“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):

1. Personal Support

Managing the Minister’s time by regulating access and helping calibrate routines that allow them to perform at their best.

2. Policy Support

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.

3. Political Support

Advice (per above), alongside maintaining relationships and links to manage dependencies, including the centre, other ministers, with caucus, the party, media and stakeholders. 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.  

4. Communication Support

Media, social media and communicating issues and decisions across the ministry, the government and the bureaucracy.

5. Executive Coordination

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

KEY PRIORITIES

1. Physical Office Move

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.

2. Recruit Key Staff

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 inisters 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.

3. Establish Processes

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.

* 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 GUIDANCE

General 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)

What Good Looks Like for a Chief of Staff

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:

Office Structure

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

Prioritisation

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…” (LTBAM)

 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.

Diary Management

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. <inset cross link to Diary management Page>

• 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.