An interesting read, drawing and quoting heavily from roundtable discussions held by the authors with eleven chiefs of staff going back to Fraser's administration. Struck me as quite valuable in shedding light on an important position about which probably relatively little is publicly known, primarily in the way that it organises and sets out the various roles and functions of the office; if various media commentary is anything to go by, one suspects that matters of political management, and particularly in relation to the ministry and party, may be more prominent in practice than their fairly brief treatment in this account would suggest (unsurprising if so, as those are the elements that former chiefs of staff are probably least likely to highlight and speak candidly about), and of course the book tends to emphasise the similarities (and certain historical trends) more than the significant differences that would surely exist for each individual PM-CoS relationship.
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