ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three initiatives aimed at improving resource management each emerging in the 1980s. One was a top-down, service-wide Financial Management Improvement Program (FMIP), intended to provide better management performance through an integrated resource framework. The second involved a series of bottom-up, technical refinements to administrative budgets— producing consolidated appropriations for 'running costs arrangements'. The third initiative involved the use of program evaluation and completed the package by asking whether governments received value for money. The FMIP was conceived and developed in 1982-83 and progressively introduced from 1983-84. Labor's first Finance Minister, John Dawkins, made a number of increasingly firm commitments toward the FMIP after the findings of the Diagnostic Study were released, indicating that the government would proceed to implement FMIP in April 1984. The program was overseen by a select steering committee established in June 1983 and composed of a chair plus other senior officials from line departments and a representative from the Auditor-General's Office.
