I worked in Australia’s foreign service for 30 years from 1993 until 2023. How did the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade change over that time? And did it change for the better?
The department’s structures and culture in 1993 unsurprisingly mixed the old and the new. Like the rest of the public service it was hierarchical, sometimes overly so. DFAT officers had a reputation for being ambitious, even cut-throat. I encountered some sharks over the years, but most colleagues were friendly and collaborative. Some managers were shouty, a few outright bullies – and some people played favourites.
Although the organisation’s activities were expressed in contemporary bureaucratic language (action plans, performance outcomes, sub-program objectives and the like), a statement of service book, which included concise staff biographies, was commonly called “the stud book”, recalling, tongue only partly in cheek, a more equine era. Officers wrote their own entries, covering educational and career details and sometimes more personal information. Managers often consulted the book when filling positions, but some staff consulted it with romantic intentions in mind.
The typists’ pool had disappeared; officers wrote up their own documents. But tea ladies still traversed the corridors with their trollies in the Administrative (now John Gorton) Building, where DFAT was housed until the R.G. Casey Building opened in 1996.
The senior leadership was mostly white and male: only 18% of DFAT’s Senior Executive Service (SES) were women in 1998 and female heads of mission were even rarer, at 14%. The 27 graduate trainees in the 1993 intake more closely embodied the country Australia had become. A majority (15) were women. Five of our number had Asian ancestry (two Indian, two Chinese and one Eurasian/Indian), reflecting both the changing composition of Australia’s population and the growing importance of Asia to Australian policymakers. Brendan Augustin joined when he was still a Malaysian citizen. He read classified material while his Australian citizenship was being processed. Such a loose arrangement became impossible a few years later.
Fear of making mistakes and an urge to exert tight control, either by Canberra or a ministerial office, have made DFAT more risk-averse.
Our intake was the first to include Indigenous officers. Our four Indigenous colleagues came from various mobs, including the Yuin, Biripi and Larrakia. They taught me things I didn’t know about my own country.
There was still a sense of difference and sometimes tension in 1993 between some of the older staff and “the tradies”, who had joined the foreign service from the Department of Trade in 1987. But my graduate trainee intake took the amalgamated organisation as a given.
Thirty years later, DFAT is even more diverse. Peter Varghese became the first secretary of Asian descent in 2012, ending the long line of white men. A year later, Damien Miller became our first Indigenous head of mission, and in 2015 Julie-Ann Guivarra our first Indigenous SES officer. In 2018, Ridwaan Jadwat was the first Muslim immigrant to be a head of mission. Today, 50% of the SES is composed of women. Three consecutive secretaries have been women, as have the last three foreign ministers.
Merging DFAT and AusAID in 2013 created a more complex organisation, with nearly 7,000 Australian and locally engaged employees. Yet for all its complications, the amalgamation has been a net positive, creating greater synchronicity in Australia’s international efforts. People joining the department since 2013 have taken its hybrid nature for granted.
Each entity brought something valuable to the new organisation. AusAID ameliorated DFAT’s sometimes hyper-competitive culture. The tradition of the “stud book” lapsed, AusAID personnel seeing it as elitist and intrusive. But DFAT’s insistence on rigorous drafting helped shape the character of the combined department. One former AusAID colleague, James Gilling, told me to be wary of development consultants who “charged by the weight” (that is, by submitting verbose reports).
The old shouty management style, too, became less common, with the department adopting stronger anti-bullying procedures – though a few senior people have continued to indulge in such behaviour.
The department has become more top-heavy. While strong leadership is important, the addition of more SES officers hasn’t always produced better outcomes, especially if numbers shrink in the engine room. And a bloated SES can spend some of its time deconflicting and organising itself.
Fear of making mistakes and an urge to exert tight control, either by Canberra or a ministerial office, have made DFAT more risk-averse. Posts now have less autonomy, undercutting their ability to respond nimbly to events on the ground.
Most of the time, DFAT doesn’t have enough people, carrying a deficit of several hundred. As a manager, I was always fighting to fill all the positions in my team. And the internal paperwork only seemed to increase.
Under Penny Wong, the department’s budget has increased after years of periodic cuts. But we should be spending more on diplomacy, including by significantly expanding our overseas network, which remains small compared to many marker countries.
We will need a bigger and better resourced network in an increasingly multipolar world. And there is an urgent need for skilled diplomats who can build relationships, analyse events and propose and implement plans for securing Australia’s national interests in the face of disinformation and misinformation turbocharged by social media.
Lachlan Strahan is the author of The Curious Diplomat: A memoir from the frontlines of diplomacy, released 1 November 2025.
