Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Kenneth Joseph Townsing (1914–1997), public servant, was born on 25 July 1914 at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, second of three children of Joseph William Townsing, mines timber contractor and horse trader, and his wife Laura Alma, née Clyde, both Victorian-born. The family moved to Perth when Kenneth was about five. He was educated at Newcastle Street State School, Perth Boys’ School, and Perth Technical College, completing his junior certificate (1930) and choosing a commercial course so as to gain employment in the harsh years of the Depression. The State public service promised a career, and in 1931 he secured a position as a temporary office boy in the Department of Lands and Surveys. He studied for the public service examination at night school and passed in December 1932, qualifying him for promotion to the permanent staff as a junior clerk in the Treasury Department in March 1933.

Townsing found accountancy and finance ‘absorbing’ (Townsing 1982). In 1934 he was assigned to work with the assistant under-treasurer, (Sir) Alexander Reid, to prepare Western Australia’s case as a claimant State dependent on Commonwealth untied grants, to the newly formed Commonwealth Grants Commission. He was promoted to clerk in January 1936, and continued his night-school studies, qualifying as an accountant and company secretary in 1937. Determined on further study, he enrolled part time in 1938 and 1939 in a diploma of commerce at the University of Western Australia (UWA) before World War II intervened; he did not complete his studies. Enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force on 19 February 1940, he was allocated to the Australian Army Pay Corps. He served at Gaza, Palestine, from May 1940 to January 1942, except for six weeks (February–March 1941) at Tobruk, Libya. In 1941 he was promoted to lieutenant. Back in Australia, he was posted to the staff of the paymaster-in-chief at Allied Land Forces Headquarters, Melbourne, where he rose to temporary major (1943) and chief inspector of accounts (1944). He was demobilised in January 1946. On 4 November 1942 he had married Frances Olive Daniel at St John's, Elsternwick, Melbourne.

In January 1946 Townsing chose to return to the Western Australian government as an inspector in the Public Service Commissioner’s Office, before promotion to secretary in November 1949. Two major reclassifications of staff positions, pay, and conditions, one of them achieved overnight by the light of a kerosene lamp, enhanced his reputation. Reid’s impending retirement resulted in Townsing’s appointment as assistant under-treasurer in February 1952. He became deputy under-treasurer in 1954 on Reid’s retirement, but a plan for Townsing to himself become under-treasurer was briefly derailed in January 1958 when he was instead appointed public service commissioner. However, the Liberal-Country Party’s electoral success in April 1959 brought (Sir) David Brand to the premiership, and Reid’s plan for the succession of his protégé was reinstated. Townsing duly became under-treasurer in June 1959 and remained in that position until retirement. He worked closely with Brand, who was treasurer as well as premier, and the minister for industrial development, railways and the north-west, (Sir) Charles Court, during more than a decade of transformation in the State’s economic development and financial relations with the Commonwealth. He also served the Australian Labor Party government of John Tonkin (1971–74), and the first year of the Court Liberal-Country Party government (1974–75).

On taking up his appointment as under-treasurer, Townsing had found the Treasury ‘virtually bankrupt’ (Townsing 1982), and so set about restoring the balances, including by holding back expenditure on capital works. Like almost all treasury heads he abhorred waste and was painstaking in vetting departmental expenditures—‘a tough money man’ who, according to Court, ‘worries about the State's money as though it were his own’ (Western Australia, Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings 1974, 1983).

Commonwealth-State financial relations consumed much of Townsing’s time, particularly the complex work of preparing and presenting Western Australia’s submissions to the Commonwealth Grants Commission for its special grant as a claimant State. While these grants benefited the State over three decades, they were strictly vetted by successive Commonwealth governments, and the State government wanted an end to Western Australia’s mendicant status. In 1968 Townsing judged the time right to finally steer his State to that outcome. With the imminent arrival of the first mineral royalties from large-scale resource projects, the State urgently needed freedom from the commission’s financial shackles. Moving swiftly in the first months of 1968, Western Australia negotiated with the Commonwealth treasury and the commission for an end to its claimant status with retention of its ongoing Commonwealth grant at the 1968 level. This was Townsing’s proudest public achievement and with good reason. For two years the State enjoyed a more generous grant than had it remained a claimant state. To claw back this advantage, in 1970 the Commonwealth began drawn-out negotiations from which Western Australia emerged well, particularly with regard to capital funds that were crucial to service the new resource development projects. Townsing’s detailed knowledge of the minutiae of Commonwealth-State financial arrangements, accumulated over forty years, together with his ‘imaginative approach,’ made him a successful negotiator, nicknamed the ‘Prince of Pirates’ (Smith 1975, 23) by his Commonwealth protagonists and the press.

The improvement in State finances pleased Townsing and he supported Court’s determination to ensure that the resource companies, not the government, provided the costly new Pilbara port and railway infrastructure. ‘Don't you give us any more government railways’ (Court 1990–2007, 1026) was Townsing’s view and that of other senior public servants concerned about future deficits. His interest extended beyond the economy, however. To ensure government support for the arts was well directed, he initiated the State Arts Advisory Board (from 1973 the Western Australian Arts Council) in 1970. He was also a key figure in the building of Perth Concert Hall, working ‘in a quiet way behind the scenes’ (Callaway 1984, 361) with its various stakeholders to guide both siting and design.

For most of Townsing’s tenure as under-treasurer he was an ex-officio member of the UWA senate, serving for sixteen years (1954–70), as chairman of its finance committee (1956–70) and pro-chancellor (1969–70). Until 1970 the State provided the bulk of university funding and he recalled working ‘endless hours and weekends’ (Townsing 1982) on university work, including advising on everything from staff reclassifications to the building of the University Club; it was a ‘demanding responsibility’ (Townsing 1982). Ensuring that government funds were expended carefully was his priority; he orchestrated the introduction of tuition fees and was prepared to question staff entitlements. He supported the establishment of both the Western Australian Institute of Technology (later Curtin University) and Murdoch University, including the allocation of UWA endowment land to the latter. In 1971 UWA had conferred on him an honorary LLD, and in 1981 Murdoch University awarded him an honorary doctorate of the university.

After responsibility for sixteen budgets Townsing retired on 30 June 1975. Each had been ‘an exhausting exercise’: ‘Treasury is a treadmill and there is no getting away from the weight of paper that keeps pouring in’ (Townsing 1975), he wrote in explanation to a colleague. Public service colleagues respected his talents, describing him as a ‘task-master’ who ‘worked enormously hard’ (McCarrey 2008) himself, while the governments he served all recognised his dedication and skills. At a time when few committees existed to apportion government spending, the under-treasurer exercised extensive discretion and Townsing continued the Reid tradition of ‘frank and friendly reception’ (Alexander 1975) of community groups. He was an approachable, amiable man who could listen well and take what Brand applauded as ‘a reasonably non-Treasury approach’ (Brand 1968).

Townsing continued with heavy work commitments in retirement as a member (1975–84) of the State Salaries and Allowances Tribunal and as a government consultant, overseeing, for instance, the renovation of His Majesty’s Theatre with the architect Peter Parkinson. He also served on the boards of several mining companies. His public service was honoured with appointments as ISO (1966) and CMG (1971), culminating in a knighthood in 1981. In his leisure he enjoyed cycling and gardening. He died at his home in Mount Lawley, Perth, on 24 August 1997 and was cremated at Karrakatta cemetery, survived by his widow and their daughter Peta, and two sons Ronald and Glen. His legacy as a dedicated and effective public servant lay in the State’s ledgers which were ‘written in black figures—not red’ (Smith 1975, 23).