 It is a great honour to deliver this year's A&U Emeritus Faculty lecture and I very much appreciate the faculty's acceptance of me as a member. My formal academic credentials are in fact quite limited but the university has recognised my contributions as a practitioner over many years as well as my writings before and after leaving the Australian Public Service. I am what the Americans call a pracademic, still learning to be a scholar. I'll take this opportunity to reflect on a lot of the work I've done both before and since joining the A&U in 2005. I'll touch on public management developments I was directly involved in between the 1970s and 2000s as a practitioner and also on my subsequent writings on public administration developments in Australia and overseas. One of the continuing challenges is to identify shifting paradigms in public administration. Not just the changing fads and fashions but the underlying ideologies and the intellectual ideas that have framed past developments and those that may or even should shape future challenges and that's what I wish to canvas today. Let me start by exploring the term neoliberal. Is it a meaningful descriptor of the ideas behind the era of public sector reform we have witnessed over the last 40 years? I've never felt comfortable with the term. It is rarely defined and is most often used pejoratively to dismiss any of a myriad of policies and practices the user of the term dislikes. I've highlighted that it is not a term ever used by practitioners whether they be politicians or bureaucrats. Jim Joes chides me about the relevance of this observation noting that it is still appropriate for scholars to describe the dominant ideological and intellectual ideas that comprise a milieu within which the activities of practitioners take place even if the practitioners don't do so themselves. Fair point. But that still leads the criticism Peter Schergold and I have about the lack of clarity over the ideological and intellectual ideas that underpin neoliberalism. Schergold draws attention to the very different ideas that historically have surrounded the term. From the turn of the 20th century when it referred to a position between laissez-faire and state control through the post-World War II years when it emphasized competition in the price mechanism and on to the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era when the term was used to mean state withdrawal and surrender of control to the private sector. Despite the fact that the state has not been rolled back since the 1980s, the term has continued to be used including by critics of Bill Clinton's reinventing government and Tony Blair's Third Way and in Australia by critics of Paul Kelly's the end of certainty in March of the Patriots though he too never uses a term. Let me try to dissect the meaning to the term neoliberal that is not inherently pejorative but is descriptive of at least some of the key intellectual ideas and contributed to policies and practices in government in Australia over the 1980s and 1990s in particular including Peter Schergold, Mike Keating, I do Mike here and I that we might accept as valid if by no means explaining all the reforms we witnessed. This I suggest requires first some examination of liberalism. Liberalism is associated with political philosophers like Locke, Payne and Hume. It is also associated with Adam Smith and economists such as the Mills, Malthus and Ricardo. However the ideas of these original economic liberals are too often today misrepresented. In a wonderful essay written in 1984 Ian Cassel's challenged contemporary assessments of the economists in the 18th and 19th century. They were certainly not conservatives defending the privileges of the rich and powerful. On the contrary, they were the radicals of their day opposed to the protections that gave rise to those privileges. Cassel's carefully dissected the debates between the economists and the anti-economists of the time revealing the extent to which the former were focused not just on personal freedom but also on advancing the interests of the poor. They opposed slavery and championed the rights of women, particularly over birth control. They also advocated for universal education and higher wages for working people. It was the anti-economists who not only supported laws that protected the economic interests of many landowners but also allowed slavery, the subjugation of women and holding down of workers' wages. In so doing the anti-economists stood for maintaining the powers of the upper classes and the church. For the economists back then liberalism was not much about laissez-faire government there was no welfare state at the time to roll back but about a different role for the government. It was certainly about free markets and open trade which required removal of many government restraints at the time but it was also about recognizing new roles for government particularly in education. Liberalism was also concerned about personal freedoms human rights in today's language. After Cassel's death in 2010 I was keen to celebrate his contributions both to public administration and to the discipline of economics. In particular I wanted to bring to a wider audience this extraordinary 15,000 word essay that had never been properly published. I have long speculated why Cassel's then secretary of the Department of Finance wrote this essay. My best guess is that Cassel's wanted to offer their relatively new Hawke Keating government the advice that a Labor government could draw on liberal economics to deliver its progressive agenda doing so more efficiently and effectively than if it shunned the use of markets. Perhaps this Cassel's essay justifies the use of the term liberal to describe some of the key intellectual ideas behind the Hawke Keating government's economic reforms a renewed recognition of the advantages of markets or more broadly what Paul Kelly called the end of certainty with a breaking down of former restraints on non-white immigration free trade and labor markets over a longer period. Importantly the liberal ideas as applied in Australia at least under Hawke and Keating but also for the most part under