2024 David Hawkes Oration – Andrew Metcalfe AO

On 30 October 2024, IPAA National President Andrew Metcalfe AO delivered the 2024 David Hawkes Oration for IPAA Northern Territory. His speech tackled the complexities faced by public servants, emphasising the importance of navigating these ‘interesting times’ with integrity and purpose. Below is a transcript of his speech.

It’s wonderful to be back in the Northern Territory, a place that has been very central to many aspects of my working life — particularly in the Immigration, Environment and Agriculture portfolios.

Can I also associate myself with Vicki’s Acknowledgement of Country, and pay my respects to the Elders.

Can I also acknowledge all Indigenous Australians here today, and say how delighted I am to be again visiting Larakia land.

I come here today as the National President of the Institute of Public Administration, a role I have had in the last year, following my retirement from full-time work in August 2023.

It is indeed a great honour to have been asked to give this year’s Hawkes Oration, celebrating David Hawkes’ contribution to public administration and good governance in the North Territory.

David Hawkes was commissioner for public employment for 13 years between 1989 and 2001 and was, at his retirement, the longest-serving commissioner in Australia. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Public Sector Employment and Management Act (1991), regarded at the time as the most advanced of the new devolved public management models in Australia.

He will be most remembered as a supporter of sound and innovative HR management policies and processes, and as a strong but fair negotiator in industrial relations matters.

In preparing this speech, I have had the opportunity to talk with Ken Davies about David. Ken recalled David’s very strong commitment to helping others successfully progress their careers, and to achieve positive results for the Northern Territory community — a person who set the gold standard for supporting others.

Indeed, David did not just see the public service as an organisation worth belonging to — he believed that serving the public is indeed a noble cause.

I could not agree more.

The first Oration in honour of David was 22 years ago, and IPAA in the Northern Territory has created a wonderful tradition and indeed created a body of reflections and opinions from many speakers over the years. Looking back over previous orations, you have heard from academics, journalists, social commentators, and political leaders.

I see that in 2012 the oration was given by my old boss, Professor Peter Shergold. I was a deputy secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet between 2002 and 2005, including when Peter was the secretary. We worked very closely together on many issues of national and international significance.

Peter also personally championed the need to occasionally have fun at work.

Our PM&C executive team’s rock-star performance at the 2004 PM&C Christmas party, in our after-hours personas as the Blues Brothers and the Soul Sisters, and in the admiring presence of prime minister Howard and Mrs Howard, is the stuff of legend in Canberra!

Well, at least that’s how a few of us who were there that night remember the occasion!

May I also take the opportunity of being here in Darwin today to briefly mention with sadness the recent passing of Luke Bowen, who, as the chief minister has said, was one of Australia’s finest leaders in agriculture.

I had the pleasure of working with Luke in several roles over the last decade, particularly when he was a senior executive in the NT Department of Agriculture when we faced issues together such as the impact of COVID on our primary industries, and the threats posed by the spread of lumpy skin disease and foot and mouth disease into Indonesia.

Luke was tireless. He was a wonderful — remarkable — champion of agriculture in the Northern Territory, and more broadly across Australia. Indeed, you could see that his heart was in the Territory.

Amongst his many achievements, he contributed greatly to Commonwealth and territory work on these issues.

He was much more than a work colleague, he became a friend to many of us. I, and I know many others, will miss him greatly.

 

Australia then and now — some personal reflections

Ladies and gentlemen, the Toowoomba, Queensland, that I grew up in during the 1960s and 70s had no Indigenous Australians living in it, or, if there were, there were very few and not known to our family or friends.

As a child I roamed far and wide over the bushland of the Toowoomba range, learning about and coming to love the extraordinary diversity of animals and plants, but never really thinking about, or learning about, the people who had been there for tens of thousands of years, at least for tens of thousands of years up until the mid-19th century.

My family has pride in our own Australian history — of Irish settlers arriving in Tasmania in 1829, and of my maternal grandfather, who was a stockman for Sir Sidney Kidman, the cattle baron.

But while growing up I knew nothing of Australia’s First Peoples apart from occasional references about the Aboriginal tribes who met the First Fleet, or who assisted European explorers of this land.

Because there were no Indigenous Australians — or only a very few — living in Toowoomba by the 1960s. They had been sent elsewhere.

