Reinventing civil servants: Public management development and education to meet the managerialist challenge in Australia

Abstract

IntroductionAustralia has been engaged in a comprehensive process of federal civil service reform for more than 20 years [1][2][3][4][5][6]. It began in the 1970s, when the long undisturbed Australian Public Service (APS) was confronted with a major review process and with a set of administrative law reforms. Soon after gaining office, the Hawke Labor Government (1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991) introduced radical administrative reforms, under the influence of economic rationalists, who were the dominant professional group in APS management and who advocated "managerialism", "commercialization", "deregulation", "corporatization" and "privatization" as their key reform strategies [7][8][9][10][11]. By so doing Australia followed, albeit somewhat idiosyncratically, the path of public sector reform first articulated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and repeated, in various shades, in New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere [1,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].By the mid-1980s APS agencies began to feel dramatic change. First, they had to achieve cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness in all that they did. Second, serious efforts were made to identify and deal with inefficiencies in budgetfunded service delivery. Finally, pressures built up for the adoption of business practices that would achieve productivity improvements, lower costs, generate more extra-budgetal revenue and improve customer services.The purpose of this paper is to examine the 20-year metamorphosis of the APS's traditional, passive and non-directive, almost dilettante approach to management development into a proactive, directive and systematic approach that involved the acquisition of articulated management competences, in part by means of employer-financed, post-experience public management education. Management development in the Australian public serviceThe traditional approach The traditional approach to public management development in the APS reflected the sacrosanctity of two long-held principles. First, that the APS could be administered by the application of common sense by reasonably educated people. Second, that any administrative and policy-advising techniques, concepts, paradigms and information required were best learned on-the-job, with experience as the teacher, augmented by appropriate administrative