaries note that often the hardest ministers to brief are those who come into office mid-term. Newly elected ministers do not know what they do not know. Ministers who have been observing from the backbench have a greater tendency to assume they know how the process works. (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p129)
Even if the reshuffle occurs quickly, there will be media speculation and other signals that give the department time to at least pull together a basic brief. Some of the material is evergreen, or will have changed little since the last election and can be easily updated. The brief will also include an outline of current priorities, including their status and an outline of any immediate decisions required.
The strategy usually adopted by secretaries to navigate a reshuffle is to reach out and make the connection immediately following the announcement. They will work out a way to deliver a general briefing, and set up a time for a more formal induction after the swearing in. They will also attempt to get a sense of who needs to be in the room (deputies/key officials etc) for those early briefings in order to establish relationships.
The comprehensiveness of the Brief is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. If you’re not naturally a reader, the volume of information can be offputting. Even if you are, there are other ways to extract what you need from the brief.
Treat it as an invitation to dialogue. Use it as a discussion guide in your initial meetings. Ask officials to elaborate on it, follow up on it, and explain which sections are relevant to which of your concerns and why
Make a member of your office the guardian of the book: Departmental staff are slowly becoming comfortable with the idea that they serve ministers and their offices, rather than the minister as an individual (see for example (Davis 2025), where the retiring Secretary of PM&C refers repeatedly to “ministers and their advisers). A trusted staffer in your office (probably, but not necessarily, your Chief of Staff, whom the department will typically provide with a copy of the book) can become the keeper of the brief - someone whose responsibility is to be conversant with its contents and bring the relevant pieces to your attention at the right moment. This will likely only be relevant for the initial, feet-finding period of your tenure - the brief is aimed at the completely uninitiated, and events will overtake some of the information.
Read it to identify red flags. The department will have been keeping track of your election commitments and thinking about how it can implement them. The IGB should identify obstacles, and unintended consequences, and recommend ways to deal with them.
rules of thumb
The Advanced Political Leadership curriculum and its supporting materials contain much that can support you in building a productive relationship with the department.
The Clear Leadership framework is particularly useful, as are many of the concepts explored under the theme of Working Well With Others.
Here are a few tips specific to the Minister-Department relationship:
Imposter syndrome hits everyone, and there is always a temptation to try and cover up your weaknesses by pretending you understand things you don’t. But if you bluff, you forgo the opportunity to learn.
“...as a cabinet minister… we are here-by-day, gone-by-night generalists who arrive, not experts in our brief, but there to challenge. And what you need more than anyone else is civil servants who are prepared to say, that is a crazy idea… don't do it for these six reasons. And, you know, if you don't have civil servants doing that, you're going to end up coming a cropper pretty quickly.(Hunt 2025)
The ministry is a pressure cooker and it’s natural to want to vent at someone. Departmental officials may seem like a soft target. But treating them disrespectfully is perilous: to succeed you will need the full capacity of the public service on your side. And your office looks to you for cues. If you treat public servants poorly, so will they.
“...make sure you are respectful and courteous with your departmental staff because they can protect you from the worst disasters” (Tiernan & Weller 2010)
Part of the role of the Chief of Staff is to be a ‘shock absorber’. They can have the hard conversations on your behalf.
When there has been a change of government, it is natural to suspect that at least some of the public servants you have inherited harbour what one senior minister described as “a warm and loving feeling about the previous regime.” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p65). Coalition governments tend to assume that public servants lean left, and may therefore not commit themselves wholeheartedly to a centre-right agenda. And there can be particular tensions for erstwhile shadow ministers, who may have spent several years criticising the department they now run.
The consensus in the literature is that these fears are baseless in the vast majority of cases. Public Servants are first and foremost concerned with serving the government of the day and pride themselves on their ability to do so.
There is nothing wrong with throwing ideas around if everyone understands that is what you are doing. But as a minister you have considerable resources at your disposal. A request that might, when you were in opposition, be interpreted as a whim or a thought bubble now has the potential to trigger a full-blown project plan drawing in multiple departmental staff.
“The danger of being a minister is, when you say we’re doing this or I want that, people actually do it.” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p114)
