From front line to border line with no regrets

Martyn Dunne

Look back on any successful person's career and you find turning points, moments when crucial decisions took them in in the right direction.

In Martyn Dunne's case there was his decision to give up a fledgling career in teaching and go travelling; his move when he got back home to opt for the military, despite his being older at 26 than most officer cadets at the time; and his appointment in 1999 as commander of the international forces in Dili, East Timor - a job that propelled him into the Army equivalent of stardom.

With the reputation he had built, he seemed destined one day to be chief of the Defence Force. As the well-informed Wellington news-sheet Transtasman said, Dunne was "long identified as having a field marshal's baton in his knapsack".

Then, late last year, he did something no one expected. After 33 years, he left the military to become chief executive and comptroller of Customs.

The Wellington establishment, as Transtasman put it, raised its eyebrows in surprise. Others were more blunt, pondering why he had blown the opportunity to progress to a job that would have been the ultimate reward for his life's work.

Those wondering did not know that in taking the Customs job he had also turned down a plum United Nations posting.

After a couple of months in his new assignment, it seemed a good time to ask him why he made the dramatic switch - and whether he had any regrets.

Dunne's new office, on an upper level of Wellington's Custom House, seems a world away from his military experiences. Six years ago, on the night Dunne arrived in Dili, he and Australian commander Peter Cosgrove sat with their feet in a ditch in their makeshift headquarters, wondering what on Earth they had got themselves into. They were wearing battle uniforms. Outside, Dili burned, the night punctuated by the sound of gunfire from the pro-Indonesian militiamen whose reign of terror against the Timorese was about to end.

This week, Dunne is wearing a corporate uniform - red tie on a blue check shirt, set off with cufflinks. His office is immaculate.

For a man of such military stature, he is not tall. He does not look 55 either, and his lean, athletic figure is topped off with a mop of dark hair.

If, like that night in Timor, he is again wondering what on Earth he has let himself in for, he does not show it. He betrays the confidence of a natural born leader and talks enthusiastically, using his hands and arms for emphasis.

"I had some regrets about leaving the Defence Force but once I had made the decision to become comptroller of Customs, I didn't look back," says Dunne. "Everyone around me, probably my family, were wondering what I was doing, but I had no regrets and I don't have any now.

"I consider it a privilege to have done what I did and I consider it a privilege to be chosen to come here, and I've just got to make sure I don't let anyone down."

When the Customs job came up last year, following the death of incumbent Robin Dare from cancer, the service was in a state of organised upheaval. Beefed-up security measures brought on by September 11 and the plethora of terrorist attacks, more imports of drugs and pirated goods, ever-increasing visitor numbers, and burgeoning trade meant Customs was having to deal with rising workloads and responsibilities.

In 1998, it employed 700 people. By last year, staff numbers had swelled to 1300. Dunne saw that it was a department in transition, the development of which needed to be strongly managed.

"I saw the challenge of it, the excitement of coming into an organisation that had a good reputation but which I knew was going to have to move forward," he says.

For the first 100 days, Dunne set about visiting almost every Customs office and meeting as many of his staff as he could. To get a proper understanding of their jobs, he helped out where he could.

"A lot of it was interesting because a lot of people in the organisation hadn't had experience of the senior leadership being on the ground. It's something I saw as naturally having to be done."

What he saw convinced him that while Customs was not broken, it needed some fixing. He launched Project Guardian to review the way the organisation goes about its business and adopt changes.

"I think one of the major changes will be to move towards more of a service-oriented environment that has less emphasis on conduct of a business. We need to run it on sound business practices, but we provide a service on behalf of the Government. That is a bit of a paradigm shift."

He also wants to break down what he calls silos within the organisation, units operating separately from each other.

"We're going to look at some of the traditional ways of doing things. For instance, people have become specialised. We need to look at whether it's better to train our people across the broad spectrum."

He will look at bringing recruits to a central location for their basic training, in a similar set-up to what happens in the police.