Howard did not involve the rolling back of the state. Indeed not only was government expenditure maintained as a percent of GDP but significant room was found to improve social security payments for the poor to broaden access to senior secondary and higher education to introduce a more generous and sustainable retirement income system and to invest in the environment. Having accepted that liberalism or economic liberalism as a significant contributor to the reform since the 1980s what about the neo in the neoliberalism? Does neo mean just renewed interest in liberalism or some new variant of liberalism? For some the policies and practices of the 1980s and 1990s were greatly influenced by more recent intellectual ideas particularly public choice theories which emphasise the role of self-interest amongst those involved in politics and government. Arguably these contributed to the views of some conservatives such as Thatcher and Reagan that government was the problem not the solution and that firm action was needed to reduce the size of government and to contain the power and influence of the civil service. Was this the case in Australia? Certainly there was bipartisan concern in the 1970s that the civil service was too independent and insufficiently responsive to the elected government a view endorsed by the Coombs Royal Commission and following the oil shocks there were also concerns amongst some economists here and elsewhere that the size of government was contributing to failures to respond quickly enough to changing circumstances. I recall attending a major OECD conference in 1980 which led to an influential OECD report the welfare of state in crisis. My view at the time was that the OECD exaggerated the problem and in any case the Australian situation with our approach to social security avoided the challenges facing most other OECD countries. While I accept that public choice and related intellectual ideas were in the background in Australia as Australia embarked on its reforms in the 1980s and 1990s I did not perceive distrust of government in the renewed focus on markets and market type mechanisms. As Mike Keating argued the Australian reforms were not really about the role of the state but how the state went about exercising that role. Mike Keating's critics however were concerned not only by the risk of conservative governments using the more market-based approach to wind back the state or the inherent risk of an efficiency equity trade-off but also by the management aspects of the reforms. The neo and neoliberal does not really capture these aspects. Much of the focus of the critics at the time was on managerialism and the increased use of private sector management practices within government as well as the use of the private sector to deliver public services. They were concerned that this would inevitably dilute public sector values and that the emphasis on efficiency might be at the expense of increase in equality. The dominant view amongst my public service peers at least until the late 1990s was that these concerns were exaggerated and that there was little evidence then of increasing inequality. Despite the title of this lecture I remain unconvinced that neoliberalism accurately reflects many of the dominant ideas that drove the reforms from the 1980s. Economic liberalism was certainly important but perhaps managerialism encompasses more of the key trends in public sector management. It is also a more neutral term with its defenders as well as its critics whose views I shall return to shortly. But let me first describe the managerialist measures pursued over the last 40 years. The term... Where else? Sorry. Those things jumped a little bit. Sorry. The term New Public Management was first coined by Christopher Hood in 1991 to describe how the reforms over the previous decade were affecting public management, not just public policies. His article focused on developments in public administration in the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s. While NPM is a loose term, Hood identified seven overlapping precepts associated to varying degrees with the doctrine. Hands-on professional management, explicit standards and measures of performance, greater emphasis on output controls, disaggregation of units in the public sector, greater competition in the public sector, private sector styles of management practice and greater discipline and parsimony in resource use. Hood saw these arising from two sets of ideas. New institutional economics, which led to ideas of a contestability, user choice, transparency and incentive structures and successive waves of business type managerialism. The mix varied, Hood seeing New Zealand more influenced by the first set of ideas and the UK and Australia more by the pragmatic use of the second. While these NPM precepts most clearly represented a break with the past traditional public administration, included the focus on performance for results with less emphasis on input controls and processes, the adoption of private sector management practices with less emphasis on the uniqueness of the public sector and the use of competition to drive efficiency rather than verbarian bureaucratic structures. As Hood noted, the NPM reforms were based in part on the assumption that honesty within the civil service could be assumed without detailed process rules. The coherence of the reforms was really obvious at the time as governments reacted to events deliberating each time on the different options open and inevitably taking decisions involving swings and roundabouts. Australian practitioners, both politicians and bureaucrats focus primarily on pragmatism, not ideology or articulated intellectual ideas. Most measures were incremental, not in themselves involving fundamental shifts and involved compromises. Rarely was the cumulative impact appreciated in advance. The role of competition within public administration and indeed the widespread use of business management practices only emerged clearly in Australia later in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some steps, well short of competition, were taken to improve the performance of GPEs as early as the 