And we were never taught about their part of the Australia’s history. That they represent the longest continuing culture in human history.

Nope, we knew nothing about any of that.

And it is only now, so many years later, that I understand what really happened on that land where I played and lived and roamed as a child.

What I now know, courtesy of a lot of research being done is that the Jagera, Giabal and Jarowair people lived on the Darling Downs for at least 40,000 years before European settlement. Well over a thousand generations of people.

Estimations place the Indigenous population pre-European settlement from 1,500 to 2,500 people.

In 1827, the Darling Downs was ‘discovered’ by Allan Cunningham and, 13 years later, Patrick Leslie and his party began the first wave of settlement.

The settlers brought with them diseases like smallpox, influenza and measles, which were devastating to the Indigenous population. These introduced diseases, as well as social disruption, relocation, and murder, caused the indigenous population of the Darling Downs to be almost wiped out by 1870.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Aboriginal survivors of frontier violence were under the absolute control of the Queensland government. The widespread mindset of the time was a belief in White supremacy and so the Europeans felt they knew best when it came to the lives of the Indigenous people.

In a move to separate the Aboriginal people from the Whites, they would be removed from their traditional land, for virtually any reason, and relocated to reserves and missions set up throughout Queensland designed for their containment and control.

Arbitrary relocation could occur to any Aboriginal person but children, more so orphans and single mothers, were especially vulnerable. These removals resulted in the breakdown of many regional affiliations and families, tearing people away from their traditional values and way of life.

I won’t continue to quote from the histories as they progress through the 20th century, but, of course, they continue to the Stolen Generation, to the landmark Mabo High Court case, the legal dismissal of the original doctrine of terra-nullius and the recognition of the native title, and, of course, to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Now, colleagues, I don’t know how many people have actually read the Uluru Statement. And I won’t repeat all the words here, but I do want to just read the final sentence. “We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

As an Australian who loves this country and is proud of my family’s almost two centuries here, but one who grew up largely ignorant about the culture civilisation and sovereignty over millennia of the First Australians who lived on this land, can I simply say how extraordinary that statement is.

The extraordinary — the extraordinarily generous — offer to walk together for a better future. There is still so much more for us all to do to make that happen and for it to become a reality.

 

Navigating through uncertain and complex times

Colleagues — I have been asked to talk today about navigating through tricky times as a public servant — and about how to survive and thrive in uncertain and complex times. It is probably a truism to say that all times are uncertain and complex. And they usually are indeed tricky.

World events; global forces ranging from advances in technology to climate change; political, economic, environmental and social issues and attitudes in Australia and locally; expectations about the roles that governments and public officials should play — the list goes on and on — times sure are tricky and complex.

And when the speed of communications, the use and impact of social media, the advantages and problems of artificial intelligence and other new technologies, and the changing mores of society are added to that complexity — we certainly do live in ‘interesting times’.

And indeed the well-known ironic phrase ‘may you live in interesting times’ has its own tricky and complex origins.

While widely thought of as a Chinese curse, the closest researchers can attribute it to Chinese is through the expression “Better to be a dog in times of tranquillity than a human in times of chaos” — originating — according to Wikipedia sources at least — from a 1627 short story by Feng Menglong, “Stories to Awaken the World”.

And while there are various theories as to its use in modern English expression, I am attracted most to a statement made by Joseph Chamberlain in 1898, while he was Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies:

“I think that you all will agree that we are living in the most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and let me also say, new objects for anxiety”.

So my proposition here today, of course, is that there was nothing particularly special about 1898 and that all times are interesting — and that we as public servants are thus always destined to work in ‘interesting times’, or ‘tricky times’.

And always will.

So, how can we survive?

And maybe even thrive?

My own experiences in almost four decades as an Australian public servant brought me directly into many situations of complexity and uncertainty. Many were challenging. Some were high profile and of great media interest.

But many did not attract public interest or notoriety and simply represented the day-to-day work of ethically leading large organisations, of seeking to respectfully interact with ministers and their staff, doing all I could to help to implement the law, to provide services to our direct clients and to the wider community, and to advance the government’s policies and programs.

The roles that many of you here today continue to play, every day.