"A lot of people join Customs now having watched Border Patrol [a reality TV programme on the department]. We've got to make sure we live up to their expectations and make sure that the range of skills we give people is going to leave them with a good career."

With so many changes under consideration, Dunne's own career hardly looks in danger of stagnating.

Dunne does not say so, but it seems that he feels he might have stagnated if he had stayed in the Defence Force. In September last year he was due to complete his term as commander of the Joint Forces. It was going to be about 18 months before the next Chief of Defence was due to be selected.

There was the opportunity to take a UN job - he was selected to be force commander of the UN in Jerusalem, a two-year posting that would have seen him control observers in the region.

But in the meantime he had applied for the Customs job, eager to take a senior leadership role in New Zealand.

"It wasn't intended that both jobs came together at the same time but they did and I had to make a decision," says Dunne. "It was a difficult position because it's not in my nature to inconvenience people and I felt that I needed to really explain.

"Fortunately it worked out that I was able to move into this position at the same time the UN offered to let New Zealand put up another candidate."

It is not the first time his career has taken a path others did not expect. Growing up in Pukekohe the oldest of three (he has a sister and a brother, both of whom now live in Australia), Dunne travelled every day by bus and train to Auckland to school at St Peters College, Epsom. The long daily journeys, and what Dunne calls the "regime" in place at the time, meant he did not particularly enjoy school.

It was perhaps a surprise, then, that he opted to take the careers adviser's suggestion that he become a teacher.

Dunne went to training college in Ardmore in 1967, then took up a primary school posting in Whangamata - he wanted to go there for the surf. 

Around this time, he married Jenny, and the couple set off to the Cook Islands for two years. By then, he realised that he had made a mistake in his career. "It just wasn't the environment for me." His father could not understand why anyone would want to walk away from a good job, but that was what he did.

He and Jenny set off travelling for several years, including spending time in the Himalayas and overland through Afghanistan (a country he returned to years later when he was involved in planning New Zealand's involvement in the war on terror).

During their travels, he decided he wanted to join the Army. His great-grandfather had military experience and his father was a serviceman during World War II, but there was no great armed forces tradition in his family. Rather, his taste of military life in the National Service had hooked him.

"In hindsight, I should have gone into the military earlier on, but life is about those sorts of opportunities."

He signed up in 1977, spent time in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), and held command and training positions in New Zealand and Australia. Timor was a highlight, but he served overseas elsewhere including Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Mogadishu.

The Army allowed him to study in Australia, at the College of Defence and Strategic Studies and La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he graduated with a Master of Arts degree.

Art has remained a part of his life and he still pulls out his brushes to conjure up abstract paintings. Other hobbies are running, watching rugby, and dragging up the Kapiti Coast on his land yacht - "You can just go for it."

But for the staff at Customs, it is not so much their new boss' hobbies that interest them as his military background.

"One of the great fears that people have, of course, is that you all of a sudden are going to line them up and march them around the square," says Dunne. And he knows that when people do not agree with a decision he makes, they'll roll their eyes and say, "Oh, here's the general coming out in him".

"At the end of the day in defence, if you said something, people did it. But the real measure of decent leadership is that people do what you ask them to and they come along with you because they want to."

In describing his leadership style, he says he is aware that he sometimes makes people run too fast. "My style is wanting to get on and get things done, but you've got to make sure that you bring people with you - you don't want to turn around and see a whole lot of train wrecks behind you.

"It's a matter of encouraging people, getting the best out of them, making sure they've got the energy there. I found coming in that there's some people who did have the energy, they just needed to be given a little bit of a tickle and a pat on the back."

For a man who has invested much of his life in the service of New Zealand, Dunne says he is glad to have the opportunity to continue that with Customs.

"Obviously there was a natural inquisitiveness by those who were on the selection process: why would I want to do this? Very senior politicians were interested too.

"My consideration was - and I'm quite genuine about this - I wanted to keep contributing to New Zealand. I felt that it would be sad to have all this experience and opportunity of leadership if you couldn't contribute and return."