Public Administration and the AWB Affair - setting the scene

In my last post on the AWB Affair, I suggested that a major issue for me was the way the affair suggested the existence of systemic problems in our system of public administration and that I might write something on the history of the affair from that perspective.

In doing so, I would like to make the material accessible to people outside Australia as well as those in the country with limited knowledge of the way Government works.

In addition, those who read this blog regularly will know that I use my posts to develop ideas and to expose them to public test, then moving on. In writing, I draw from previous posts, pointing to interlinks between ideas, modifying ideas as necessary

So in forming my preliminary views on Cole, I was influenced by the previous posts I had written looking at changes in Australian public administration in a global context. I thought therefore that I should provide a brief overview of them.

This current public administration stream really began with my confessions of a policy adviser series in which I planned to use elements of my own career to point and counterpoint between broader change processes and my own experience. However, I put that aside for the moment because I needed to do some background work.

So far there have been four background posts:

• Changes in Public Administration - Notes. This post sets a broader context and looks at the raise and fall of the welfare state under the impact of the 1970s oils shocks combined with the rise of alternative views.
• Publish or Perish - where did the this phrase come from? This post look at the rise of citation indexes as an example of the interest in measurement that forms a key element of modern approaches.
• Changes in Public Administration - the New Zealand Model. This post looked the rise of Thatcherism, the development and implementation of the New Zealand model and the transfer of its ideas to Australia .
  NSW Ten Year Plan - praiseworthy but flawed reviews a current example of planning approaches displaying New Zealand features..

Finally, a snippet of interest for all those with some interest in the Australian Government.

The Australian system is still remarkably transparent notwithstanding recent War on Terror related changes. Here most Australians do not know that the Australian Government maintains a good on-line directory on structure, organisations and key people at national government level.