![Frances Adamson earned her stripes at a time when appreciation of economics graduates, China and women were all on the rise.](/content/dam/images/g/r/g/c/q/j/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gqrfz5.png/1475134278584.jpg)
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If GoPro cameras had existed in 1985, it would have been great to strap one onto Frances Adamson’s head and press record.
For the next 30 years, that camera would have captured the big changes happening in Australia and the world via the career of its wearer.
In late August, that wearer reported for work in Canberra as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Adamson’s appointment as the department’s first female head follows distinguished stints as Australia’s ambassador to China, as a prime ministerial adviser and as an adviser to foreign affairs and defence ministers on both sides of politics.
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Adamson has made her career with her China expertise, yet unlike a famous earlier DFAT trainee, Kevin Rudd, this was not the result of a childhood Sinophile obsession, nor even a fascination with the world of diplomacy.
As an economics student at the University of Adelaide, Adamson visited Canberra with other students considering traineeships at the departments of Treasury, Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Foreign Affairs.
It was the early 1980s and there was a surge in demand for economists across the Commonwealth public service following the Hawke government’s floating of the dollar and accompanying economic reform.
The trip was an eye-opener for Adamson, exposing Canberra as a place not just for colourful politics but where public policy was made.
Eschewing a chance to work at Treasury while doing her honours year in economics, Adamson followed her interest in the wider world to a graduate job in Foreign Affairs.
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That it was 1985 when she joined the department has particular significance. The Hawke government had passed the Sex Discrimination Act the previous year and it had a material impact on the group of graduates that joined the department; in 1985, for the first time, there were more women than men. Canberra was changing, and fast.
“You had the election of the Hawke government in 1983, financial deregulation and other big reforms,” recalls Dennis Richardson, secretary of the Department of Defence.
One of the national capital’s most widely experienced mandarins, Richardson is, among other things, a former head of both Foreign Affairs and Trade and ASIO, and a former ambassador to the United States. In the 1980s he was on the staff of the prime minister.
But it wasn’t just the economy that was changing. The culture at Foreign Affairs was being shaken, too.
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“The appointment of Stuart Harris [as secretary] in 1984 was very significant because he wasn’t from Foreign Affairs,” says Richardson.
Harris was an economist, reflecting the Hawke government’s new focus on the internationalisation of the economy, and he smashed the mould of Foreign Affairs’ always appointing from its own ranks. Women were still a relative rarity in a public service that, until 1966, had required them to resign when they married.
“Foreign Affairs before the Trade amalgamation had greater depth in high strategy than today, and its younger officers were excited about the use of their analytic skills in policy change at a time of active policy development,” observes a former ambassador to China, Professor Ross Garnaut.
“There was some uneasiness amongst some in the older upper echelons, then exclusively male, about the allocation of greater relative weight to the expanding Asian over established North Atlantic relationships.”
![Making history: Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, right, welcomes Frances Adamson as incoming Secretary of the ...](/content/dam/images/g/r/h/m/b/r/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1473985166837.jpg)
So Adamson – who opted for a diplomatic silence for this article – entered a department and culture in which, Richardson says, the new recruit would have looked up the ranks and seen few women.
Richardson doubts this would have particularly perturbed her, noting she had been the first female captain of the Adelaide University rowing club. He marvels at what she would have had to overcome, and the respect she must have garnered, to get there.
A posting to Hong Kong
Elsewhere in the world, dramatic change was under way. Deng Xiaoping had begun the process of reforming the Chinese economy and in 1984 had negotiated the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the British.
In 1987, wanting to know everything about the implications of China’s opening up, the then-foreign affairs minister Bill Hayden created a posting for an economist in Hong Kong. It had Adamson’s name written all over it.
With Garnaut, then Australia’s ambassador to China, Adamson trekked all over the nascent, still largely undeveloped growth areas of the Chinese mainland. They visited Guangdong province and the Pearl River Delta at a time when the Chinese were still mostly wearing their Mao suits. The economy was overwhelmingly agrarian but small manufacturing plants were popping up along the coast.
Adamson travelled, too, to Taipei, as Taiwan was becoming more democratic.
“Frances and I learnt a lot together about the big currents of change in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta – and also in Taiwan, which we were following through Hong Kong at the time,” Garnaut says.
“She was thorough in following up strands of information on new developments, and effective in making sure that we saw the right people and had the right conversations. A highly competent and effective young officer at the beginning of what was obviously going to be a big career.”
This combination of being there at a time when economics, China and a bigger role for women were in play forms the backdrop to Adamson’s career.
But it’s the significant capabilities displayed in all the jobs she’s done that have seen her develop an extraordinary collection of champions, both in politics and across the public service.
Which role makes Adamson most influential?