1970s with the establishment of telecom Australia and Australia Post's statutory authorities out of the form of PMG. The restructuring of telecom to open up some function to competition really only occurred in the early 1990s. The running costs reforms for government funded organisations that I contributed to in the Department of Finance began in the early 1980s and only gradually opened up opportunities to use competition to drive efficiency. The first step was to amalgamate various line items previously based on specific inputs such as travel or office material or training or salaries to allow our agencies to allocate their administrative expenses or running costs to best advantage in meeting their responsibilities that the idea was let the managers manage. The notional costs of defined benefit and superannuation contributions were later added so that agencies bore the full costs of their employees. This opened up opportunities for agencies to explore whether some activities might be undertaken more efficiently via competitive contracting rather than in-house. An efficiency dividend was also imposed pressuring agencies to identify ways to improve productivity including through competition. The ill-fated move to compulsory contracting out-of-IT services only occurred in the late 1990s. This series of steps was complemented by the series of measures taken to promote more efficient service-wide corporate services in which I was involved when I was Secretary of the Department of Administrative Services briefly in 1993 and 1994 and led eventually to the privatisation or closing down of most of those services Commonwealth cars, property services, construction services and so on. The Defence Commercial Support Programme I was responsible for in the early 1990s also took this competitive approach. Market testing support activities that have long been provided inefficiently by mostly uniform personnel such as catering, maintenance of equipment and supply management. In 1995 the Council of Australian Governments agreed to a national competition policy following the 1993 Hilmer Inquiry promoting competition more widely across the Australian economy including across the public sector. While now seen as a landmark development this too was an incremental step according to the Productivity Commission consolidating and extending reforms over the previous decade. It is also important to recall the range of factors that contributed to the reforms in the 1980s and 1990s in Australia were on which those reforms were built. These include the reform themes arising from the Coombs Royal Commission in 1976 of increased responsiveness to the elected government greater representativeness within the public service of the diversity of Australians and greater openness to the public and the need for improved efficiency. While the MPM measures reinforced Coombs efficiency theme they also built upon much earlier work on program budgeting. In line with Coombs recommendations the first steps taken in the 1980s involved enhancing the use of the budget in the forward estimates and identifying program objectives and measures of performance using a form of program budgeting. The measures pursued in the 1980s were also modified by the continued emphasis on the other two themes from Coombs. Thus for example while Australia did develop quite a lot of management authority we did not follow in full the MPM's agentification agenda that emerged in the UK and New Zealand but retained extensive political oversight of both policy and administration through ministerial departments. Indeed closer political control was a continuing theme through the 1980s and beyond. Another earlier set of reforms that continued as the MPM changes emerged concerned administrative laws that made administrative decisions transparent and open to challenge limiting the MPM shift away from process controls. That is the shift from traditional public administration to MPM was never a complete replacement but involved a significant degree of sedimentation retaining many aspects of previous practices and developments but with a stronger emphasis on efficiency. Nonetheless the MPM measures in Australia attracted some strong criticism during the 1980s. Amongst the criticisms were claims that the reforms failed to appreciate the continuing relevance of the 1854 Northcott Rebellion reports of a professional civil service and Weber's depiction of an efficiently operating bureaucracy. These emphasising structures and processes not just results. These criticisms were largely rejected by key public service leaders at the time who denied any ideological agenda and emphasised the benefits of the focus on management for results in their own continuing adherence to public service values. That was essentially my own view at the time also. I will return later to review our overall experience with managerialism but let me now refer to the issues that began to emerge in Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Issues that also arose in other Anglophone countries that had practiced many of the MPM precepts. These led to important modifications but not rejection of MPM. Perhaps the most significant question at that time was about MPM's reliance on vertical structures. This reliance was seen as an obstacle to addressing problems across organisational boundaries and such problems seemed to be on the increase. The Blair government in the UK coined the term joined up government. The Canadians referred to horizontal management. New Zealand had its return to the centre review and in the early 2000s Australia began to refer to whole of government and connected government. A second related question concerned the transactional nature of some of the relationships under MPM. The strict contractual performance arrangements included underpurchase of provider arrangements and contracting out. Partnerships involving more equal contributions and shared responsibilities over longer timeframes were seen as offering important benefits to overall performance. Associated with this was the idea of accountability downwards and outwards, not just upwards which extended MPM's focus on customers drawn from private