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“Over the last twenty years, there has been a significant growth in the numbers of Ministerial staff. In the past, working in a Minister’s office was often seen as a secondment or a temporary placement. People now make careers as a Ministerial staff member, and will often work for a Member of Parliament in both Opposition and Government.” (Australian Public Service Commission 2025)
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the public service enjoyed a virtual monopoly over advice that ministers in Australian governments received. Over time, Ministers became concerned that this limited the range of advice and perspectives that filtered through to them. In addition to more diversity of thought, they wanted greater responsiveness from their counsellors.
Beginning in the 1970s, Ministers here (and across Westminster-style systems internationally) sought to break the public service monopoly and create systems of advice that were more contestable; systems that blended independent, expert and political advice with a broader range of inputs. In doing so they set in motion waves of government and public sector reforms that have continued more or less uninterrupted to the present day.
The advent of partisan ministerial staff was part of this process, beginning formally from the Whitlam era and accelerating through Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and on to the present.
Ministers now have two primary sources of advice: official (the department) and partisan/personal (the private office). In theory, responsibility is shared and based on complementary skills and drivers: the department offers continuity, neutrality and a long-term view while the private office seeks to serve, support and advance their own Minister’s policy and political interests.
In addition to meeting the need for a complementary source of advice, this growth “...has been driven by ministers seeking support to deal with the complex demands of their roles, to extend their capacity to assert control over the public service, and to function effectively in an increasingly competitive, professionalised and media-saturated political and policy environment” (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p254).
ACCOUNTABILITY
Ministerial staffing is an area where constitutional theory has yet to catch up with political practice. In constitutional theory, staff don’t exist. They are regarded purely as an extension of the minister.
Staff are directly and personally accountable to you. Any authority they exercise is considered to be delegated by you. You are vicariously liable for their decisions and actions.
This is not a trivial point, nor is it some arcane and dusty curiosity. It creates real risks that you need to anticipate and proactively manage.
Consider the atmosphere and realities of working in a ministerial office: the long hours, the high pressure, the competitiveness and the almost-inevitable sense of self-importance that accompanies the sense of mission.
Consider too the profile of the many ministerial staffers: young, bright, inexperienced, maybe a little cocky, certainly ambitious and exercising a lot of vicarious power that they may not be alive to the limits of.
All of this creates a perfect storm of potential for bad behaviour and poor decisions. And in the eyes of parliament, the public and your colleagues, these will be considered your bad behaviour and poor decisions.
Day to day, this is your Chief of Staff’s responsibility to manage. But there is much you can do to set culture and tone.
These issues are explored in more detail (alongside the various codes of conduct that have been legislated in many jurisdictions) on our Key Relationship: Your Office page, but they are worth keeping in the back of your mind even during these initial stages.
WHAT MINISTERIAL STAFF DO
Your office is there to increase your capacity across the spectrum of your responsibilities. The work it does can usefully be broken down into five broad tasks (Maley 2000):
Managing the Minister’s time by regulating access and helping calibrate routines that allow them to perform at their best.
Ministerial staff are a complementary source of policy advice to the department, with different capabilities, perspectives and strengths. Your office can advise you on the political dimensions of decisions in a way that public servants may not, since they are required by law to be non-partisan and impartial.
Providing political advice and maintaining relationships and links to manage dependencies with stakeholders including the centre, other ministers, caucus, the party, and the media.
Relationships with your constituents remain the province of your electorate office, who are still a part of your wider support team - a fact often overlooked by ministerial offices, who could do more to utilise them.
Media, social media and communicating issues and decisions across the portfolio, the government and the bureaucracy.
Creating and administering processes and acting as a proxy for the Minister, including the management of:
Systems and office procedures.
Diary.
Program.
Processes for planning.
first orders of business
This is handled by the Ministerial and Parliamentary Services (Commonwealth) division of your department, and their state and territory level equivalents. The allocation of office space and the timetable will have been agreed between the leaders’ office and the department of first minister and cabinet. This is not a trivial task. New portfolios may have been created, floor space is finite so new floor plans may be required and actual physical objects need to be allocated, tracked and transported.
