Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
sectors. Consequently, they also questioned their capacity to manage these issues
through traditional bureaucratic structures and methods. 22 Perceptions that the
public service had become ‘a self-contained elite exercising power in the interests
of the status quo but without effectively being accountable for its exercise’ 23 led to
reviews and changes that aimed to restore ministerial control.
The most important set of public sector practices and values that emerged
in the 1980s and 1990s is collectively described as the new public management
(NPM), and is still highly influential today. NPM aimed to make government more
efficient and effective, based on ideas derived from economic theory and business
management techniques. Its proponents called for the public sector’s monopoly
over policy making and service delivery to be removed or at least reduced. (The
Howard government’s minister for administrative services applied a ‘yellow pages’
test: if a business was listed in the business phone directory, the minister argued
thattherewasnoreasonwhyitshouldbeprovidedbygovernment.) 24
Instead, the NPM’s objectives included giving users more choice in the services
they received, making more use of market-type competition, and foreshadowed
a program of widespread privatisations and the separation of service delivery
agencies from their parent policy departments. They called for a greater focus
on financial incentives and transparent performance management in public sector
organisation. 25 The classic NPM text Reinventing government 26 coined the phrase
‘steering, not rowing’ to advocate less involvement by the public sector in actually
delivering services and more focus on policy making and on the choice and design
of such services. 27
A summary of NPM’s characteristics, such as ‘disaggregation, competition and
incentivization’, 28 is provided in Table 1. In practice, NPM was not always adopted
forthesamereasonsanddidnotalwaysconsistofthesamepolicymixwhen
implemented. 29
22 Other potential explanations of NPM point to more endogenous developments within
bureaucracies themselves, such as the impact of new technologies that allowed work to be
refashioned along private sector lines.
23 Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (1976), quoted in Wanna and
Weller 2003, 87.
24 Aulich and O’Flynn 2007, 160.
25 Hood 1991, 5.
26 Osborne and Gaebler 1992.
27 Denhardt and Denhardt 2015, 11; Osborne and Gaebler 1992, 32; Pollitt 2002, 276.
28 Dunleavy et al. 2006.
29 Dunleavy et al. 2006; Hood 1995; Pollitt 2002; Pollitt 1995.
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