 

Influences and experiences

So I’d now like to talk a little about the particular experiences I’ve had, to illustrate some key issues from which I learnt over that long career.

I’m often asked about what shaped me as a public servant.

And I answer by saying that there are many key influences.

Let me try to list some of them:

1. A training in, and resultant deep respect for the law, particularly administrative law.
2. A good understanding, from both my high school studies and my university studies, of Australian and state government institutions and public policy issues.
3. A keen interest in current affairs.
4. Early exposure as a public servant to elected officials and their staff, particularly through my role as parliamentary liaison officer in the Brisbane office of the Department of Immigration, and later experiences working quite closely as a mid-level and more senior officer working with a number of ministers from both sides of politics — particularly Chris Hurford, Robert Ray, Gerry Hand and Phillip Ruddock. Later, as a Deputy Secretary and then as a secretary, I worked closely with many other ministers and five prime ministers.
5. Early and frequent involvement in direct provision of services to the public, particularly with visa and citizenship applicants and their families and supporters. This naturally brought with it an understanding of the direct impact that public servants and their decisions can have on people’s lives and livelihoods.
6. A strong understanding of the importance of teams in working with others: to deliver good results, and to have a shared understanding of what we were there to do.
7. I’m certainly not a micromanager, but I came to realise that intuition — gut feeling — is important. Trust your instincts. If that little niggle is there, don’t ignore it. Act on it. Find out if there’s a problem. And if there is, fix it.
8. I also came to understand the power of organisational culture, of ‘how we do things around here’. Culture is critical. Leaders must establish clear expectations of ethical behaviour, and demonstrate that in every one of their own actions.
9. I recognised that we are all human, and have seen first-hand that sometimes humans make mistakes. But — if you make a mistake, you must tell people about it and what is being done to fix it. The sacking offence is not making a mistake, it is not fixing that mistake, or, even worse, covering it up. Learn from mistakes, don’t repeat them, don’t ignore them, don’t forget them — and never, ever, try to cover them up.
10. And finally, I learnt that talking things over with colleagues, friends and, mentors is incredibly important. You always make better decisions, and avoid bad ones, when you’ve discussed them and sought other people’s views. And diverse backgrounds and experiences make this advice richer.

There are many situations that I faced during my career that could illustrate some of the tricky situations faced more generally by public servants. Let me share just three with you today.

The first relates to a specific individual, and how much impact government decisions have on her life and the lives of her family.

The second was about organisational failure, and subsequent repair and reform.

And the third relates to regulatory activities and illustrates the need for strong and trusted stakeholder relationships.

 

People’s lives

One very direct and personal experience that I had was seeing the impact that decisions by public servants can have on people’s lives.

It occurred when I was the acting state director of the Department of Immigration in Melbourne in 1989.

I won’t mention the names of the people involved, but their situation was front-page news over several days back then. The case involved the adoption of a baby girl from overseas.

The laws that governed these arrangements were both state laws and Commonwealth – particularly the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act — which governed the status of children living in Australia in those circumstances.

Until the adoption order was finalised, adoptive children from overseas were formally wards of the minister of immigration.

However, given that the laws relating to the suitability of parents to adopt were state laws, the long-standing arrangement was that immigration ministers delegated their guardianship powers to relevant state children’s services officials.

In this particular case, there were a series of decisions by state officials that led to two different sets of parents being given custody, and then disputing each other’s custody, of a baby who had arrived from overseas under the inter-country adoption program.

The first that the Department of Immigration in Australia heard about the matter was when the minister, then senator Robert Ray, received various applications to appear before the courts.

Robert Ray resolved the matter by appointing an expert panel to advise him on what was required to achieve the ‘best interests’ of the child involved.

The panel advised which family the baby should be placed with, and the minister acted on that advice — that the baby should be returned to the first parents that she had been placed with.

He then asked that to give effect to his decision, that I, as acting state director, and accompanied by two senior social workers, go out to the Melbourne suburbs and take the baby from the one family and return her to the other family.

We did this one cold afternoon, back in that autumn of 1989.

I held that little baby girl in my arms in order to take her from one set of parents, and later that day I again cradled her in my arms as I returned her to the other set of parents.

She is now 35 years old.

I can honestly say it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

I often think about that day, and how what public officials do, and how they do it, can profoundly affect people’s lives.

