The former chief of Australia’s Department of Parliamentary Services Carol Mills has revealed she received a $380,000 payout after her tenure was terminated by parliament’s presiding officers in April.
Mills also spoke about the “very difficult time” she had endured over the past nine months amid a damaging row in Australia and the UK over her proposed appointment as clerk of the House of Commons.
The Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, suspended and then terminated the appointment process late last year after a backlash from British MPs and a critical letter from the clerk of the Australian Senate, Rosemary Laing.
After missing out on the UK job, and accusations she had misled an Australian parliamentary committee about her knowledge of the use of CCTV footage in Canberra, Mills also lost her employment as DPS chief.
Her departure was announced on 24 April, but Mills confirmed to a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that her employment had been terminated by the presiding officers, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, and the Senate president, Stephen Parry. “I did not resign,” she said.
Mills said she had been “provided with some information from the presiding officers” but she did not disclose the reasons for the termination.
She confirmed, however, that she had received a loss of office payment “consistent with the act and the determination under which I was employed”.
“It’s spelled out in the determination that you’re entitled to 12 months’ salary ... around $380,000,” she said.
Mills later made some broader comments about her difficulties at DPS, saying the department had “few champions and many detractors” and was subject to continual review.
“The issues of resourcing, lack of role clarity, duplication, change resistance, etc which affect the department are systematic,” she said. “No one individual can be accountable for their existence nor for their eradication but it does seem that this expectation has been increasingly placed on the position of secretary of DPS.”
Mills said she was an experienced public servant and executive and had “successfully run large and demanding portfolios”.
“Obviously it’s been a very difficult time for me,” she said. “I’ve been buoyed by the tremendous amount of personal support I’ve received since last August when the clerk of the Senate released a damaging intervention into an overseas recruitment process I was involved in.
“That support has continued. I’ve been contacted with good wishes and endorsement by a plethora of current and former senior politicians, public servants, academics, and business people.”
Mills said informed people in the public service and elsewhere had originally warned her against accepting the position of DPS secretary “because in their view under the current arrangements the job could not be done”.
She said if DPS was to move forward it must consider why three well-credentialled secretaries had been criticised for their endeavours. She hoped “that none of my successors are placed in a similar position”.
Mills was speaking at a hearing of the Senate’s finance and public administration committee, chaired by the Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, which recently published a damning report about the “dysfunctional” management of DPS.
Mills defended her previous answers to a parliamentary committee about an investigation into a DPS staff member.
The case attracted controversy because it uncovered CCTV footage of the employee placing an envelope under the door of Labor senator John Faulkner. Mills reiterated that she had answered questions in good faith.
