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Kevin Rudd leaves bureaucrats angry

— Photo: AFP

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

SYDNEY: He jokingly calls his office Stalag Kevin and says he believes in “burning the midnight oil,” but the workaholic ways of the Australian Prime Minister are not proving popular with his staff.

Kevin Rudd’s frenetic work load in his first six months in office has led to a string of complaints from exhausted bureaucrats about working conditions. Senior public servants said they are expected to work late into the night and at weekends and that the long hours are interfering with their family lives.

Disgruntled civil servants are believed to have been behind two recent leaks of confidential Cabinet documents and now one union, which represents them, has issued a thinly-veiled warning of industrial action unless Mr. Rudd eases off.

Opposition politicians have seized on the apparent backlash against Mr. Rudd, with the Liberal Party health spokesman Joe Hockey accusing Mr. Rudd of hypocrisy. “For the last 12 months he’s been lecturing Australians about balancing work and family and bringing fairness into the workplace,” he said.

“The Prime Minister doesn’t practise what he preaches.”

Mr. Hockey, who ran several departments when he was a minister in the Howard government, said senior bureaucrats worked for much less pay than the private sector.

“To treat them with contempt is a major error of judgment,” he said.

Ministers said their leader’s work ethic should be admired. Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said: “We’ve got a big agenda, we expect a lot of ourselves and we expect a lot of the people working with us; but it’s for the betterment of the nation, it’s for getting better outcomes for Australia.”

Mr. Rudd was said to have lost six diary secretaries since he came to office, but said he has no intention of slowing down. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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