Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy has been reappointed for another five years, adding a key element of continuity at the top of the bureaucracy in the wake of a raft of changes to public service chiefs under the Albanese government.
The renewal of Kennedy’s position heads off weeks of speculation over his future ahead of the forthcoming federal Budget as industry and the financial markets counted down the days left on the key bureaucrat’s contract after the recent changing of the guard at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Taxation Office.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ office confirmed the appointment of Kennedy, which is set to be officially revealed in a speech by the treasurer to the Committee for Economic Development today.
The treasury secretary is one of the closest and most trusted advisers to both the treasurer and the prime minister and was instrumental in finding a practical way forward to amend the Stage 3 tax cuts so that they delivered relief to taxpayers without becoming an albatross for the government, which repeatedly said it did not have a policy change the longer-term tax package, until it did.
The technical deftness of the changes has delivered the Albanese government a degree of relief from the Opposition’s line that the government is out of touch with the cost of living pressures created by the mix of inflation coupled with higher interest rates.
The treasurer is expected to point to the previous government’s initial appointment of Kennedy as a proof point of a meritorious selection rather than a politically driven one after successive removals of senior bureaucrats under the Abbott and Morrison governments that produced greater performative synergies with ministerial rhetoric, but often fell short in terms of actual delivery and execution.
Kennedy’s reappointment also cements into place the core team to start pushing into place a range of microeconomic and regulatory reforms that have been drifting since the change of government including a resurgence of fee gouging in the retail banking and payments sector, an explosion in scams, and a lumpy retail economy that remains disrupted after the pandemic.
Infrastructure – particularly making complex systems operate reliably, predictably and efficiently – is regarded as one of Kennedy’s fortes alongside the constant of tax reform and keeping the economy on an even keel.
The government is coming under renewed pressure from unions and the minor parties to hit negative gearing on investment properties, a move Cabinet members like Bill Shorten have poured cold water over, reminding proponents of the so-called miraculous re-election of Scott Morrison in 2019.
Although a bureaucrat for more than three decades, Kennedy made a career move from nursing to numbers in 1992 when he joined the Australian Bureau of Statistics and has held senior positions at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Department of the Environment and the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.
Kennedy scored a Public Service Medal in 2016 for outstanding public service in the area of climate change policy, an area he is known to remain keen on.
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