Royal Commissions in Australia: When Should Governments Appoint Them?

The Cole Royal Commission into AWB sales of wheat to Iraq once again draws attention to questions of when should governments resort to ad hoc inquiries and, in particular, establish royal commissions with their associated prestige and statutory powers to call and examine witnesses and require presentation of documents. In this article, Dr Scott Prasser, author of ‘Royal Commisions and Public Inquiries in Australia (Lexis Nexis 2006) examines the use of royal commissions and other investigatory/inquisitorial instruments of executive government by Commonwealth and state governments.     

BOOK NOTES

Government Service as a Profession, Brisbane, Queensland Regional Group of the Royal Institute of Public Administration, 1978 K. WINDOW, Local Government Reform, Brisbane, Queensland Group of the Royal Institute of Public Administration, 1978 JAMES M. BUCHANAN and RICHARD E. WAGNER, FiscalResponsibility in Constitutional Democracy, Leiden and Boston, Studies in Public Choice, No. I, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978 Y. FORTIN, Le Controle de I'Administration Economique en Grand-Bretagne, Paris, Editions du CNRS, 1978 Ethics in Public Administration: A Bibliography, Canberra, Public Service Board, 1979 R. N. SPANN, Government Administration in Australia, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1979 COLIN PRITCHARD and RICHARD TAYLOR, Social Work: Reform or Revolution? R. T. GOLEMBIEWSKI and M. COHEN, People in Public Service: A Reader in Public Personnel Administration, Illinois, Peacock Publishers Inc., 1976 CLAUDIA D. SCOTT, Local and Regional Government in New Zealand: Function and Finance R. M. BURNS, Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: Canadian and Australian Experiences, Canberra, The Australian National University Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Research Monograph No. 22 1977 ALBERT BRETON and ANTHONY SCOTT, The Economic Consrirurion of Federal Stares, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1978 Bureau of Transport Economics, A Discussion Paper of Transport Planning in Sydney to 1975, Canberra, AGPS, 1978 RUSSELL MATHEWS, Australian Federalism 1977, Canberra, The Australian National University Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, 1978 RICHARD L. DAFT and SELWYN W. BECKER, Innovarion in Organizations. Innovation Adoption in School Organizations, New York, Elsevier, 1978 RICHARD LEHNE, The Quest for Justice. The Politics of School Finance Reform, New York, Longmans, 1978 JEAN I. MARTIN, The Migrant Presence. Australian Responses 1947–1977, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, Studies in Society series No. 2, 1978 H. WHITMORE and M. ARONSON, Review of Administrative Action, Sydney, The Law Book Co., 1978 R. A. WILD, Social Strarification in Ausrralia, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin Australia Ltd., Studies in Society series No. 3,1978 ADAM GRAYCAR, Social Policy: An Australian Inrroducrion, Melbourne, Macmillan, 1977 DAVID SOLOMON, Inside rhe Australian Parfiamenr, Sydney, George Allen and Unwin, 1978 J. R. HAY, The Development of rhe British Werfare Srare. 1880–1975, London, Edward Arnold, 1978 INA BERTRAND, Film Censorship in Australia, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1978 BRUCE MUIRDEN, When Power Wenr Public: a Study in Expediency: the nationalisation of the Adelaide Electric Supply Co., Bedford Park, APSA, Politics, Flinders University, 1978 ANDREW LEMON (ed.), Archives Conference Proceedings, 1977, Australian Society of Archivists, P.O. Box 83, O'Connor 2601, 1978 H. C. COOMBS, Kulinma: Listening to Aboriginal Australians, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1979 DIANA CLOSE, LOULA RODOPOULOS, JENNIE M. BRIGGS, and ELISABETH GAWITH, Interviewing Immigrants: Developing Research in the Australian Context, Melbourne, Clearing House on Migration Issues, 1978     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
CAMERON HAZLEHURST and J. R. NETHERCOTE (eds.), Reforming Australian Government: The Coombs Report and Beyond
R. F. I. SMITH and PATRICK WELLER (eds.), Public Service Inquiries in Australia
R. L. MATHEWS (ed.), State and Local Taxation
J. S. HUNTER, Federalism and Fiscal Balance: A Comparative Study
V. SUBRAMANIAM, Transplanted Indo-British Administration
NORMAN LEWIS and BERNARD GATESHILL, The Commission for Local Administration: a preliminary appraisal
MALCOLM BAINS, Management Reform in English Local Government
M. A. JONES, Organisational and Social Planning in Australian Local Government
J. J. MACKEN, C. MOLONEY and G. J. McCARRY, The Common Law of Employment
PATRICK KEATINGE, A Place Among The Nations: Issues of Irish Foreign Policy
JOHN D. ROCHE, Planning in the ESB
C. V. BROWN and P. M. JACKSON, Public Sector Economics     