sector management ideas. Rod Rhodes identified the practice of networking from his research in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Networking both within government including across levels of government and beyond government represented a shift away from traditional hierarchical government, first as the new right or thatcher drew on markets and then continuing as new labour, Blair emphasised joined up government. Rhodes was one of the first to use the term governance more specifically network governance which is now commonly used to describe the modifications to MPM which emerged in the 2000s. Importantly however from the perspective of the practitioners these modifications did not involve a wholesale rejection of the MPM doctrine. For the most part the precepts identified by Hood in 1991 continued under MPG. In part this was because of evidence including from the Productivity Commissioner of significant gains, particularly in efficiency from the MPM measures taken over the previous decade and more. In Australia the shift to MPG can be seen most clearly in the emphasis on cooperation in both the 2013 amendments to the Public Service Act and the new Public Governance Performance and Accountability Act, PGPA Act of 2014. PGPA Act in fact at the same time strengthened aspects of the MPM doctrine, mandating corporate plans, promoting better risk management and strengthening performance reporting. The use of markets continued in many areas it was extended for profit non-government organisations were assumed to offer more efficient and effective social services than government providers for example childcare, aged care disability and employment services. In some cases consumer choice was also promoted deepening the role of markets. Because the MPG developments preserved much of the shift from traditional public administration it is worth now exploring the broader impact of managerialism and revisiting some of the early criticisms. Hood's original article mentioned some of the contemporary debates over MPM. Hood noted how the MPM measures were most suited to the values of keeping it lean and purposeful and raised the question whether in doing so success would be at the expense of other values particularly honesty and fair dealing and security and resilience. Perhaps it is hard to fully justify these three sets of public sector values using the same administrative designs and perhaps we go through tides as priorities between these three themes change over time. MPM may have delivered impressive gains in efficiency but questions are being raised again as to whether such gains are possible without negative side effects on honesty and fairness and on security and resilience and whether today we should shift our priorities again. John Halligan uses a slightly different framework to identify the overall trends in Anglophone countries over the last 40 years. Referring to three in particular politicisation, managerialism and externalisation. Politicisation is not a core element in Hood's MPM description but it has certainly accompanied MPM developments in Australia since the 1970s and it is clearly apparent in other Anglophone countries. Some early US critics of reinventing government considered that it led necessarily to attacks on the civil service weakening the foundations of a merit-based bureaucracy and leading to continual increases in the number of political appointees, growing reluctance to rely upon the expertise of bureaucrats and the decline of career protections in civil service systems. This was written in 1998. Initially, pursued in response to the widespread view in Australia that the civil service was too independent and sufficiently responsive to the elected government, politicisation encompassed a range of steps to increase the power of the political arm of the executive over the administrative arm. These included the introduction and expansion of ministerial advisers not subject to civil service requirements of merit-based appointments or non-partisanship, gradual weakening of tenured appointments at the top of the civil service, weakening the central public service authority, strengthening prime ministerial control over senior appointments and termination and close to political control of public communications. Getting the balance right is a perennial issue in public administration. The public service must be responsive to the elected government but it must also exercise a degree of independence. Halligan and I have noted the evidence that Australia moved further on politicisation and externalisation than the other anglophone countries and highlighted emerging concerns. These include loss of capability within the APS and serious risk of reduced efficiency and effectiveness as well as integrity concerns. Such concerns were already being identified at the time of the 2010 Moran review and again in the 2019 SODI report. I also raised such concerns in my submissions to SODI and my parliamentary library lecture in 2019 and in my report to the RoboDebt Royal Commission earlier this year. The legislative changes in 2013 and 2014 following Moran were intended in part to address some of these concerns but subsequent developments suggest that they were not successful. Indeed, political pressures on the APS continued to grow after 30 as did the use of contractors, consultants and non-government organizations to deliver public services. Other aspects of managerialism have also been increasingly questioned, particularly the applicability of private sector business practices in public sector management. Performance pay was widely used from the late 1980s and extended in the late 1990s but has been almost totally discarded in the APS over the last decade. This has been partly because of technical issues in applying the rewards fairly but also because of recognition internationally that public service motivation is different and that organizational performance in the public sector may be adversely affected, not enhanced by an emphasis on personal financial rewards. The devolution of pay and conditions to each agency on the premise of enterprise-based productivity bargaining has also proved to be a