The public service in action: The nation’s top mandarins are going after a senator’s Facebook feed

Behind this week’s decision to cancel the sale of historic military sites in Sydney and Melbourne was a dispute between a senior public servant practising the art of dissembling and a new senator discovering the power of social media. The conflict is a test of an important democratic principle: that government is accountable to parliament.

Senator Jessica Collins, a New South Wales Liberal, has been struggling to extract detailed information from a deputy secretary in the Defence Department, Celia Perkins, for six months about the disposal of 67 sites, including Victoria Barracks in Sydney and Melbourne.

Senator Collins’ online videos of her awkward interactions with Ms Perkins and other public servants are so popular — they were seen 8.2 million times last month — that the bureaucrat may be avoiding her. On October 22 another Defence official was temporarily promoted and given extra pay so he could answer questions instead of Ms Perkins in Canberra.

It is a well-established convention that senior public servants appear at parliamentary committee hearings to explain how the Government’s money is being spent. In this case, Ms Perkins was on a three-day trip to the Sydney region and could not attend, the committee was told.

Senator Collins is waiting to see if Ms Perkins will attend another hearing next Tuesday. The senator wants to question the bureaucrat about the future of Sydney’s Victoria Barracks which, despite the government’s promise not to sell the site, is going to be emptied of all army personnel by December 1.

“Her role and responsibility is to give us the answers in a clear and direct way and we disseminate that out to the Australian public,” Senator Collins said today. “If the ministers are making incompetent decisions, that is not their fault. They should be up front about that.”

The Defence Department did not respond to a request for comment on behalf of Ms Perkins, who has spent all but four years of her career in the department after graduating from the University of Canberra with a communications degree, according to LinkedIn.

Enough desks for war?

In a video posted last week by Senator Collins, Ms Perkins admitted there would be fewer work stations than military personnel at offices in central Sydney after the transfer from 185-year-old Victoria Barracks.

“Senator, we have very detailed usage data on the secret network and in almost every defence location there’s plenty of DSN (Defence secret network) terminals that don’t get logged onto every day,” Ms Perkins said.

Senator Collins, who was an analyst on Pacific security before politics, said: “But we’re not in a war Ms Perkins.”

In a separate video that triggered feedback from around the world, Senator Collins asked “how much does it cost to change a light bulb” on a military base. One of Ms Perkins’ staff members said they did not know.

Senator Collins isn’t the only politician to struggle to get answers out of Ms Perkins, who is responsible for the department’s bases and landholdings.

On September 4, Greens senator David Shoebridge became visibly exasperated as he complained Ms Perkins had spent 10 minutes avoiding a question she knew the answer to, four months after he first asked.

The question wasn’t very important — whether the NSW police had been consulted about the sale of a Sydney building — but Senator Shoebridge said her slow response “is one of the reasons why people have deep suspicion about the positions adopted by Defence but increasingly deep suspicion with government”.

Senior public servants are experts at deadpan delivery. In this case, Ms Perkins became emotional and her hands shook as she responded to the criticism. “I often find your questioning a little bit distressing and it can find, you know, to be exactly clear on giving you the answer you’re asking for,” she said.

After a clip of the confrontation appeared on the internet, Ms Perkins was subjected to online abuse. Someone posted details of her pay, which is almost twice that of a backbench MP.

Seeking a safe workplace

That day, a little earlier, Ms Perkins had tried to lay down the law to the lawmakers. As the Senate’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade committee began a hearing on the sale of military land, the public servant said she and her colleagues “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites or the reproduction of our likenesses for purposes outside the framework of the parliament”.

The attempt to stop clips of their to-and-fro circulating backfired. At Senator Shoebridge’s request, Senator Collins immediately shut down the hearing.

She found the clerk of the Senate, Richard Pye, a senior official who helps run the Upper House. He was shocked at the public servant’s attempt to control the legislators, according to Senator Collins. “In all his 20 years he had never seen that before,” she said. (Mr Pye did not respond to a request for comment.)

When the hearing resumed after 14 minutes, Senator Collins told Ms Perkins that the clerk had told them they could publish her evidence “in the manner in which we see fit”.

What the senators did not know was that top public servants had been working on a plan to fight back against their social media posts.

In late August Ms Perkins emailed her departmental secretary, Meghan Quinn, with a suggestion: in order to maintain a “safe workplace” and protect the department’s senior officials from foreign spies, how about telling the senators they were not allowed to edit the officials’ evidence and post it online?

“Social media posts using footage from previous hearings in edited and embellished formats had generated significant vile, personal commentary that was distressing for staff and invited online bullying,” she said, according to a document obtained by the ABC through a freedom-of-information request.

Ms Perkins, who frequently posts photos of herself at work on LinkedIn, added: “We actively discourage security clearance holders from a social media presence that identifies us and our roles.”

She ran the plan past Defence Minister Richard Marles’ office and Assistant Defence Minister Peter Khalil.

The mandarins intervene

Around the same time, a more powerful group had made a play to curb the annoying senators. The Secretaries Board, a committee of the heads of all Federal public service departments, told MPs the online videos were generating ridicule, hostility and abuse towards senior officials.

“Officials have been accused of being ‘weak’ for implementing government policies,“ they wrote to a parliamentary inquiry into standards. “It is not uncommon for public servants to be accused of ‘hiding’ things, ‘covering up’ for the government, or ‘being a liar’.”

A former deputy head of two intelligence agencies saw it as an attempt to censor criticism. “Without the embarrassing words and poor performance (by the public servants), the public criticism would not occur,” wrote Senator Shoebridge’s brother, Michael Shoebridge, in a submission he said the committee refused to accept.

Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo said the requests from the Defence Department and secretaries “represented overreach in a world of social media”. Any abusive comments by politicians could be disciplined under new codes of conduct, he said, but critical posts by the public could not be used as a reason to stop MPs using social media to promote their work. “People have to grow up a bit,” he said.

As for Senator Collins, after only 18 months in Parliament she is has already become a social media expert with the help of a graduate electorate officer. With most voters getting their news online, she sees video clips as the future of political communication.

“The front line of politics is on social media,” she said. “You have to make your message pretty clear.”