It is a complicated area. By that, I don't mean to dodge all the issues that you've raised, which are important ones.
Public servants have an obligation and a duty to be loyal to their minister. That's the nature of this system.
So it would be inappropriate--and I'm speaking hypothetically--for a minister to ask a public servant to undertake partisan activity, and it is inappropriate for a public servant to undertake partisan activities unless there are certain circumstances that have gone through some kind of review and regulatory process. That's the grand theory. Then we have to get to the practical reality of a big system having to operate.
But it is a balance between a duty of loyalty to a minister and protecting the status of the non-partisan public service. It puts people like me in a very different position, because I don't have a duty of loyalty to a minister, which means that I have a different kind of role to play and am in a different position. I have a different kind--