disaster, one which even now the government and the APS commission have seen. More recent reports and inquiries have also raised serious questions about honesty and integrity within the APS and amongst the external organization it relies upon. These suggest hood was right to ask back in 1991 where the MPM might prove to be at the expense of honesty and fair dealing. A closely related question is whether the devolution of authority and the use of principled space legislation such as the public service act and the procedures such as the Department of Finance and the APS commission. While I was not persuaded by the critics of the 1980s and early 1990s at the time I now appreciate in hindsight that there was substance to some of the concerns. Let me turn therefore to a contemporary reassessment of managerialism. I should commence by endorsing some of its key tenets. In particular a focus on results remains vitally important as does the systematic use of evaluation. The fact however that the focus on results as important as it was led to insufficient depreciation of the continuing importance of processes and inputs. Related to this was it is now clear an unrealistic expectation of political including parliamentary interest in results based performance and holding the government and public service to account primarily for that. A weakness of the MPM approach was not just about the measures adopted or the emphasis on measurable indicators but about the failure to fully appreciate difficulties in defining results or in taking account of trade-offs in performance and the assumption that accountability should focus almost entirely on results. Over 30 years of promoting accountability based on results based performance the parliament still focuses far more on processes and inputs. No doubt the parliament would give more consideration to results if governments were willing to be more candid in their reports and promoted and published more evaluations but processes and inputs are important too. They provide the necessary infrastructure for the achievement results as well as ensuring integrity of the honesty and fairness in hoods terminology and capacity to meet future requirements for security and resilience in hoods terminology. Related to this is another early criticism that the MPM advocates did not appreciate sufficiently the continuing relevance of Northcott Trevelyan principles of a professional civil service nor of the benefits of Verbarian bureaucracies. These rely heavily on processes and structures including the merit principle. I was not persuaded at the time that the measures we were pursuing might be inconsistent with such principles but with hindsight it has become increasingly clear to me that over time merit has lost its central status as has neutrality. The latter has led not so much to direct partnership but to what Canadian Peter a coin called promiscuous partisanship, the willingness to so please those currently in power as to disregard impartial policy advice and administration. There is also a dangerous blurring of public service and private sector values. Should we assume the private sector with its profits based values can deliver any public service effectively or are they public services that require the unique values of the public service and are we investing sufficiently in public service oversight drawing on its values to ensure those services that are delivered by the private sector are fair and inclusive. The use of competition particularly of corporate services has delivered considerable efficiency gains. That said there was naivety about the capacity of the APS to manage contracts and an underestimate of the impact of hollowing out expertise on the ability to be an informed purchaser. Even when competition leads to efficiency gains sustaining those gains relies upon continuing abilities as informed purchases. A related issue was the uneven capacity to regulate non-government service providers in quasi markets such as childcare and aged care which requires consideration of quality and affordability and the financial viability of providers as well as their effectiveness. Subjecting policy advising to competition has also too often involved not genuine competition for ideas but less worthy competition for the year of ministers and decision makers. At a broader level there is some validity in the arguments of early critics about the assumptions of so-called economic rationalists. I was aware back then of the debates in the 1950s and 1960s between Lindblom seeing a science in muddling through and Yaheskel draw advocating rational decision making to address muddling through's policy inertia. While I supported the results based approach I recognised that there were other legitimate means to develop policies and to assess performance. Few colleagues did so and I realise now I too inclined towards a naive belief in rationality. The emphasis on efficiency sustained now for over 40 years has also contributed to the current malaise but even here I'm reluctant to fully endorse the views of critics. Some efficiency measures have certainly been crude particularly the efficiency dividend adversely affecting the capability of many mostly smaller organisations to maintain quality services for the public. The challenge is how to maintain reasonable pressures for continuous improvement and efficiency while also protecting capability and integrity. Finally it is important to recognise the many exogenous forces affecting government administration. The world is different today from that in 1980 as is the public service. Perhaps the best illustration of this is that in 1980 around 55% of Commonwealth public servants were at classifications equivalent today to the lowest two levels and there are now just 5% of service at those classification. 