Twice in the past week Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has blindsided his Attorney-General Robert McClelland and made hugely important legal appointments.
First, he brushed aside the candidacy of NSW Chief Justice Jim Spigelman to appoint Federal Court judge Robert French who stood as a Liberal candidate against Kim Beazley Snr in the seat of Swan at the 1969 federal election at the age of 22.
Now he has chosen Roger Wilkins, a handpicked senior official of the Liberal Greiner Government, as head of the Attorney-General’s Department.
Both start in their new jobs on September 1.
The Wilkins appointment promises to be the most interesting. When Bob Carr came to office in 1995, he didn’t remove Wilkins as director-general of the Cabinet Office and appoint a Labor administrator – he kept him on.
Indeed, throughout Carr’s record-breaking 10 years in office, Wilkins was his right-hand man managing the Cabinet Office and later he was given the job of running the Arts Department as well.
While the Director-General of the Premier’s Department, Col Gellatly, took charge of crisis management and strategy, Wilkins was Carr’s man whose chief responsibility was to roll out Carr’s plans and outmanoeuvre any opposition.
A former minister told Crikey: “Ministers feared Wilkins but they respected Gellatly.”
The fear appears to be based on Wilkins’s studied aloofness, his intellectual snobbery and his ability to put down opponents with withering commentary.
When the Iemma forces took over in 2005, Gellatly and Wilkins both left, Wilkins to take a highly-paid position with Citigroup as head of its Government and the Public Sector Group for Australia and New Zealand.
After the Rudd Government was elected last November, Wilkins was called into service to leading a strategic review of the government’s climate change policies.
But the friendship between Rudd and Wilkins goes back a long way. When Wayne Goss was elected Queensland premier in 1989, Rudd served as his chief of staff and then became Director-General of the Cabinet Office until the government was defeated in 1995.
Rudd’s opposite number in the NSW Liberal government was Wilkins and they quickly realised that they had much in common and a firm friendship resulted.
When Goss left office in February 1996, strenuous behind-the-scenes efforts were made to find Rudd a job in the NSW bureaucracy because he was already considered a “chosen one” by the right-wing machine in Brisbane and Sydney. It failed.
Wilkins who is permanently attired in a bowtie – according to friends he has more bow ties than Imelda Marcos had shoes – is married to the Sydney public relations operative Sue Cato, who was previously married to Liberal man-about-town Ian Kortlang.
Wilkins, who is a keen student of the German philosopher Nietschke, will make a perfect match with the Rudd who is determined to change the culture of the Canberra mandarins from cautious cynicism to intellectual meritocracy.
As one of the two most senior bureaucrats in NSW throughout the Carr administration and the first year of Iemma, Wilkins has a lot to answer for.
Interesting that Rudd is a great admirer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by the Nazis. It was the German philosopher Nietschke whose nihilism, particular antipathy to all things Christian, rejection of ‘truth’ and views of the “superior man” fed much of the Aryan supremacy and views about the “Jewish problem” in the social policy of the Third Reich. Nietschke lost his mind. The concentraion camps of the three great criminal states of the 20th century, the USSR, National Socialist Germany and China, were born in the minds of those children of the Enlightenment, Marx, Hegel and Nietschke.
So John James is racist against Germans too? Just because you’re German doesn’t make you identical to Nietzsche, despite John’s suggestion that Bonhoeffer and Nietzsche must be peas in a pod because of their common nationality.
It is spelled “Nietzsche” genius.
Make no mistake, the appointment of Wilkins as head of AGs is a disgrace. Mitchell is quite right to suggest that Carr/Wilkins have a lot to answer for: ask Morris (iemma). Carr fled as his popularity declined and, despite the hero worship from the ABC, his transfer to Macquarie tells us more about Carr’s real politics than his membership of the ALP. Wilkins transferred to the Citi group and now he transfers to AGs. Corporate executives are attacked (but never stopped) from their million dollar bonuses when their businesses go belly-up. These two are being rewarded for what they have done to NSW and only Crikey is raising the real issues.
Any relation I wonder to “Tony Wilkins Manager, Environment and Climate Change with News Limited” who also attended if memory serves the Rudd love fest …. err sorry 2020 conference.
One imagines it was Roger Wilkins who helped Carr implement his forest policy 95-2001 by taking a meat cleaver to the areas outside national park and saying, half half: That is 50% of the public’s land and natural heritage goes to private industry and the other half is a PR badge of honour. But it was all the public’s?! Too bad – 20 year logging guarrantees for private profit and Carr broke his ELECTION promise to close the wicked Eden Chip mill. 1,500 arrests against that monster – more than the Franklin River campaign.
I have always said Carr was always only as green as the political virtue in wedging the browns in the Nationals and the wets in the Liberals like Terry Metherell and his ilk. For the same reason therefore Carr donated seed funding to the Climate Institute to replay the NSW wedge model at federal level – and didn’t it serve a treat.
But with Roger Wilkins in there early on review of climate policy who really doubts that Rudd is as committed to climate policy reforms only to the extent – like Carr – that it disagggregates the Coalition. As long as it serves it’s purpose there is no actual philosophical commitment beyond acquistion of political power to actually implement serious political reform of the energy economy. Garrett will be a figleaf for embarrassing moments talking like a bren gun. Otherwise business as usual – Coal is king etc.
What was that about Garnaut being only one voice in the ear of govt in a major downgrade of his role post election win? And burning of forest ‘waste’ (read woodchips from the Eden chipper formerly upright eucalypt trees) is still being touted as greenhouse friendly by NAFI earlier this week. Wilkins would be pleased. So would Greiner. These guys really are twisted.