Bear in mind too that the Westminster tradition abhors a vacuum: your predecessor remains Minister until you’re sworn in and will need time to move out before you can move in. When the office move happens as part of a change of government, it’s in your party’s interest to give them a reasonable amount of time to move. Be gracious, respectful and treat your predecessor as you would want to be treated in the same circumstances. Politics is a world of infinite games and remember that what goes around comes around.
Governance and process for recruitment vary by party and jurisdiction. The First Minister (Prime Minister, Premier or Chief Minister) determines the number and level of personal employee positions allocated to each Minister or Assistant Minister. The below staffing chart, tabled at Senate Estimates in 2025, provides a snapshot of staff allocations at the Commonwealth level and provides insight into the numbers and mix of positions in different types of ministerial offices.
Senior staff appointments in particular tend to be tightly controlled by the centre - for example, Federal Labor has an Office of Staff Support to manage the process, while the Coalition has a Government Staffing Committee that handles recruitment. This is a quality assurance and a risk management strategy, aimed at providing ministers with an appropriately balanced mix of experience and personal loyalty on their personal staffs. It reflects increasing professionalisation of the staff role and recognition that staff capability directly impacts ministerial performance.
Expect recruitment to take time. Your Departmental Secretary may offer to provide experienced departmental officers on a temporary basis to fill the gaps (see the section on Establishing your Relationship with the Department for detail). This can be very helpful in getting established and developing links to different parts of the portfolio, but it should be time-limited while you determine arrangements that are going to serve you best
Note that rules around the ability for secondment of temporary staff change from time to time, so you will need to check what the current situation is.
Note that seconded departmental staff differ from Department Liaison Officers (“DLOs). Whilst both are departmental staff, DLOs are not temporary replacements for personal office roles. They have a well-defined, ongoing set of responsibilities to facilitate communication between the office and the department. DLOs are discussed in greater detail below.
Office processes can be optimised over time. The main imperative in the initial stages is to provide clarity and manage the volume of information and requests. The most precious resource you have as a minister is your time. Well designed processes will help you clear space to set priorities and get across your brief. Robust processes will protect you from the risk of avoidable mistakes while you develop familiarity and confidence.
Key work streams that will need to be managed include:
Who is responsible for which aspect of your portfolio.
How decisions get made.
How the diary is managed*.
Principles for responding to invitations and who decides whether you will attend.
Delegated authority.
Who prepares for parliamentary questions.
Templates and sample processes can be found at the bottom of the page on Key Relationship: The Ministerial Office.
* Good diary management is essential to your effectiveness as a minister. You can find a detailed discussion and a series of practical tips under Managing Time to Advance Your Priorities.
If you're looking for a top-line, easily digestible account of what good likes like in a ministerial office, MKI's Raj Nahna (former Chief of Staff to NZ PM Jacinda Ardern) has developed Top Ten Habits for Highly Effective Ministerial Offices.
RECRUITMENT: CHIEF OF STAFF
Grahame Morris, who served as Prime Minister John Howard’s Chief of Staff (CoS), describes his role as that of:
“...[T]he penultimate adviser before the final decision is made, the penultimate policy adviser, the penultimate political adviser, the penultimate media adviser, speech adviser, program or diary adviser and certainly the senior ‘go-to’ person in the office.”
Ideally, the Chief of Staff should be “The person with whom the Minister can drop their guard…" (Tiernan & Weller 2010, p276). They aspire to be, per former Howard CoS Grahame Morris: "...a handbrake on dumb ideas and an accelerator and a driver of the good ones” (Rhodes & Tiernan 2014, p104).
Above all, you need someone whose integrity and judgement you can trust. Someone who will tell you the unvarnished truth always, including when you’re being a jerk.
Think about complementarity in this unique relationship. Where are your weaknesses and blindspots, and what strengths in a CoS would help you compensate for them?