55% now 5%. The biggest driver of this change is technology though commercialisation and contracting out is likely also contributed. On the positive side we now have a much more graduate public service. On the other side I strongly suspect there has been considerable classification creep adding to costs and under utilising the skills and knowledge of all junior staff as well as a shift away from technical and professional expertise towards general skills. In summary my assessment is not that the managerial measures were taken were wrong but that they went too far. Important balances were lost. Too much politicisation and not enough emphasis on merit and neutrality. Too much contracting out and not enough consideration of internal capability and where public service values are essential. Too much private sector management approaches and insufficient attention to public service motivation and values such as impartiality merit and inclusion. These have all contributed to a loss of capability. In addition I suspect we have not adjusted to technological and other exogenous forces as well as we should have exacerbating capability weaknesses. Some others have taken their criticism a lot further suggesting the measures pursued since the 1980s undervalued the role of the state giving too much benefits of markets into the dangers of government failure. On this view the shift to NPG from NPM only modified the focus on markets and continue to diminish the role of the state. I'm yet to be convinced this is a serious issue in Australia but nor should it be totally ignored. Governability and the capacity of the state has been the focus of considerable literature overseas since the 1970s. That literature has noted the more limited degree to which NPM and NPG were pursued outside the Anglophone countries despite the pressure from organisations like the OECD and the World Bank. While elements of the NPM and NPG agendas have been pursued in European and the Nordic countries the story of recent reforms there is complex. Countries with a Napoleonic tradition seem to have preserved a stronger role for the state in the use of the Burian bureaucracies. In the face of more recent populace attacks on the role of the state there have been calls amongst public education scholars for further modification of managerialism and reinvestment in the state. A rebalancing of reforms which I believe we also should examine as we look to the future. A range of possibilities for future international trends have been identified in recent years. Some as predictions and others as preferred outcomes. These include Decentred Governance as suggested by Rose and Bervia taking networks further, moving away from institutions to groups of people and their beliefs and practices and stories and highlighting the importance of local knowledge and the diversity of policymaking and its exercise. Digital Era Governance is suggested by Patrick Dunleavy involving further reintegration made possible by digital technologies simplification of relationships between agencies and their clients and digitalization where the agency becomes its website. And a neo-Burian state as advocated by Christopher Pollot and Geert Burkhart involving reinvestment in government to be more professional more efficient and more responsive to citizens. Business like methods playing a subsidiary role while the state remains a distinctive character with its own rules, methods and culture. There are some signs in Australia of support for each of these options. Place based management is receiving some attention particularly with regard to services for indigenous communities and to the need for community involvement and control and listening to their stories consistent with Rhodes suggestions. More broadly, Thody recommended that more attention be paid to partnerships between government in the private and non-profit sectors and across governments. Canadian Jocelyn Burgon had previously suggested that the public sector should draw on more of the collective power of civil society and look to live the civic results and society resilience not just specific policy results in what she termed a new synthesis that attracted considerable interest in Australia at the time. Janine O'Flynn here at ANU has noted the importance of partnerships in the response to COVID-19 and their continued importance to address complex problems and support resilience. Thody also gives considerable attention to the potential benefits from digital technology, advocating more investment and the development of a digital expert profession within the APS. This is also central to Thody's push for one APS and to the recent badging of services Australia. As mentioned earlier, technology has had an immense impact on the public sector and society. There seems little doubt it will continue to have a major impact. More on Thody, both refer to the need to improve capability within government, perhaps reflecting aspects of Pollock and Buchat's NWS model. More recent scandals over robo debt, grants administration, consultancies and the personal behaviour of some senior public service have also led to widespread calls for greater integrity in the public service and greater emphasis on public service failures. Perhaps more likely than a single new paradigm is some combination of all three options, plus continuation of aspects of MPM and MPG, that's sedimentation of perspective. But I'm particularly interested in exploring a little bit further the NWS model. As described by Buchat, the NWS model encompasses so-called verbarian elements such as the reaffirmation of the role of the state as the main facilitator of solutions to the new problems of globalisation, technological change and environmental threats. Reaffirmation of the role of representative democracy as a legitimating element within the state, reaffirmation of the role of administrative law and preservation of the idea of a public service with a distinctive status culture and perhaps less than in the past terms and conditions. The NIO elements Buchat suggests are the shift from internal orientation towards an external orientation that meets citizens needs and preferences. This achieved not through market mechanisms as a rule, but through the creation of professional culture of quality and service. Supplementation of the role of representative democracy by a range of devices for consultation and direct representation. Greater orientation on the achievement of results and professionalisation of the public service as managers as well as experts in the law