There has been a vigorous debate, much of it behind closed doors, about what sort of person should be director of the Australian War Memorial. Should it be someone with military experience, someone with professional qualifications in history and or museum administration or a professional public-service manager capably of running anything?
Military people tend to be can-do type but can get themselves into strife when the crash through becomes crash, as exemplified by former director Air Vice-Marshal Jim Fleming.
The history-museum person can lose out by not having the political nous to extract money from the Government. For example, one of the leading runners for the job was former Museum of Australia director Margaret Coaldrake who could not overcome government pusillanimity to get that project off the ground in a coherent way at Yarramundi.
They can also uncompromisingly put historical fact before ethos and be insenstive to legend and the memory, as exemplified by the dispute over the the titling of the statue of Simpson and his donkey.
The bureaucrat can become captive of the minister’s political agenda, which may not be healthy in an institution which is supposed to be an independent statutory authority. In the past year there was certainly a political agenda to make the memorial more multi-cultural and not to offend the Japanese, as exemplified by the official VP day.
All, of course, can suffer from promoting their particular view of the institution (memorial, museum, Minister’s plaything) at the expense of the other roles.
The former director Brendon Kelson has criticised the appointment of a military person. He has pointed out some of the major difficulties the memorial has had in the past two years, particularly the ill-conceived inquiry by the Merit Protection Review Agency and subsequent loss of quality staff. But, it was bureaucrats (namely himself and the present acting director Peter Hawker) who failed to prevent or overcome those difficulties, however unexpected their source. Bureaucrats can also put finances and systems before both the memory and research.
General Steve Gower now inherits the control of an institution with some major difficulties of identity, funding and depletion of quality staff. It will take great skill to balance the memorial’s functions and get cohesion among staff. If he does not excel in that, he will most likely be the last military person to occupy the director’s chair. He thus will best serve the returned-soldier/memorial elements of the institution (and indeed all elements) by resisting any political pressures and resisting pressures to emphasise one function over another and getting the balance right.