Policy Advice and a Central Agency: The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

Providing policy advice is often the epitome of a public service career, the opportunity to have a direct influence on policy. Yet there is a wide range of circumstances in which policy advice might be sought, requiring different information, timetables and depths of analysis. This will necessitate the development of a number of skills and be dependent on the political and administrative circumstances. Using the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as a case study, we develop a typology of policy advice, ranging from intelligence gathering, to reviewing options, coordinating policy and sometimes initiating strategy. We illustrate the implications of these differing types of work to show how public servants must approach policy advising, conscious of and within a framework that supports different approaches to policy work according to the situation.

Keywords::

• policy advice
• prime ministers
• public servants

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Hamburger

Peter Hamburger was a senior officer in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for eight years, with six of them as head of the Cabinet Secretariat and Cabinet Division. He had previously been an SES officer in the Department of Finance.

Patrick Weller

Patrick Weller is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University.