Administrative reform and management improvement

The rhetoric and practices of administrative reform and management improvement in Australian public bureaucracies in the early to mid-1980s deserve critical scrutiny not least because of the virtually universal legitimacy accorded to them. The very language of administrative reform and management improvement invites immediate approbation and the willing suspension of disbelief. In hindsight, and from the vantage point of the late 1980s, it is possible to appreciate the inevitability of the Labor-led governments in the Commonwealth and four of the States adopting this rhetoric of administrative reform and management improvement in the first half of the 1980s. The extent of divergence, convergence, tension or conflict between these different administrative reform agendas depends on the politics of those who are leading and implementing the agendas.