By: Barry Soper | Thursday, May 03, 2012 6:00 AM

A Cabinet paper once fell off the back of a truck and into my lap way back when Rob Muldoon was waging war on his opponents.

The paper contained a candid view of how the Germans saw our trade union movement and how their militancy could affect their investment in God's Own.

When the top secret paper was given publicity the threats against my continuation as a Press Gallery hack flowed thick and fast, so fast in fact that the leaked paper was deposited with a foreign embassy which prevented the police from getting their hands on it and finding out where it'd come from.

Then the trench coat trilbies began padding the pavements, keeping their eye on my movements, presumably in the hope that they'd be led to that insecure truck. The navy blue HQ Holden was parked outside my house and when it was time to drive to work, there was always an escort.

The tail was lost when my car drove on to an inter island ferry, they obviously didn't have a ticket!

That's how serious the leak of a Cabinet paper was taken in those days. Any public servant handing on information of that sort would be in breach of the Official Secrets Act that they signed up to.

At the moment the public service is leaking like a sieve as they fight for their survival. Requests for official information see documents, usually hard to access, being processed in the time it takes to run them through the copy machine. The forestry industry's finding it hard to fell the logs quickly enough to keep up with the demand.

Now a Cabinet paper's fallen into the lap of the frothing Phil Goff, showing what was going to be signed off by Ministers on Monday. They'll be discussing the proposed staff cutbacks at Foreign Affairs, the closure of embassies and the savings to the public purse.

In the first year though it'll be, in the Dipton Drawler's favour phrase, fiscally neutral. The twelve million bucks of savings will be gobbled up by redundancies, physically carrying out the changes and of course by money hungry consultants.

The leak of the paper goes to show the level of frustration in the bureaucracy at the moment but the nark is unlikely to be fingered because he or she will be seen privately as doing the public a service!