Dear Minister, Letters from a Public Servant

Dear Reader Now that the house of cards has fallen here in Hooseland I am going to share with you the letters I sent to Ministers over the last eight years. What started out as a once-a-month report from the frontlines to a Minister, hoping (in retrospect naively) that if they knew the truth things might improve for public servants, turned out to be the biggest battle of my life. These are the letters from the first four of those eight years, I am trying to recover the letters from the last four from a locked cloud platform after my laptop was stolen in a sting operation. I will share these for all the world to see in due course.

Time and hard experience have taught me that the public service is not just a place, it is also a concept. As servants of the public, we all have moral agency and the ability to make our own choices as to how we respond to things that happen. Once upon a time the role of the public servant was a more sheltered one in Hooseland, for the most part kept away from the public eye, and our Ministers took responsibility for their Government's successes and failures. Those days have ended, and in the face of an increasingly 'politicised' public service I decided that it was time the tables were turned, and the political masters were 'publicservantised' so to speak.

Of course, as a public servant that was going to be a bit tricky as most of us don't have any actual face to face contact with Ministers, only the well behaved and important ones get to do that. But I was growing weary of the 'water cooler' conversations and corridor grumblings about what was wrong in our world of work. That is how this book came about.