THE PUBLIC SERVICES AND CO-OPERATTVE FEDERALISM

A paper of this type clearly calls for some definition of terms. Although "The Public Services" are usually seen to comprise the State Public Services and the Australian Public Service, in reality of course, government institutionalized services to the public go beyond these seven agencies. All the statutory authorities—Commissions, Corporations, Boards and Trusts—are part of public administration; so also are local government bodies. There are in the various public services some agencies which form part of the public service proper (i.e. a Department defined as such under one or other of the Public Service Acts) whereas in others they have the independence of a corporate entity. In South Australia for instance the whole state water supply and sewerage services are provided by one public service department, the Engineering and Water Supply Department. In the other states those services are provided by more than one agency and these range from government departments and local governing bodies to statutory authorities. A similar division of responsibility exists in the road construction area where some states perform their highway undertakings through the agency of a statutory authority, while others prefer the tighter Ministerial control of a government department.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
Citizen Participation in Government. Edited by MARGARET MUNRO-CLARK
The Business of Government: Western Australia: 1983–1990. Edited by ALLAN PEACHMENT (Leichhardt
Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and Leadership in Government. Edited by TERRY COOPER and N. DALE WRIGHT
Ethics in Public Service. Edited by RICHARD A. CHAPMAN
Public Sector Management in Australia. By JOHN WANNA, CIARAN O'FAIRCHEALLAIGH & PATRICK WELLER
Service Delivery and Public Sector Marketing. Edited by CIARAN O'FAIRCHEALLAIGH, PETER GRAHAM & JENI WARBURTON
The Contracting State. By IAN HARDEN     

Independence and Responsiveness – Re‐tying the Gordian Knot

Striking the Balance: Public Service Independence and Responsiveness ‐ an Institute of Public Administration Australia roundtable in conjunction with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, 14 March 2008. The roundtable consisted of around 60 participants consisting of former federal and state/territory ministers, ministerial advisers, current and former public servants, media and think tank representatives and a multi‐disciplinary range of academics.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Public Service Personnel Management in Victoria, Report to the Honourable J.E. Kirner MP, Premier of Victoria. By JOHN ALFORD, FAY MARLES and JOHN POWER
Review of The Auditor-General: Ally of the People and Parliament — Reform of the Australian Audit Office, Report 296
Sisters in Suits: Women and Public Policy in Australia, by MARIAN SAWER
Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats: Essays on the Contemporary Australian State, by ANNA YEATMAN
Decisions and Organizations. By J.G. MARCH     

BOOK NOTES

AINSLEY JOLLEY, Macro-economic Policy in Australia 1972–76, Australian Studies in Economics, London, Croom Helm, 1978
DAVID SCHUMAN, The Ideology of Form, Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, D. C. Heath, 1978
R. S. PARKER, The Government of New South Wales, University of Queensland Press, 1978
PETER HAY, IAN WARD, JOHN WARHURST, Anatomy of an Election
Hong Kong Journal of Public Administration, edited by Ian Scott and Miron Mushkat, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1979     

ACCESS OF PUBLIC SERVANTS TO AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIAL TRIBUNALS: ATTITUDES OF GOVERNMENTS AND GOVERNMENT EMPLOYERS*

Abstract: Some recent cases in the arbitration tribunals involving strikes and work bans suggest that some governments and government employers are apprehensive about and resentful of the intrusion of the tribunals into their affairs. The Commonwealth government, for instance, recently amended the Public Service Act to remove what were seen as threats to the efficiency of the public service resulting from constraints imposed by the Arbitrator on the Public Service Board in relation to recruitment, selection and promotion. At the State level, the issues which arise in many public service strikes are not industrial in character, yet as the strike in almost all gaols in N.S.W. earlier this year illustrated, an industrial tribunal can help the conflicting parties reach an agreement. If, however, the tribunal fails in such efforts, it can do no more, where the issues are not industrial, than state its views about what is just and reasonable in the circumstances and perhaps recommend how the dispute should be resolved. Since 1974 the attitude of the N.S.W. Public Service Board toward this category of recommendations has hardened, as illustrated by the 1975 Teachers Case re Preference; the 1978 Prison Officers Case re Disciplinary Proceedings; and the 1978 Teachers Case re Disciplinary Proceedings. But while some governments and government employers fear that the discharge of their responsibilities is being impaired by industrial tribunals, they are nevertheless prompt in enlisting the aid of these bodies when in trouble and often find such aid indispensable. Governments and government employers will have to learn to live with the industrial tribunals, which, at the Commission level, are part of the judiciary and have an obligation to discharge their statutory responsibilities independent of the executive branch of government.     

EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS: PROBLEMS OF ASSESSMENT

Abstract: The paper focuses on the Coombs Commission's recommendations on efficiency and effectiveness in the Commonwealth Public Service. The recommendations involve the allocation of organizational responsibility for efficiency and effectiveness to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Public Service Board, Treasury and the Auditor-General and individual responsibility to the departmental manager through the establishment of a "Forward Estimating Budgetary" process. However the Commission has given little guidance in the matter of the technological tools which must be developed in order to secure its implementation.
The Commonwealth Public Service Board has developed over the last two years a program of Staff Utilization Reviews (S. U. Rs) as one of its management improvement programs. The paper canvases the technological aspects of efficiency and effectiveness drawing upon the development and operational experience of the S.U.R. program. It concludes that much resource-intensive work must be done before the Commission's recommendations can be implemented but Australian and overseas experience confirms the potential fruitfulness of that work.     

PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION

In 1960 a newcomer to public personnel administration in Australia would have been presented with two treatises and told that these were the alpha and omega of the subject. The first edition of R. N. Spann's Public Administration in Australia appeared in 1959, while the Boyer Report, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Public Service Recruitment , of which R. S. Parker was co-author, was also published in that year. The newcomer would have found in these works not only an introduction to the then generally accepted ideas about personnel management in Australian public services, but also a critical assessment of those prevailing ideas, a critique which reveals the authors' beliefs and which influenced the succeeding generation of practitioners.     

How Do We Know if it's Working?

This article introduces the first of the three cross‐cutting themes used to assess Australian integrity systems: evaluation of their consequences. It argues that an evidence‐based approach to assessing the overall impact of integrity and corruption prevention measures is possible, based on experience in Australia, drawing on measures including the evolving State of the Service surveys of the Australian Public Service Commission. However, different types of measurement serve different institutional purposes, with little current integration and no overall agreed framework for how they might be combined to help judge performance. The article identifies key issues that need to be addressed in developing such a framework.     

DISCUSSION ON PAPERS BY Mr JACOBS AND Ms McCLELLAND

Speakers included Mr E. Matthews (Tasmanian Public Service Board), Mr L. Cleland (Australian Archives), Dr E. W. Russell (Victorian Public Service Board), Mr B. Rope (Commonwealth Public Service Board) and Mr L. Laing (Commonwealth Attorney General's Department). There was considerable debate about the use of work measurement techniques in efficiency audits. Some speakers argued that management review programs are best seen as concerned with broad indicators of efficiency and effectiveness, especially at the higher levels of the organization, and that there were many troubles about the use of work measurement techniques. Some Public Service Boards were said to have reservations about these techniques in the context of efficiency reviews.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Standards and Values in the Australian Public Service A JOINT PUBLICATION OF THE MANAGEMENT ADVISORY BOARD AND ITS MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE Whose Utility? The Social Impact of Public Utility Privatisation and Regulation in Britain JOHN ERNST Public Management: The New Zealand Model JONATHAN BOSTON, JOHN MARTIN, JUNE PALLOT and PAT WALSH People, Places and Policies: Aspects of Queensland Government 1859–1920 KAY COHEN and KENNETH WILTSHIRE Environmental Politics and Policy Making in Australia TIMOTHY DOYLE and AYNSLEY KELLOW Police Leadership in Australasia BARBARA ETTER and MICK PALMER Transforming Power: The Politics of Electricity Planning AYNSLEY KELLOW     

Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Fragile Bastion: Judicial Independence in the Nineties and Beyond H CUNNINGHAM (ed.)
Policy and Change: The Howard Mandate SCOTT PRASSER and GRAEME STARR (eds)
Genesis, Termination and Succession in the Life Cycle of Organizations: The Case of the Maritime Resource Management Service M PAUL BROWN (Monographs on Canadian Public Administration — No. 19)
Managerialism: The Great Debate M CONSIDINE and M PAINTER (eds)
The Chance of Politics PAUL HASLUCK (ed.)
Health Policy in Australia H. GARDNER (ed.)     

