On 18 September I acted as MC at the Crawford School Alumni and Friends Dinner. It was a great chance to meet some past students and hear from Kim Beazley on current issues in politics (under Chatham House rules sorry!). Beazley has a long history in Australian politics and he took up the role of Chancellor of the ANU earlier this year. A couple of days prior to the event it was no surprise when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced Beazley would be the next Australian Ambassador to the United States.

Alongside Beazley, newly retired Liberal Brendan Nelson has also been fingered for a diplomatic post. Nelson will take up the role of Australian Ambassador to the European Union. It is an interesting fact that Rudd defeated Nelson's coalition at the 2007 election and that he beat Beazley in a leadership battle within the Australian Labor Party.

Picture (L to R): Michael Costello, Kim Beazley, Ian Buchanan and Graham Bradley.

A New Era of Reform?

Wow! Can it really be this long since I made any contribution? So much has been happening in public management circles in Australia that it is negligent of me not to have commented. Recently the Prime Minister has outlined his vision to build 'the best public service in the world'. The first stage of this involved establishing an Advisory Group oversee an international benchmarking exercise which will test the Australian Public Service against counterparts around the world. The Advisory Group will also oversee the development of a reform blueprint. The PMs speech, presented at the recent conference of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government is available here. Expect much more from me on this topic in the coming months.

In late July I has the chance to present at a conference on Unicameral systems. For a few years I wrote the political chronicles of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), so I was invited by my colleague Professor John Uhr who heads up the Parliamentary Studies Centre to contribute to this international conference examining the experience of the ACT in the context of other unicameral systems around the world. It was not until I arrived, however, that I realised the conference would be held in the Legislative Assembly and that I would be presenting my thoughts on that very Assembly whilst standing in it! Video of the conference is available from the Crawford School site and a summary of proceedings is also available.

Global Speak: Virtual Seminar

I'm really pleased to have been invited to present a virtual seminar as part of the PolicyNet group of which the Crawford School is a member. This will see me beamed around the world to institutions such as Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton, USA), Peking University School of Government, Hertie School of Governance (Berlin), Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (Carleton University, Canada), Balsillie School of International Affairs (Canada), The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), and Tsinghua University School of Public Affairs (Tsinghua University, China). This is a great chance to link up with people in other parts of the world and to connect up our students (some schools use the seminar series as a basis for a course) - hopefully my Australian accent will not be too thick!!


I settled on the following title Understanding The Role of Public Managers in the 21st Century: Challenges and Debates. This will enable me to speak broadly about the changing role of public managers and how this has changed over time as waves of reform have redefined this role. It will also provide a chance to discuss some of the interesting debates that are emerging around the public value framework something I have spent quite a bit of time delving into over the last few years.

Recently John Alford and I published a piece in a special issue of the International Journal of Public Administration titled Making Sense of Public Value: Concepts, Critiques and Emergent Meanings. In the paper we revisited Mark Moore's original work on the public value framework - essentially a strategic management framework for the public sector - and then we considered how the notion of public value has taken off in different ways, especially over the last few years.

A fairly heated debate has been sparked through a serious of exchanges in the Australian Journal of Public Administration through a series of articles since 2007 which are essentially focused on the politics, management and whether this approach travels well outside the USA. More recently the debate has internationalised with our piece in the IJPA and a piece by Rod Rhodes and John Wanna being published in Public Administration. Expect this one to continue on for a while!

The Challange of "Closing the Gap"

Yesterday the Productivity Commission released the Overcoming Disadvantage report which tracks whether or not government policy and programs are impacting on Indigenous Australians outcomes across a range of areas e.g. life expectancy, Year 12 completions, health, criminal justice and so on. The almost 800-page report (a shorter overview is available) is an attempt to pull together data from across the country to enable the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to track progress on its commitment addressing Indigenous disadvantage. It is the fourth in the series of reports (2003, 2005, 2007). The current framework is centred on the notion of "closing the gap" which is at the centre of COAG agreements hammered out under the Rudd government in late 2007 through 2008.

Media coverage has so far been relatively negative and has focused on the lack of progress and, in some cases, increase in worrying statistics (e.g. reporting of child abuse). As was noted in The Australian yesterday "all the usual horror statistics are there" with "no improvement in 80 per cent of the 50 economic and social indicators of disadvantage the report measure. Indigenous children are six times as likely to be abused as non-indigenous Australians, according to the report. This is an increase on 2003 when they were four times as likely to be abused. Indigenous people are 13 times more likely to end up in prison. The imprisonment rate increased by 46 per cent for indigenous women and 27 per cent for indigenous men. Indigenous victims of domestic violence are hospitalised at a rate 34 times higher than non-indigenous people". It is hard to tell a positive story about the data, but what can we garner from the report about the challenges of public management in Australia?

Firstly, this is a complex and challenging policy area. As part of a large research project our team has spent a lot of time looking at how government agencies connect up to address Indigenous policy and service delivery. Here we are not talking (simply!) about Commonwealth organisations, but also States, Territories, local government, non-profits, private organisations, and community groups. Making progress using such a complex institutional and organisational structures creates ample opportunity, but major barriers.

