A recent timely 4 November article in the ‘Canberra Times’ by John Wilson and Kieran Pender, “If public servants are made ‘silent members of society’ , democracy is worse for it”, highlights growing problems in interpreting and administering the protocols governing public political comment by Australian public servants.

The High Court ‘s final rejection in 2019 of Michaela Banerji’s appeal for compensation relating to her dismissal from the Australian Public Service for repeatedly posting under a pseudonym her dissenting political views on immigration matters, (Banerji 2019) , provided opportunity for useful detailed elucidation by Justice James Edelman as a member of that High Court of the Court’s thinking on the whole question of the need for public service neutrality.

The matter is relevant again now five years later because of public servants’ signatures increasingly appearing in open group letters on contentious political matters such as Israel-Gaza. Australia’s most senior public servants confront new challenges in administering the current apparently contradictory protocols governing public political statements by public servants.

For some 70 years since Federation, Australia operated under the classical blanket prohibition of any political comment by public servants . In Australia’s great national debates over conscription, Australia’s racially tainted immigration policy , free trade versus protection, or our participation in the Vietnam war, public servants were carefully silent in their official roles – whatever their private views , many of which have subsequently come to light in memoirs and biographies. Effectively they lined up firmly with the policies of governments of the day.

How much longer can this practice of silence by officials, already under stress since the 1970s, continue under the unprecedentedly stressful present situation, where Australian governments are routinely ignoring Australia’s obligations under international humanitarian law instruments for which their predecessors have signed up? Namely, respect for ICJ and ICC Conventions , and for recent ICJ and ICC decisions and UNGA resolutions pertaining to the alleged genocide in Gaza ; and respect for statements in the matter by the UN........

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