Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today's Talking Politics

Guide is with Dennis Groob and he's going to be explaining about the civil service. Who

do they serve and has it become more politicised over time?

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It's a very best to start with where the idea of a civil servant comes from. There's a

sort of Victorian origin story here. The ideal civil servant comes out of a Victorian notion

of what it is to be a public servant. Just tell us what the ideal is like before we talk about

what the reality is like. Like most ideals, the sort of myth of the 19th century civil servant

has a long and interesting history but remains very much a myth. So we're going back I suppose

the great foundation document of the modern civil service is the North Cotrevellian report of 1854

when the then secretary permanent secretary at the Treasury Charles Trevellian was tasked with

looking at how to reform the civil service. Now he's produced this wonderful report which is

still referred to all these years later if you look at it. It's a 19 page polemic. It's full of

politics, it's full of very little evidence and a lot of advocacy. And what he's advocating for

is what we would now consider a meritocratic style of civil service and some division in labor

between the clerks who are scrolling things down on paper and the more cerebral upper echelons

of the civil service who are engaged in policy. And that upper level is what we're going to focus on

is the idea that these people are apolitical or is it inevitable that they're going to be doing

what we would call politics? In my view it's inevitable that they're going to be doing politics

and interestingly there is nothing in the North Cotrevellian report that says the civil service

...