Secondly, creation and collection of data is a real challenge in policy areas that span jurisdictions and organisations. This is not the first we have heard of this (health care is another classic example). Amazingly there is no common data collection approach but, instead, a multitude of system - think for example of how police officers in each Australian jurisdiction would classify their activities, or health providers, or educational institutions. Getting simple picture is problematic. Prime Minister Rudd noted yesterday at the COAG meeting that ''there's simply not enough statistical analysis to give us clear indications as to what's happening on the ground''. In the end, there is an enormous challenge of getting baseline data and this has still not been solved.

Third, the report and the associated coverage shows us again the perils of performance measurement and reporting. The Prime Minister has indicated that the report was "devastating", and others have lamented the lack of progress. But when the end outcomes of the COAG closing the gap strategy include indicators such as closing the life expectancy gap in a generation, are we right to pass judgement a few years in? In other areas very ambitious targets have been set and rightly so: halving the gap in employment outcomes in a decade, having the gap in reading, writing and numeracy within a decade and so on. Another issue emerges around the closing the gap notion: we are not trying to reach an absolute standard, but a relative one and the outcomes for non-Indigenous Australians are not static. This means that where there is improvement in the outcomes for non-Indigenous Australians the gap which has to be breached widens.

For sure we need to track progress, but what will be the implications for policy action? My concern, based on our recent research work, is what the reaction will be and whether there is ever a chance for changes to become embedded in an area subject to so much policy inertia. One of the key things that emerged from our recent field work was the almost constant churn in policy and programs and the inability for people on-the-ground to ever get traction. Let's see what the coming weeks bring.

Did I make the Top 50?

Yesterday I got an email from the editors of PUBLIC which comes out of the ESADE Institute of Public Governance and Management, Spain. They have released the Top 50 articles from their newsletter PUBLIC as part of their 5th Anniversary. Around 10,000 people read the newsletter in more than 100 countries. A few years back I was invited to write an article on public value and contracts for the newsletter and was published alongside Joseph Stiglitz, Chris Huxham and Christopher Pollitt, not bad.

Unfortunately I didn't make the cut for the Top 50 but it is a great collection for those interested in public management and reads like a "who's who" (maybe this explains my glaring absence?). Better still, the editors have made it free! You can access it from the following link: http://issuu.com/publicbook/docs/public_en/8

Nothing like a scandal to heat up a cold Canberra winter!

After a bit of a break - apologies for that - I am back to blogging, and what a time to return! Last week the "ute-gate" scandal emerged from the depths of winter to give political junkies a scandal to obsess about. The Brits may have heads rolling over perks, but surely it is only in Australia that a Prime Minister can borrow a ute from a mate and see it snowball into calls for resignation over emails, favours, faxes and dust-ups at the Mid-Winter Ball!

In The Australian today several articles deal with the emerging scandal and political showdown. The story centres on whether or not a long-time friend of the PM (and a car dealer that lent him a ute) was given favoured treatment by the government in having his interests represented during a period where the government was trying to assist the car industry.

With calls for resignation flying back and forth a range of interesting questions are being asked: Did a long-time friend of the PMs get special treatment? Is it "normal" for the Treasurer to get faxes about constituents at home? Does the mysterious email exist? Has the PM and/or his Treasurer misled the Parliament? As the Federal Police are called in investigate some parts of the "whodunit" age old questions emerge: what is the proper role of public servants? what is the nature of the relationship between politicians, their advisors, and public servants?

Such questions are nothing new, we now have a new scandal, however, to examine them in. Perhaps most importantly, are public servants acting inappropriately or not? Has a culture emerged whereby public servants are too "responsive" to political actors? This scandal feeds into a very interesting debate which played out in the pages of the Australian Journal of Public Administration between the former head of the Australian Public Service Commission, Andrew Podger and the former head of the Department of Prime Minister of Cabinet, Dr Peter Shergold. the articles are available for free from the journal website.

Over the coming days and weeks we can expect this issue to be dissected to the nth degree, however for those interested in public administration and management this will be yet another (potential) example of the changing nature of the politico-bureaucratic relationship and the questionable role of political advisers who act as agents between the two.

The pollies are back in Canberra this week before the winter recess: expect a feisty week as they play high stakes poker in part with the reputation of public servants.

And another thing ... Back to Bhutan

I recently had an article (with Debbie Blackman) published in Public Administration and Development, which looks at civil service reform in Bhutan. Debbie and I visited Bhutan together in 2007 and have both returned (separately) in 2008 to work with civil servants there. Despite the remarkable changes going on in Bhutan in recent times there is remarkably little written on Bhutan's reforms. Part of this probably has to do with limited access but also the fact that most attention in recent times has come from the international infatuation with Gross National Happiness which, I think, tends to be caricatured and not taken seriously as a unique Buddhist-inspired development philosophy. Some have argued GNH is the Bhutanese contribution to Buddhist economics - I didn't even know this existed until I starting writing this article! You can see the abstract here or you can get the whole article from my Crawford School page. Over the next year I will do some writing on service delivery and reform in Bhutan, and perhaps over the next couple join with some colleagues to write a book of reform and democratisation. In the meantime enjoy some of the first published work on public sector reform in Bhutan!