Trends and Opportunities in the Public Sector: A Critical Assessment

The public sector should be designed to work on behalf of government. Government, in turn, should be designed to work on behalf of a citizen community both to pursue its collective interests and to defend the citizen community against harmful effects of private market activities. At this time, the integrity of the public sector/government has been eroded because the established forms of regulation of the market are outmoded. This has permitted transnational corporations to argue that government should respond more to their agendas often at the expense of citizen needs and claims. At the same time, citizen movements have become more diverse and sophisticated. They represent an opportunity for revisioning the work of government and the public sector.     

Contracting Out and Public Values: A Symposium

The three papers that constitute this symposium were first commissioned for a workshop entitled Citizenship and Contractualism held in October 2000. The theme of that workshop centred on the contractualisation of the relationship between service deliverers and their clients. 1 They have been published elsewhere in a special issue of Law in Context, March 2001, co‐edited by Terry Carney, Gaby Ramia and Anna Yeatman.
These three papers did not fit that theme. They are concerned more with the general use of contracting out as a tool of contemporary governance. I have used the title contracting out and public values because all three of these papers raise fundamental questions about the implications of contracting out for public values.     

RECONSTRUCTING PUBLIC BUREAUCRACIES: THE RESIDUALISATION OF EQUITY AND ACCESS*

In a recent intervention within the debate about the managerialist reconstitution of Australian public bureaucracies, the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Finance, Michael Keating (1989, p.124), sums up what he calls the raison dêtre of the reforms "as changing the focus more to 'management for results'". He proposes that the aim in this has been "to focus management attention on the purposes of programs and the cost-effective achievement of outcomes rather than simply on inputs and processes".     

THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE AUSTRALIAN STATE IN THE 1980s

Abstract: The adoption of the discourse of management by Australian public services in the 1980s can be seen as a cultural revolution. Results-oriented management, subordinated to economic considerations, is the dominant approach. The upper levels of the public services have been remodelled in the form of a technically-oriented elite recruited on merit, defined in terms of higher education credentials, drawing a technical intelligentsia, or "new class", into public employment. Although "people and process" approaches, espoused in particular by women, find a place in the new culture, they are subordinated to the demands of scientific management. While the technical intelligentsia is resistant to traditional forms of bureaucratic authority and open to rational debate and new ideas, its members are not well equipped to take account of the substantive concerns of public policy and service provision. The distinctiveness of public management is submerged by inappropriate private sector models, and issues tend to be reduced to economic ones. The paradox that this culture has risen to prominence under Labor governments is explored and the developments are placed in the context of contemporary demands placed on the Australian state by private capital.     

Analysis of the First- and Second-Generation Raving Dragon Novelty Bath Salts Containing Methylone and Pentedrone

In recent years, a large number of designer drugs sold as “Bath Salts” have appeared on the market. In July of 2011, Raving Dragon Novelty Bath Salts was obtained over the Internet. This product became unavailable in October of that year coinciding with the DEA issuing a temporarily schedule of mephedrone, methylone, and MDPV. Four months later in February of 2012, a new product was released from the same company under the new name Raving Dragon Voodoo Dust. The contents of both products were identified using spectroscopy methods: nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared, UV–visible, tandem mass spectrometry, and high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry. It was determined that Raving Dragon Novelty Bath Salts contained methylone. The replacement product Raving Dragon Voodoo Dust contained the unscheduled drug pentedrone. The Raving Dragon brand of products illustrates the rapid change of ingredients in these products to circumvent laws restricting availability, distribution, and use.     

Perspectives on the Capacity of the Australian Public Service and Effective Policy Development and Implementation

It is a long held tradition of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) to invite speakers to address the Fellow's Colloquium as part of the annual symposium, with an aim to spark discussion and debate on a controversial and contemporary topic. In 2010 the debate was focused on the question of whether there had been a degradation of the professional capacity of the Australian Public Service (APS) with regard to effective policy development and implementation. The contributions of each of the four panel members are reproduced here, in part, and they reflect the diverse perspectives which informed a robust and compelling debate. Janine O'Flynn, the editor of these contributions, argues that any claim of degradation is based on rumour rather than hard evidence, and she sets out how we might think about policy capacity from a public sector management perspective. Sue Vardon, the former CEO of Centrelink and the architect of a transformation change program which redefined the delivery of public services in Australia, reflects on the strengths of the APS, but points out the current stresses that it now finds itself under. Anna Yeatman, an expert in political theory and its application to citizenship and public policy, argues that in the last twenty years we have witnessed degradation in the work of government and that this has impacted on policy capacity. Lyn Carson, an expert in deliberative democracy, points to the unrealised capacity that could come from increasing citizen involvement. Policy capacity is degraded, she argues, because we have systems that are neither deliberative nor representative. Individually these contributions spark their own controversies; together they ask us to consider the question in different ways.     

Balancing Competing Demands: Position Taking and Election Proximity in the European Parliament

Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item‐response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.