And what a solemn duty we have to undertake our work lawfully, with empathy and understanding, and in a fair and reasonable way.

 

Organisations

On July 18, 2005, just over 16 years after that cold Melbourne day, I was appointed by then-prime minister John Howard to secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, following the tragic cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez, and indeed following the cases of many other people who had been unlawfully detained by the department.

Even though she was an Australian citizen, Ms Alvarez was, of course, not just misidentified and wrongly detained, she was unlawfully deported. And when realisation of that dreadful mistake came to two middle-ranking officials, they failed to do anything about it. They covered it up.

The period leading up to my appointment had been a deeply bruising time for the department, with its failures regarding these unlawful detentions and other acts highlighted in major reports by the former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer, the former chief commissioner of the Victorian Police, Neil Comrie, and the commonwealth ombud.

As the new secretary, I had a very strong mandate for organisational and cultural reform.

For me, that time following my appointment as secretary was about restoring the government’s and public’s confidence in the department through developing, implementing and embedding a positive cultural change agenda, and by taking actions that would substantially improve performance and definitely prevent a repeat of those tragic mistakes.

We carefully analysed the Palmer report and deduced that it provided three key themes for the future.

Essentially, what the report said was that the Department of Immigration had to become an open and accountable organisation; it had to have fair and reasonable dealings with clients; and it had to have well-developed and supported staff.

I believe that these three simple themes should be of universal relevance for all public-sector organisations. The values they encapsulate provide the principles for sound decision-making and good administration.

My task and that of my leadership team was to create an integrated department united by its common, historical purpose of building the Australian nation through people, and by sharing a common culture based on the APS values and code of conduct, as well as our own departmental-specific business values.

This period was the beginning of the journey to drive and integrate the reformation of the department through a values-based culture.

My leadership team and I were also concerned to ensure that all staff had a much greater appreciation of our actions and decisions on our clients.

Back then we didn’t call it ‘a customer-centric approach’, but that’s what you’d probably call it these days.

Because, after all, this had been a department that misapplied, misunderstood, or avoided its own legislative regime, and had taken wrongful actions in relation to many people.

Decisions taken by migration officers can have profound implications for people — whether or not they can be in Australia, whether their family can be with them, whether they can become an Australian citizen.

So, for the first time in the department’s history, I created the role of deputy secretary for client services. And we constantly drove home the message that we were there to lawfully implement our legislation, and also to provide services to people.

One way of doing this was through a whole series of workshops facilitated by independent consultants — workshops where actual clients of the department were asked to recount their experiences with the department.

And what made these workshops a quite powerful process was that departmental officers — senior, middle-ranking and junior — were seated behind the clients, and required to listen directly to what was said. To hear what people thought about how we handled their application, and how we interacted with them.

That was a new experience for our staff!

 

A key question for any successful change process is how to sustain change over time

It is one thing to have an initial rush of enthusiasm, but quite another to genuinely change an organisation and ensure that change endures beyond the tenure of a particular leader or set of leaders.

The success of the change of an agenda also lies in the ability of leaders to communicate their claims effectively; to engage all the employees in the journey, to make this a shared experience, to ensure the people understand the reasons for the change, and ultimately to own that change.

One-way communication from the top is useful but it is not enough — actual and effective two-way engagement is what is required.

Leaders need to listen, much more than they speak.

And their actions speak much louder than their words.

This change and reform program required involving our people, and key stakeholders and accountability bodies, in each step of the journey, and actively harnessing their own goodwill and creativity as part of that journey.

In 2007, the then-ombud, Professor John McMillan, released a report entitled ‘Ten Lessons Learnt’, which basically summarised the lessons learnt from the various reports the ombud issued in relation to those many wrongful-detention cases.

Those 10 lessons are to:

1. Maintain accurate, comprehensive and accessible records
2. Place adequate controls on the exercise of coercive powers
3. Actively manage unresolved and difficult cases
4. Heed the limitations of information technology systems
5. Guard against erroneous assumptions
6. Control administrative drift
7. Remove unnecessary obstacles to prudent information exchange with other agencies and bodies
8. Promote effective communication within your own agency
9. Manage complexity in decision-making
10. Check for warning signs of bigger problems

John McMillan and I jointly launched that report at an IPAA event — and I suggested there was, in fact, an 11th lesson: the need for a strong and positive culture and values base for public officials.