relevant to their sphere of activity. I doubt Australia will experience a full blown shift to NWS or European approaches but a serious correction to some of the major developments under MPM and MPG in Australia is certainly needed. Involving the renewed appreciation of Northgate Travillian principles for the civil service and appreciation of the role of bureaucracies in the state. These include placing more emphasis on public service values and drawing much more on public participation. Challenging assumptions of the inevitability of bureaucratic self-interest and rational choice. Not contracting out where public service values such as impartiality, commitment to the public interest and merit-based employment are important. Firm or accountability for processes, behaviours and inputs, not just outputs and outcomes. Including reducing reliance on principles by strengthening the role of regulators such as the APS Commissioner, Attorney General's Department and the Government. Returning to a career-based public service with firm or merit-based appointments and removal of term-based contracts. Clarifying the roles and accountabilities of ministerial staff and limiting their number. More selective and tailored use of private business management practices, recognizing the distinct character of public service management, this includes more care and promoting mobility between the public and private sectors and within the public sector and revisiting executive remuneration in the public sector. I very much doubt any widespread retreat from using non-government organizations to deliver public services such as aged care, childcare, disability services and employment services. More likely I suspect is the further use of partnerships. In that case what is required is increased effort to improve how we manage private sector including NGO providers. Recent experience not only with the NDIS but also with aged care and childcare has revealed serious challenges involved in managing partnerships in quasi markets. Defense experience also reveals challenges in managing longer term partnerships even where markets are more mature given the differences in values and interests. I would emphasize the need for transparency and accountability and clarification of the role and capability of government to manage the partnerships in the public interest. Not necessarily a bigger bureaucracy but a much smarter one with a clear understanding of its values. Let's pass that one. While my main focus has been on the public service and on the delivery of social services the corrections I am recommending are also relevant to other parts of the public sector including universities. While Weber's separation of facts and values may be difficult today there is reason for concern about the extent of blurring of boundaries between the role of scholars and the role of politicians and their economic advisors focusing on the returns on investments in higher education both for individual students and for the economy. This is not to deny the importance of professional management of the enormous financial resources dedicated to higher education and the usefulness of some private sector style management techniques. But in recent years we have seen how performance management can distort understanding of the role of universities and lead to gaming as well as contributing to excessive administration activity and excessive executive pay at the expense of teaching and research. There is a case for correction like that required for the public service to recognise and value the unique role and culture of scholars and the universities. Let me conclude. I remain uncomfortable with the term neoliberal because it is really defined and too often used pejoratively about any measure taken over the last 40 years that the use of the term dislikes. But I am willing to assign myself up to being liberal influenced by the economic reformers of two centuries ago who advocated not only for more open and free markets but also for other measures to advance the well-being and liberties of all citizens including in particular the poor. I suspect most of my colleagues involved in the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s felt and still feel the same way that the balance of their personal political views no doubt pair is. This was not about rolling back the state but about more efficient and effective ways to achieve the government's economic, social and environmental objectives. The measures pursued however were not only about widening the use of markets but also about new management methods. The managerial agenda achieved quite a lot too but in hindsight it is clear that insufficient attention was given to potential downsides. Some critics at the time identified these though I still consider that most of them failed to recognise the gains the reforms were genuinely achieving. Some adjustments have been made over the years to address some of the downsides but I believe a much more significant improvement is needed. We have gone way too far with politicisation and externalisation though I recognise the importance of serving the elected government and the benefits of utilising external expertise and management reforms continue to draw too heavily on private sector practice. We need to renew appreciation of Westminster principles and the role and values of the civil service and those of other parts of the public sector. More effort is also needed to rebuild technical and professional expertise. Such a correction may not go as far as European advocates of a neo-verbarian state prefer but steps in that direction are required. My own expectation is that partnering will continue to grow in importance but calibrated by more careful management which will require revitalised understanding of public service failures ensuring the partnerships work in the public interest. I do not have a neat title for the shift I am seeking or for the paradigm that is likely to emerge whether I like it or not but central to a more effective government in the future is increased investment in public sector capability and increased respect for the institutions of government and their roles. Thank you.