BOOK NOTES

MALCOLM C. BROWN, The Financing of Personal Health Services in New Zealand, Canada and Australia
RICHARD H. LEACH, Perceptions of Federalism by Canadian and Australian Public Servants: A Comparative Analysis
G. G. MEREDITH, Small Business Management in Australia
RONALD WRAITH, Open Government
BRIAN SHOWLER, The Public Employment Service
The Commonwealth Foundation: The First Ten Years, 1966-76
ROBERT H. SIMMONS AND EUGENE P. DVORIN, Public Administration: Values, Policy and Change
Informatics and Administration
T.P. GOLDEN, Local Authority Accounting in Ireland
PATRICIA TULLOCH and KERRY McDOUGALL, Retrospect: Social Welfare Issues in the '75 Election
MAX KELLY, A Certain Sydney 1900: A Photographic Introduction to a Hidden Sydney 1900
Victorian Council of Social Service: Welfare Rights Task Force, We've Got No Choice: A Welfare Rights Perspective
A Selected Annotated Bibliography on Welfare Rights
ELEANOR HARMAN and IAN MONTAGNES (eds), The Thesis and the Book
N. ROBERTS (ed.), Use of Social Sciences Literature
JOAN MARSHALL and DEAN JAENSCH (comps), APSA Directory of Political Scientists in Australasia, 1977–1978     

The New Public Service: Serving Rather than Steering

The New Public Management has championed a vision of public managers as the entrepreneurs of a new, leaner, and increasingly privatized government, emulating not only the practices but also the values of business. Proponents of the New Public Management have developed their arguments largely through contrasts with the old public administration. In this comparison, the New Public Management will, of course, always win. We argue here that the better contrast is with what we call the "New Public Service," a movement built on work in democratic citizenship, community and civil society, and organizational humanism and discourse theory. We suggest seven principles of the New Public Service, most notably that the primary role of the public servant is to help citizens articulate and meet their shared interests rather than to attempt to control or steer society.     

What Really Happens: Department Secretary Appointments,Contracts and Performance Pay in the Australian Public Service

This account of the practice in the Australian Public Service (APS) for appointing department secretaries, using contracts and rewarding for performance, is based on my own experience in being appointed, reappointed and not reappointed, and in receiving and not receiving performance pay. It also draws on my experience as Public Service Commissioner in assisting with appointments and performance pay of secretaries. I also discuss weaknesses in the current system, and the drift to ‘politicisation’. I was first appointed as a department secretary at the end of 1993 after 25 years in the APS including 15 years in the Senior Executive Service (SES) in three different portfolios (Social Security, Finance and Defence). I was secretary of three different departments (Administrative Services, Housing, and Health, some of which went through changes in name and responsibilities during my tenure) before being appointed as Public Service Commissioner from the beginning of 2002. I retired from the APS in June 2005.     

Testing the Discourse of Declining Policy Capacity: Rail Policy and the Department of Transport

It has been observed that countries that implemented new public management (NPM) reforms are currently witnessing growing complaints about a decline in the policy capacity of their public services. Australia is a part of this trend with public sector leaders increasingly voicing concern about policy capacity decline within the Australian Public Service (APS). This article sets out to examine whether there is an empirical basis for this discourse and to assess allegations that NPM reforms have contributed to any related shifts. It draws on rail policy and the Department of Transport as its case study. It finds that the reforms transformed role of the department in a way that enhanced strategic policy capacity. However, the reforms also introduced a number of structural impediments that make it difficult for the new role to be effectively executed .     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article. Review Article: Reflections on Labor Jenny Hocking & Colleen Lewis It's Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis Restructuring Australia: Regionalism, republicanism and reform of the nation‐state Wayne Hudson and A J Brown (eds) Renegotiating the Environment: The Power of Politics Jenny Stewart & Grant Jones Holding Power to Account: Accountability in Modern Democracies Richard Mulgan The V.I.P. Affair 1966–67. The Causes, Course and Consequences of a Ministerial and Public Service cover‐up Ian Hancock