This thesis seeks to unravel why and describe how governments continuously tweak or disrupt their bureaucratic machinery.
This thesis, undertaken by a former Victorian public servant, seeks to unravel why and describe how governments continuously tweak or disrupt their bureaucratic machinery, not only to the detriment of the institutional memory, expertise, effectiveness and trustworthiness of the public service but also, ironically, to their own capacity to deliver their political agenda.
Machinery of government, or ‘MoG’, refers to the way government functions and responsibilities are allocated and structured across departments and agencies and a MoG change to the reorganisation of these structures. The decision to MoG is the uncontested sole prerogative of the first minister alongside allocating ministerial portfolios, and is made without Cabinet input or documentation, putting these decisions behind an impenetrable curtain of secrecy. Despite numerous historical, analytical and logical-deductive studies, little of the MoG literature seeks to capture the beliefs, governing narratives and motivations of first ministers and their inner circles when making these entirely volitional decisions.
My doctoral thesis draws on Rhodes’ interpretive political science and the methodology and methods of interpretive historical ethnography to pull back the MoG curtain despite the lack of direct observation. Drawing on scholarly, official and journalistic sources, 50 semi-structured interviews with elite political and bureaucratic actors, and autoethnographic observations from my own career, the study tells ‘my story of their stories’ for Victorian premiers across five administrations over 40 years. I find that, whether well-intentioned or not and whether conceptualised by the decision-maker as driven by policy, politics or administrative considerations, MoGs are always political solutions to political problems. There are grounds for concern about the consequences for good government when the MoG prerogative seems to be accompanied by ‘MoG amnesia’, repetitive performative signalling of newness, obliviousness to the costs and harms of MoGs, and increasing disengagement from the Westminster idea of a non-partisan bureaucracy
Speaker Biography:
Monica Pfeffer spent 27 years in the Victorian Government, followed by 12 years at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government building bridges between public servants, new research and new ideas coming from universities, public intellectuals and civil society. As a public servant she worked on, inter alia, income security and State concessions, women’s policy and family violence, social justice, ageing, disability, health reform, health inequalities, diversity, poverty and social (in)exclusion, Indigenous Affairs and youth justice. She has lived through several different political regimes and what felt like innumerable machinery of government changes.
Panel:
Associate Professor Michael Di Francesco (Primary Supervisor), Professor Carolyn Hendriks (Associate Supervisor), Associate Professor Maria Maley (Associate Supervisor)
Event Speakers