Their precise responsibilities will vary based on context, but are likely to include (Rhodes & Tiernan 2014, p 105):
Supporting and protecting the minister:
Ensuring yourstyle, preferences, vision and priorities are reflected in the process and structure of the office;
Serving as a ‘pest controller’ (managing relationships - including ‘friends’, saying ‘no’) and ‘shock absorber’ (being the bearer of bad news);
Being a ‘lightning rod’ for discontent;
Being the trusted person who ‘pushes back’ (and with whom the minister can ‘let off steam’);
Maintaining focus on priorities - making sure the urgent doesn’t crowd out the important;
Managing the Minister’s time - including by regulating access;
Helping calibrate routines that allow them to perform at their best.
Running the office: Forging an effective team, recruiting suitably qualified & experienced staff, Establishing routines, building trust, ensuring clearly defined responsibilities and a mix of expertise, ensuring that the office is well organised and managed. As ministerial staff numbers have grown, and as concerns have emerged about the culture of parliamentary workplaces, this aspect of the job has grown in importance and has required more of Chiefs’ time.
Crisis management: Maintaining calm, lowering the temperature, putting a process around it. Clearing the decks, establishing the facts, getting the right people in the room. Keeping the business of government going.
Controlling the agenda: Maintaining the capacity to take a longer view; using incumbency to dominate and shape events; avoiding policy drift; refocusing and recovering the initiative when ‘events’ take things off course.
Policy coordination: Coordination of policy and political management with central offices and within & across portfolios; managing your role in cabinet routines and process, contributing to routines that enable the public service to coordinate effectively.
Political management: Maintaining relationships and links to manage dependencies: caucus, party, media, stakeholders, constituents etc.
Trust and clarity are key determinants of a successful relationship with your CoS. Where do decision rights lie? What can they deal with on their own vs referring to you? How can others be confident that they speak on your behalf?
Since Whitlam’s appointment of Dr Peter Wilenski as his Personal Private Secretary - effectively establishing the role of the modern Chief of Staff in all but name - the CoS has become ever more important in ministerial offices across all Australia jurisdictions.
The scope of the role has also grown. In particular, as offices have become larger and expectations around workplace culture have evolved the ability of CoS to lead and manage high-performing teams has become an increasingly significant dimension of the work.
MKI research by former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Ben Hubbard, identifies the following traits and competencies:
Foundational competencies: Essential skills that any Chief of Staff needs to be successful
Deep knowledge of Minister's role within institutional and democratic contexts
Knowledge of policy/domain areas and connections to the government’s program
Ability to influence with delegated authority
Meets the new leadership standard for team management
Political creativity: ability to read the politics and shape the strategy accordingly
Personal traits: What kind of person are you looking for?
Well organised to manage competing priorities
Honest broker: balanced in analysis, speaks truth to power
Strong observation and listening skills
Manages stress and discomfort
Trusted and respected by Minister
Has integrity and is self aware
Transformative competencies: The things that take a CoS from good to great
Extensive political insight
Expert adviser in portfolio areas
Dynamic people/process manager
Ability to build coalitions and make deals
Expert stakeholder management
Ability to combine strategy and tactics to reset/reorientate
Self-aware: knows where they and other add value
Indicators of success: How will you know they're functioning at a high level?
The advice they provide is high quality and complements that provided by the department
The office is professional, well-run, efficient and collaborative
Effective routines have been established with the department
Contribution of the team maximised
Stakeholder engagement is consistent
Where there is resource, many ministers recruit a Deputy Chief of Staff. Responsibilities are generally divided between the CoS and the Deputy. Often one drives policy while the other politics and communication, but arrangements will vary depending on skillset. One thing to be clear on is whether the deputy has direct access to the Minister or not.
Having a Deputy provides another leader in the office - someone staff can turn to for decisions and advice and who provides an upward communication channel. Staff generally have a strong bias towards trying to protect the Minister’s time. This often extends to the Chief of Staff. Providing another channel upwards means you are less likely to miss important information, but you need to ensure the two roles work well together and that you don’t inadvertently create competition or conflict.