This was reflected in the discussion between members of the AFR Magazine’s 2016 Power panel.
Coincidentally, Adamson’s appointment as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which had been widely tipped, was confirmed on the day of the Power panel’s July discussion.
Panellists nominated her for the covert list because of her past role in China, her then-current role as international adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and in anticipation of her new role. The only debate was about which of these roles made her most influential.
James Cook University vice-chancellor Sandra Harding observed that her influence would be greatest as head of DFAT.
“She is an incredibly accomplished woman,” Harding said. “There’s no doubt about that and I think she will become more important, not less.”
Former Labor minister Greg Combet, who worked with Adamson when he was in office, begged to differ.
“What’s the key foreign policy issue that we’ve been grappling with? It’s the South China Sea,” Combet said. “Frances has been the ambassador to China and she is extremely highly regarded.”
Dennis Richardson says that “if there are two words to sum Frances up professionally, they are ‘disciplined’ and ‘measured’”.
Another word frequently used to describe her is “terrific”. Asked what it is that makes her particularly terrific, her one-time boss, the former Labor foreign affairs and defence minister, Stephen Smith, says: “Well of course her most important attribute is that she’s really smart.”
He continues: “But what particularly marks her out is that when she reads things, she sees them through multiple people’s perspectives. She can see how a minister or an ambassador or a department official might read the same document. She can see how it plays out in terms of public policy, diplomacy and politics.”
At the Australian High Commission in London
Let’s rewind the camera to Adamson’s first posting, to Hong Kong as a economist with DFAT in 1987. It was there that she met and married British diplomat Rod Bunten. Her career sights were then set firmly on Asia, but in 1991 she left Hong Kong, travelling to London with Bunten and the first of her four children.
While originally planning to take 18 months off work, she found herself engaged at the Australian High Commission, working on the other end of the Hong Kong handover and as a political counsellor.
The job saw her seeking out the up-and-coming influencers in British politics. She attended the British Labour Party’s annual conference and met one of its rising stars, Tony Blair. At a Scottish National Party conference, she met a young Nicola Sturgeon.
After a short stint back in Canberra, in 2001 she went to Taipei with the Australian Commerce and Industry office, where she stayed for five years before returning to London in 2005 as deputy high commissioner.
It was there in 2008 that her path crossed with a succession of new ministers from the incoming Australian Labor government, including foreign minister Smith.
Adamson made a big impression and in 2009 Smith approached her to take on the job as his chief of staff. Smith’s predecessor, Liberal Alexander Downer, had asked her the same question a few years earlier but at that point, she felt her (then) three children were too small.
Smith says she told him she’d do the job but that he had to be comfortable with the conditions she needed to put in place in order to manage her children: not all the overseas trips, nor regular travel to Perth, where Smith was based. Other than parliamentary sitting weeks, she would aim to be home at 7pm.
Oh, and she was a career diplomat; she wouldn’t get involved in politics. She would not go to tactics meetings.
Smith was more than pleased to look after the politics. It was a happy collaboration. When Smith volunteered to move to Defence to assist prime minister Julia Gillard in accommodating the troublesome Rudd, Adamson went with him, getting a crucial insight into the Defence portfolio.
But she had already been marked to replace Geoff Raby as Australia’s ambassador to China, now one of the country’s most important posts.
Smith says he gave her a piece of advice when she was preparing to be interviewed for the job by foreign affairs minister Rudd. With tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Smith says he told her: “Kevin will want to conduct the interview in Mandarin. Frances, you are a diplomat. Make a mistake that he can correct!”
Whether she did or not, the job was finally confirmed.
Appointed to China from the periphery
While some diplomats do a two-year study in Mandarin before hitting China, Adamson’s language training had been confined to three tranches of a few months over 10 years.
She has described her Chinese as competent – OK for giving speeches and conducting diplomatic conversation, not so good for bargaining in markets. (Others say it is excellent.)
But perhaps the most interesting part of her appointment to China was that she came to it from a long career at its periphery: she had worked in Hong Kong and Taiwan but spent relatively little time on the mainland.
Adamson arrived in the posting in 2011, the year before Xi Jinping became “paramount leader”.
At home, Julia Gillard was battling through minority government, although she managed to kick a couple of goals on foreign policy. One of them was establishing the Australia-China strategic partnership, which formalised for the first time regular high-level dialogue with Beijing.
It wasn’t just the Chinese regime that was changing, either. Raby says that his time as Adamson’s predecessor in Beijing (2007 to 2011) coincided with the resources super cycle. Adamson took over just as it was coming to an end, which also changed other aspects of the relationship.
In the middle of all this, both Raby and Adamson had to make the significant adjustments of dealing with multiple prime ministers: Howard, Rudd and Gillard in Raby’s case and Gillard, Rudd and Abbott in Adamson’s.
