Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
introduction of market-style mechanisms to procure services via competitive
tendering processes led to greater co-option of the not-for-profit sector in
delivering public policies. The latter is now a major partner of the public sector, to
an extent, Alford and O’Flynn argue, that ‘would have been unrecognizable’ forty
years ago. 37
Beyond new public management
No single paradigm of public sector reform has emerged to dominate the early
decades of the new century in the way NPM dominated the closing decades of the
last. Instead, a number of influential and interrelated directions are emerging that
respond to, and in some cases reverse, NPM’s main tenets.
A new model of public sector organisation that Osborne and others have called
the ‘new public governance’ recognises that the complexity of citizens’ needs is
not well handled by NPM’s separation of policy and service delivery agencies and
widespread adoption of contractual service delivery through the private and notfor-profit
sectors.
The ‘whole of government’, collaborative and customer-centric approach that
reponds to these problems forms part of a broader movement towards the new
public governance. This is characterised by the public sector working in partnership
and through networks with other sectors to deliver public services, on the one
hand, and multiple processes allowing for input from interest groups, citizens
and stakeholders to inform policy making, on the other. 38 This pluralistic model
encompasses the concept of ‘co-production’, 39 in which policy making and delivery
ismanagedandgovernednotonlybyprofessionalandmanagerialstaffinpublic
agencies but also by citizens and communities. 40
Digital era governance harnesses new technologies in service delivery,
administration and communications and the use of social media by bureaucrats
and the public for policy input and service delivery. Proponents of digital era
governance are critical of NPM’s tendency to encourage, as they see it, ‘management
attitudes obsessed with intermediate organizational objectives rather than
service delivery or effectiveness’. 41 Advocates argue that information technology is
transforming the relationship between governments, bureaucracies and the public
through the reintegration of public services; needs-based, simpler and more agile
37 Alford and O’Flynn 2012, 8; Butcher and Gilchrist 2016, 5.
38 Greve 2015, 50; Osborne 2010, 9.
39 Or, in some views, has led to its revival as a cost-cutting aspect of NPM (Nabatchi, Sancino and
Sicilia 2017, 767).
40 Meijer 2016. Although not untroubled, the introduction of Australia’s ‘My Health Record’ and
the role of the Australian Capital Territory’s Citizen’s Jury in devising a new Compulsory Third
Party Insurance Scheme are contemporary examples of such co-production.
41 Dunleavy et al. 2006, 471–2.
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