Tony Abbott has hit back at Martin Parkinson, the head of Malcolm Turnbull’s department, for publicly observing that his decision to sack him after coming to office in 2013 damaged the public service.
Parkinson told a Melbourne University podcast this week he had no “personal animus” towards Abbott, but he said the former prime minister had damaged the public service when he sacked him for following the legally mandated directions of the Rudd and Gillard governments.
Parkinson was sacked by Abbott from the Treasury department shortly after he came to power in 2013, alongside a handful of other departmental heads. He was subsequently brought back to the public service by Turnbull to be secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet after the change in Liberal leadership.
He observed that Abbott could have achieved the same outcome “far more subtly if people had stopped to think about it, and without the damage I think it did to the public service because there were instances after that happened of senior colleagues reporting their staff saying, ‘Well I’m not going to put my hand up for a controversial role because this is what happens.
“‘You follow on the democratically elected, legally mandated directions of the government of the day and you get sacked as a result.’”
Abbott took to social media on Wednesday night to smack down Parkinson for his observations, suggesting he was not politically impartial.
Describing himself as a “PM still serving in the parliament”, Abbott declared Parkinson’s comments “out of line”.
It’s hardly the act of a politically impartial, professional public servant to claim that a PM still serving in the parliament has “damaged the public service”. The PM&C secretary is out of line
— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) December 6, 2017
From the tail-end of the Howard government, through the Rudd and Gillard periods, Parkinson was prominent in bureaucratic efforts to implement an emissions trading scheme, setting up a climate change department, before returning to the Treasury.
Abbott, who was part of the Howard government at the time the then prime minister supported emissions trading, later campaigned vociferously against the so-called carbon “tax”, which was not a tax but a carbon price with a fixed period.
He sacked Parkinson against the advice of senior Liberals but Parkinson was asked to stay on in Treasury on an interim basis, serving for a further 15 months.
The departmental head says in the interview he had a “perfectly professional” and “very open and honest” relationship with Abbott, who listened to his advice, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing. “You couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Parkinson said the damage Abbott had caused by the sacking had been subsequently “ameliorated, but there’s no question that for the service as a whole, I think it came as quite a shock”.