Pushing for a partnership with China
Beijing watchers give considerable credit to Adamson for making the most of the 2012 regime change in Beijing to push the idea of the partnership, seeing an opportunity as Xi was remaking his policy structures, meaning the two countries’ political and diplomatic relationships were finally catching up with the economic one.
There was to be an annual meeting between prime ministers, and annual cabinet-level strategic dialogues on foreign policy and economics. It was a significant breakthrough for the relationship, particularly at a time when leadership transitions can bring things to a halt.
The role of ambassadors, indeed of Australia’s missions around the world, has morphed significantly over the past three decades.
The merging of the old departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as the globalisation of our economy, means today’s diplomat is more heavily focused on promoting Australia’s economic and business ties than on old-fashioned diplomacy.
This is how Adamson approached her time in Beijing, during which the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement was negotiated.
Even without such a deal, the diplomatic corp’s role in economic diplomacy these days means liaising with states, as well as with ASX-listed and smaller companies working overseas and looking for opportunities and support.
A call from Malcolm Turnbull
Last year, shortly before Adamson was due to leave Beijing and return to Australia, she received a phone call from Malcolm Turnbull. The newly installed Prime Minister, who at that stage had only met Adamson three times, wanted her to act as his international adviser.
Turnbull said he was on a mission to restore the confidence of the public service, that its advice would be sought and listened to. He told her he wanted her on board because he believed she would not tell him what she thought he wanted to hear. It was another big commitment of time, but with the support of her family, Adamson accepted.
In less than a year, with Peter Varghese due to depart as secretary of DFAT in July, there was a growing expectation in Canberra that Adamson was on a very short list of successors.
Such is the nature of some foreign affairs careers though, that when she reported for work at the department’s R.G. Casey building in August, it marked the first time in 15 years that the department’s Canberra headquarters had been her base.
Adamson’s role becomes as much one of managing a huge and far-flung department as it does being the country’s chief diplomat.
Having gone through one massive cultural change in the late 1980s with the merger of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the department has been going through another trauma in the past couple of years with the nation’s aid agency – AusAid – being merged into Foreign Affairs.
“The merger with AusAid has not been a happy, or entirely successful, marriage,” one insider observes.
“It’s not just a matter of cultures, or the usual unhappiness of merged organisations. These are just two organisations with completely different modus operandis and purpose.”
Merging two cultures
Trying to finally bed down this change will be one of Adamson’s biggest internal challenges: finding a way to construct a new culture that takes in the best of the two previous organisations.
Adamson’s elevation means there are an unprecedented number of women running federal government departments; she becomes the seventh. Her influence will extend beyond DFAT to having a say in the way the Australian Public Service develops through the Secretaries Board.
Her message to DFAT staff in August was a very upbeat one about the public service’s record of support for its people and the resulting loyalty this instils in its staff. This ethos, she said, would help shape the way she leads the department.
At all the crucial turning points in her career – and her life – she had been supported by the department, she told her staff, and by the public service. That included an active accommodation of her need to find time for her four children. She was twice promoted while on maternity leave.
People who’ve worked with Adamson have been astonished by her capacity to manage a work/life balance which most people would find daunting. One colleague talks with awe of Adamson saying to the Prime Minister during a meeting, “sorry Prime Minister, but my daughter is on the phone”.
It’s all about priorities and time management, and winning the space to do things your way by the value you bring to a job.
6 other women taking charge
Frances Adamson is one of seven women heading up departments in the Australian Public Service, of which there are 18.
- Kathryn Campbell Secretary, Department of Human Services. Appointed March 2011. Previously worked in Education, Finance and Defence.
- Glenys Beauchamp Secretary, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science.Appointed September 2013. Previously headed the Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport, worked in Prime Minister and Cabinet, as well as Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. Also worked in the government of the ACT.
- Renée Leon Secretary, Department of Employment. Appointed September 2013. Previously worked in the Attorney-General's Department, in Prime Minister and Cabinet and as head of the ACT Department of Justice and Community Safety.
- Jane Halton Outgoing Secretary, Department of Finance, appointed July 2014. Previously the longest serving secretary of the Department of Health (2002-2014), after working in Prime Minister and Cabinet. Halton leaves her role on October 14. Deputy secretary Rosemary Huxtable will be acting secretary.
- Heather Smith Secretary, Department of Communications and the Arts.Appointed January, 2016.Australia's representative for the G20 in 2014. Previously worked in Treasury, Office of National Assessments, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. A former Australian National University academic, she has also worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia.
- Michele Bruniges Secretary, Department of Education and Training.Appointed April 2016. Previously led the NSW Department of Education after a career in federal, NSW and ACT education departments.
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