One of the dimensions of your role is acting as a government spokesperson: articulating and selling policies, defending its performance, and providing accountability to the public. Media is a key channel for this work.
The complexity and turbulence of the media environment makes the recruitment of a highly capable communications lead essential.
Their responsibilities will include (Mooney 2025):
Being the first point of contact for media enquiries
Liaising with the media office in the department to source information to respond to those enquiries
Briefing you for media appearances
Driving strategic communications
Overseeing social media (though not necessarily running them day-to-day. Digital media is often bundled into the responsibilities of a junior staffer)
Who are you looking for? More often than not your media adviser will be an ex-journalist, though occasionally media advisers are former political advisors with no journalism experience but a talent for communications - perhaps an ex-speechwriter or even a former departmental communications person.
The hollowing out of the job market in journalism in recent years means that there is lots of talent available. What distinguishes an excellent media adviser from a good one is the ability to understand the policy as well as the politics - to get into the detail, grasp the nuance, and synthesise it compellingly (Mooney 2025).
A Minister or Assistant Minister may, by arrangement with their departmental Secretary, appoint a Departmental Liaison Officer (DLO). These are public servants seconded from their home departments, to ”…facilitate the flow of information and paper between the department and ministerial office” (Rhodes & Tiernan 2015, p 160).
Although they work in your office, DLOs remain a part of the public service and are governed by all relevant values and codes of conduct:
This includes remaining impartial while working in the Minister’s office. This does not mean the DLO must remove themselves when political matters are discussed. The DLO can certainly offer facts and advice from the Department. However, the DLO must not offer personal opinions or engage in activity that could be perceived as political. (Australian Public Service Commission 2024)
The number of DLOs in an office is set by the First Minister. All costs of these employees are covered by the portfolio department.
RECRUITMENT GUIDANCE
Campaigning and governing are different. You will naturally feel a loyalty to the people who helped you win office, but policy and administration require different skillsets from winning votes. That said, media, comms and administrative roles require similar competencies in both contexts, so the people in those functions are more likely to carry over.
Think about how flat you want the office structure to be. More hierarchical structures - for example, requiring all information and requests to come to you via your Chief of Staff - will be better at protecting your time. But flatter structures will expose you to a greater range of perspectives, and are better at ensuring things don’t fall between the cracks.
If you opt for a flatter structure, where multiple staff members have direct access to you, there are a few things to watch out for:
Take care when designing processes to ensure that your Chief of Staff is not left out of the loop, which will undermine both their authority and their effectiveness.
Be alive to the risk that you are inadvertently setting people up to be in competition with each other by creating the incentive to be rivals for your ear. Proximity to the principal is a kind of power, and people can get much closer without the CoS there to mediate.
You do not want to inadvertently find yourself becoming the de facto manager of your staff. That is the CoS’ job. If you end up having to performance manage them - or worse, end up in the Fair Work Commission because of the way you dealt with staff - it becomes a significant source of stress and distraction. It happens more often than you think and is a common catalyst for damaging leaks.
You need people who aren’t too role-bound. You will generally recruit according to functional specialisation, and role clarity and clear lines of accountability are essential to a high performing office. Within those general principles, you’ll need all hands on deck when crises erupt. You need team players who will help each other out, not people who cling to the terms of their position description.
Diversity is important, particularly when it comes to things like preparing for question time. You will want a wide variety of viewpoints. In addition to the usual dimensions of diversity we think about as providing good outcomes (diverse skill sets and diverse demographics) two additional things worth keeping in mind are:
A mix between people you know and trust and people with deep policy expertise (including public servants) and
A mix of people at different life stages. The workload means that offices naturally bias towards younger people without family commitments. You will likely need to make a conscious effort to counteract this natural pull and bring in more experienced staff.
The intensity of the work means that churn is an inevitable part of ministerial office life. Whilst this has disadvantages (lost productivity, institutional knowledge and relationships), it does give you ongoing opportunities to fine tune the skills mix. You should however be concerned about excessive turnover, which is usually a sign that something is not right. Exit interviews may be useful in that regard.