Colleagues — my simple plea is that we must never forget those lessons of the past.

They were not and are not exclusively applicable to the Immigration Department of 20 years ago.

Anyone working in public administration could and should continue usefully regularly refer to that ombud’s report and apply those lessons.

Indeed, I believe that — if the three Palmer report themes (open and accountable organisation; fair and reasonable dealings with clients; and well-developed and supported staff) together with the ombud’s 10 lessons, were applied as a control template for all major government programs and initiatives — then many mistakes, indeed many abuses of power, and many resultant tragedies would never occur or have occurred.

The Australian and New Zealand School of Government has done a three-part case study on the Immigration Department’s reform program during the period 2005-2010, and I commend it to you for further reading.

 

A clear purpose, and trusted relationships

My final short case study is much more recent, and which had and continues to have a very direct relevance to the Northern Territory.

It relates to the emergence or reemergence in Indonesia in recent years of two major animal diseases — lumpy skin disease (LSD), and foot and mouth disease (FMD). Either, if introduced to Australia, would have massive impacts on our livestock industries, rural communities, and food security.

LSD is transmitted by biting insects, and could potentially be brought to Australia by natural pathways. FMD could potentially be brought here through infected animal products, or through people if they had contaminated clothing or footwear.

There was thus a very major and justified alarm here about the presence of these diseases in our neighbour to the north, and a very strong response was required. This meant we had to do everything possible to keep the diseases out, and to ensure they were detected and dealt with as quickly as possible should they get here.

The problem, and our purpose in responding to it, were very clear.

My former department — the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry — is the biosecurity regulator for the Australian border, and has a major policy, operational and coordination role. As secretary of the department, I was also Australia’s director of biosecurity pursuant to the Biosecurity Act 2015.

A key feature of our biosecurity arrangements are that they are an integrated nation-wide system — with many organisations and people having roles to play.

The Australian chief veterinary officer and their state and territory counterparts, the various departments of agriculture, the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, the Centre for Excellence in Biosecurity Risk Analysis, other border agencies, international organisations, [plus] the governments of Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea all had government-level responsibilities.

Industry associations such as Meat and Livestock Australia, the Cattle Council, and the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association were all critical in providing advice, and helping to facilitate activities on the ground.

And many other players — particularly airlines and airports — and the travelling public — had key roles to play.

Successfully mobilising such a large and diverse network required exceptional public service.

Leadership and collaboration were demonstrated in very real ways by the then-minister for agriculture, fisheries and forestry Senator Murray Watt and his counterparts, the leaders of the cattle and other livestock industries, my department and our counterparts — the list goes on.

We had a very clear purpose. We had a very clear common goal.

Simply, to prevent the diseases from entering Australia.

And we addressed the problem by building on long-standing and trusted relationships, such as the one we had with the late Luke Bowen. And we made those relationships even better.

And, perhaps not always, we stayed pretty calm.

To this day we have been successful.

But you can never be complacent.

I must admit that the burden of responsibility that I had as Australia’s Director of Biosecurity was something that I felt keenly every single day.

 

Current issues in public administration

Colleagues: much has been written and said about public administration in Australia in recent years. The online newspaper The Mandarin, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and published a very informative series of articles about developments in public administration over that decade.

On a Commonwealth level, the occasionally but increasingly adversarial, sometimes points-scoring, nature of Senate estimates hearings has drawn public officials into the spotlight far more than two or three decades ago. Similar developments have occurred in our states and territories.

And, very properly, across our jurisdictions, egregious cases of maladministration have been exposed and pored over in great detail by royal commissioners, ombuds, auditors-general, anti-corruption bodies, the media and the like.

Indeed, an outsider looking in at Australian public administration and only referencing media articles would quickly conclude that we are beset by poor administration, are sometimes corrupt, sometimes make dreadful mistakes and are too slow to fix them, and that we don’t really care about the people that we are ultimately meant to serve — the Australian community.

While some of this is very sadly true, and some quite dreadful things have been allowed to occur, the reality is that overwhelmingly two million or so public officials in Australia wake up every day determined to best serve their communities and they do so with pride in their work.

