Let's put a halt to this Reith-slaying ceremony

IN more than 50 years as a senior public servant dedicated to serving governments of all political persuasions, I have never, ever, worn my own political leanings on my sleeve.
Leading public servants are entitled to our own views as individuals and voting Australians, naturally enough, and some of those views are very, very strongly held, I can tell you now. But our oaths to serve governments with the utmost loyalty mean that those personal views must be locked tightly away from the public gaze; one's own thoughts must be kept completely to one.
Even in my active public service years, I never, ever, exposed what I was feeling even to my beautiful wife Devon, and I think she respected me for that.
But in retirement, I must protest at the extraordinary attacks being mounted against Mr Peter Reith, the Minister for Workplace Reform in Mr Howard's Liberal Government.
For the benefit of my many overseas readers, Mr Reith, one of the government's hardest working and most able ministers, has come under heavy criticisms from many quarters because persons unknown have used his government number to make some $50,000 in illegal calls.
In his defence, Mr Reith has made it abundantly clear that he wasn't even aware of that bill being incurred, apart from some $1000 in emergency calls made by his son which Mr Reith naturally enough repaid immediately because he rightly argued that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for them. But the minister didn't stop there: he repaid the entire $50,000 even though he wasn't legally required to do so.
That should have been the end of the matter, but now some tasteless newspaper, no doubt one of the tabloids, has claimed that many of those other illegal calls were made to one of Mr Reith's own mobile phone numbers.
On the surface, that might seem a rather damaging allegation, were in not for the fact that Mr Reith clearly lost that mobile phone at about the same time that he inadvertently gave out his phone card number to one of his sons to make some very important emergency calls which as it transpired turned out to be non-emergency calls after all.
Misuse of taxpayers' money by government members is something that Her Majesty's Oppositions should always be vigilant about, but any reasonable reading of the Reith phone card issue shows this is really a non-issue being kept alive for party-political purposes and nothing else.
It reminds me very much of an incident in the early 1960s, when I was in charge of whole milk quota distribution in the federal Department of Primary Industry. My Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, the Country Party Leader Mr "Black Jack" McEwan, agreed that I should take extended leave until matters cooled down, and I found myself seconded to the office of none other than the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies.
I hadn't been working in his Kooyong, Melbourne office for a week when the great man swept up to my desk, put a hand on my shoulder and said: "There's trouble on the home front, Rufus. I'd like you to come with me and sort it out."
Naturally, I was honoured, and less than a week later we were sitting in the MCC VIP box at Lord's cricket ground, where indeed the Australian players continued to be in a spot of bother after a dismal showing in the first Test. Their performance lifted remarkably over the following days and I believe the eventual draw had a lot to with their country's leader being prepared to be there to inspire them. That sort of inspirational leadership has been missing in Australian politics for some decades, although I believe it has returned with the advent of the Howard Government in 1996.
The point to the story of our urgent visit to the mother country was that Mr Menzies had asked me to arrange a selection of quality Australian wines and spirits to be donated to the MCC board of directors on our arrival in England. Mr Menzies quite rightly in my view asked me to pay for those 200 cartons with a Department of the Prime Minister current account cheque, as many of the MCC board were either politicians themselves or highly placed British business figures and Mr Menzies regarded the on-going talks at Lord's with them as invaluable to Australia's growing and influential role in the Empire.
It was about this time that, just like the Reith phone card affair, some Australian newspaper questioned why taxpayers should have had to pay for the aforementioned alcoholic 'gifts', as they erroneously called them.
To his every-lasting credit, the Prime Minister brushed off the accusations the next morning as we made our way by train to the third Test venue at Leeds. "Don't those media people realise these meetings with the MCC are virtually the same as Cabinet meetings," the great man boomed. "They're certainly as boring as them," he quipped, allowing the laughter to ripple through the carriage as one does who is in total control of the language and his audience, before he extended his large right hand, palm forward, to quieten us before delivering the coup de grace: "Especially in the years since The Don retired, what?"
At any rate, the media accusations died down practically overnight after the Prime Minister arranged for some enquiries to be made and it turned out the paper in question received substantial government advertising. I believe The Age is a much better newspaper now.
It is a shame the Reith incident has not died as quickly, and for that I place a lot of blame at the feet of Opposition Leader Mr Beazley.
Don't get me wrong here: I quite admire Mr Beazley. In some ways he reminds me very much of Mr Menzies, both in stature and political leanings. Political analysts also have not been remiss in noting that both men have a surname with Z as the fourth letter.
Indeed, I believe Mr Beazley has the ability to become a very good long-term Opposition Leader once he learns to pursue issues of real merit and not just ones generated by smoke and mirrors for ephemeral political gain.

Rufus Badinage MBE, now retired, is one of Australia’s leading
experts on politics and public administration having worked as a
senior bureaucrat for various state and federal governments.