Over a decade ago, Janine O'Flynn (2008) pondered whether we were witnessing a 'collaborative turn' in public policy or merely 'the latest fad to penetrate the Public Service'? Interrogating the 'rhetoric and reality' of collaboration discourses in Australian public policy, O'Flynn (2008: 184) proposed: Collaboration has become so central to our conversations about public policy that few see the need to either define it or unpack what it means: collaboration has truly become part of the Zeitgeist. She went on to conclude that, at best, 'we could be at the beginning of some evolutionary process that will propel us, in time, towards more genuinely collaborative approaches' (O'Flynn 2008: 191). Separately, a report provided by KPMG to the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department suggested that-despite the potential to use competition to influence cost, quality and productivity and get better value for money-a purely market-based model might lead to fragmented services, reduced accountability, impaired coordination and disincentives for collaboration (KPMG 2016). Repeated efforts to reform the bureaucratic, administrative state throughout the twentieth century have largely focused on making government bureaucracy more effective and efficient in its operations (Forrer et al. 2014: 214-15). In the 1980s, new public management (NPM) promoted greater creativity, flexibility and innovation in approaches to the delivery of public goods and services. NPM sought to 'reinvent' government by reducing or redefining the role of the state, encouraging privatisation and competition, using private sector expertise, becoming more customerfocused, decentralising authority, becoming more outcome-oriented and creating more transparency and accountability for results (Forrer et al. 2014: 217). What NPM did not do was challenge the basic presumptions of the bureaucratic model (Forrer et al. 2014: 216).