They do this by providing services and advice to the government, services to help their organisations work well and efficiently, and services to the entire Australian population.

And the sheer breadth and scale of what our public servants do is almost breathtaking.

Managing in tricky times requires us to learn from our mistakes, but also to learn from what went right.

Here in the Northern Territory, there is much work done by public servants on behalf of the government by its public servants.

Let me just highlight a few of the programs and activities recognised in recent years through the Chief Minister’s Awards for Excellence in the Public Sector. And these are drawn from literally dozens of nominees and winners, just in the last few years alone.

One of the six award categories is ‘Making the Northern Territory a better place to live’, and last year ‘LARAMBA — Water treatment plant — Improving the health of a remote community’ was the award winner — a program delivered by Indigenous Essential Services and the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities.

In 2022 the award for ‘Excellence in cross-government collaboration and partnerships was given to the Department of Corporate and Digital Development and NT Health for their work on ‘Acacia 1.0 — Transforming patient centre care in the Northern Territory.

And in 2021 the award for the category of ‘Excellence in Human Services Delivery’ went to NT Police, Fire and Emergency Services for their Emergency Operations Centre COVID-19 response.

And, last week in Canberra, IPAA’s Spirit of Service Awards showcased many examples of excellent public service — through collaboration between departments and agencies, through innovation, through learning and through community engagement.

Did you know that, as a result of some great work from Services Australia, the Department of Finance, and the Attorney-General’s Department, we can all now use myGov to create a digital Commonwealth statutory declaration, using one’s digital identity to replace a witness?

And that the Australian Taxation Office now has an online learning platform to help small business owners master their taxation and superannuation obligations?

There are many, many other examples of how Australia’s public sectors are helping drive positive changes to benefit the Australian community.

 

To sum up

I trust that it seems clear from what I have said today is that times will also be tricky, but also that it is indeed possible to successfully navigate them. A strong ethical framework, and strong ethical practices, are fundamental to this success.

Mistakes have been made by Australian public servants, and they have sometimes brought enormous human or financial costs.

We must learn from mistakes and from maladministration.

We must remember the mistakes, we must train our people and put systems and checks and scrutiny arrangements in place to prevent them, and we must quickly acknowledge them and fix them if they are made.

But, usually, the public sector does its job well. Often, very well, as evidenced by your Chief Minister’s Awards.

I firmly believe that our nation’s public services are key parts of our national infrastructure. They are key contributors to the success of our country.

And that, overwhelmingly, our public servants and other public sector employees are good, honest, hard-working and able people, committed to pursuing that noble cause of serving their community.

 

Australia’s Institutes of Public Administration — enhancing ethical performance

Therefore it is a real privilege for me, following my long career as a public servant, to now be the National President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia.

In my view, one thing that unites all our public services across Australia is that we are required to, and we want to, operate lawfully and according to strong and positive values.

Our public servants are here to serve democratically elected governments and to help them lawfully govern and to implement their policies and programs. And thus to serve our communities.

The Institutes of Public Administration across each Australian government and our national organisation are the professional bodies for our public servants — an old-fashioned word to describe us would be ‘guilds’.

We believe that, amongst our other activities, and in the light of recent events, we need to do even more to help build very strong ethical guidance and to promote the ethical frameworks in public service legislation demonstrated in practice when all actors in the public sector (whether employed under a Public Service Act or adjacent to that system) always — always — act with integrity.

And we must remember the lessons of the past, and ensure that the next generation of public servants does so as well. To quote from George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

IPAA’s work in this area will complement the work of the Australian Public Service Commissioner, the Northern Territory Commissioner for Public Employment, and their counterparts in other jurisdictions.

As an Institute, we also look to influence further afield in a broader construct of a ‘public sector’ that always acquits itself with integrity in its everyday actions.

You will hear more from us about that in the months ahead.

And I am sure that what we will do is something that will embody the wonderful contributions made by past leaders such as David Hawkes, and indeed to add to his and their legacy.

 

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a privilege to be here with you today and to present this Hawkes oration.

Can I wish you all well for the future?

Indeed, I trust that you will all survive, and indeed thrive, in the many interesting and tricky years ahead — as you continue to pursue the noble cause of public service ethically and well, as exemplified by David Hawkes.