"It's a very difficult lifestyle for anyone to maintain…It's an amazing opportunity, but you make a lot of sacrifices and there's no doubt that it wears you out pretty quickly." (Dean Sherr, Former media advisor to Prime Minister Albanese)
The dimensions of the roles you recruit for and the way you organise your reporting lines will be shaped by your staff allocation and the nature of your responsibilities.
We've collected a few organisational charts from the former Chiefs of Staff who work at MKI, just to give you an idea as to how other people have approached the task.
PROCESS DESIGN
The expectations and demands on ministers are greater than any individual can reasonably fulfil. To ‘manage the mix’ of obligations across the multiple dimensions of your role, you have to ruthlessly prioritise.
Lots of things stand between you and your personal goals/priorities, and there are only so many hours in a week. So many of your commitments are non-negotiable, and - whilst not necessarily unimportant on their own terms - do nothing to advance your agenda. The overarching goal of process design is to make sure it is the right priorities (which is to say your priorities and those of the centre, which may well differ from each other but need to be aligned) that are driving the business of the government, rather than simply responding to the deluge of incoming requests.
Clarity of purpose is essential.
There will be fixed commitments you have to schedule around: parliamentary sitting days, cabinet, caucus or party room meetings etc. These are your first priorities.
There will be a second set of commitments that initially seem immovable but where you can say no. Establish the difference between the first and second set as quickly as you can and understand what the consequences of saying no are, so that you can make an informed decision about what to prioritise. Likewise try and learn the difference between genuine urgency and manufactured urgency. You don’t need to solve this on your own. Take advice from the Secretary and CoS and rely on the office to design and implement processes that reflect your priorities.
Explicitly carve out and protect electorate days, time for making decisions (one or two days a week), for personal life, and for space to kick around ideas. Try and restrict time in meetings to around three hours a day.
Maintain these routines as much as you can. “The system needs authorisation to be able to move; departments need things signed off. In the absence of routines, things get stuck…”
Your office will receive an overwhelming number of invitations to events and requests for meetings. Develop explicit principles for determining which you will accept, and a system for triaging them so that only genuine line calls make their way to you. Aim to respond to requests as quickly as you can. Your diary is likely to be quite fluid, so it’s OK to say “maybe” to an event pending your availability opening up, as long as you communicate well with the person extending the invitation.
The demands on your time will far exceed the hours you have. If you agreed to meet everyone who asked, you could fill your calendar ten times over.
The overarching goal of diary management is the same as that of many of your processes in other areas: to create capacity, allowing you to get out of the reactive space and into the proactive one.
Key tips for efficient diary management include:
While it can be useful for all staff to see the diary, only the diary manager and office manager should be able to make changes. This avoids errors and misunderstandings.
Each diary entry should include all address and contact details, with the invitation attached for reference. This needs to be readable on a phone, and searchable.
Initially, meet with the diary manager once a week to discuss invitations, with the diary manager making a recommendation on what to accept or decline. As time goes on and you develop a better understanding of your new ecosystem and a firmer sense of your preferences and priorities, you may be able to delegate this process to your Chief of Staff.
Ideally only one person is responsible for your disclosures to the parliament. Many MPs do this with the diary manager, as many of the disclosable items are related to entertainment or travel. Others allocate this task to the more senior office manager (depending on how the office is organised).
Use colour coding to manage the diary. Show cancellations in case circumstances change and you can attend after all.
Reserve time for electorate work. You won’t be able to dedicate as much of yourself to your electorate as you did before you became a minister, so you need to be very deliberate in the choices you make. It can also help to have someone in your electorate office that has good standing in the community, whom you can send as a delegate.
Most importantly, carve out time to maintain your wellbeing and personal relationships. This is not only essential in itself, it is foundational to sustainable performance.
A higher level approach to diary management, including principles for prioritisation and ideas for how to shape the diary to reflect your goals, can be found on Managing Time to Advance Your Priorities.
