I absolutely agree with you. I do have worries that there has been a tendency to have some blurring of that line. I had, for example, done a piece of work on movement of ministerial staff, public servants moving into ministerial staff and then coming back into the public service. I've been very unhappy about how some of that had been done and I requested that there be policy done on this to make this kind of movement clear.
There really hasn't been that much movement on that. I have a number of individual complaints that we're now investigating, which I can't really talk about now because they're ongoing, but there are issues now where it isn't really clear in terms of what is the appropriate behaviour for a public servant and what is the appropriate behaviour of the political side of our government. In terms of those individual complaints, I'm hoping that I'll have some of those investigations wrapped up so that we can draw those to a conclusion.
I do believe there has to be more discussion on this. I do believe that we have to start articulating what that line is. There is now an effort to review the values and ethics code for the public service. My input on it is that it has not been clear enough. Also, it hasn't been clear enough in terms of what is expected as post-employment, so what are the cooling-off expectations? If you go from public service to political activity, what is the expectation on cooling off? If you're political and if you win a competition, you can go right away.
We have to have those discussions. I don't have clear answers, but we are, as I say, doing a number of individual investigations. I hope to have that all wrapped up for my next annual report.