Fred Argy, a former high level policy adviser to several Federal governments, has written extensively on the interaction between social and economic issues. His focus in recent articles has been on the efficiency and distributional dimensions of equality of opportunity, employment policy and economic freedom. His most recent papers are ‘Equality of opportunity in Australia — myth and reality’ (Discussion paper no. 85, April 2006); ‘Employment Policy and the clash of values’ (Journal of Public Policy, volume 1, number 2, 2006); ‘Distribution effects of labour deregulation’ (Agenda, Volume 14, Number 2, 2007, pages 141-155) and ‘Economic Freedom — the good and the ugly’, (Australian Quarterly, v.79, no.5, Sept-Oct 2007: 33-39).
John Butcher is a research associate with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in the Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University. He coordinates the production of the ANZSOG Monograph series published by the ANU E Press. He has worked as a policy analyst for Commonwealth and State central and line agencies and as a performance analyst for the Australian National Audit Office.
Anna Clark is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in history education at Monash University. With Stuart Macintyre, she wrote the History Wars in 2003, published by Melbourne University Press, and in 2005 published Convicted!, a history book for children, published by Pan MacMillan. Her PhD thesis, Teaching the Nation, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2006 and examines debates about teaching Australian history in schools. Her latest book History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom (UNSW Press, 2008), is based on her postdoctoral research and uses interviews with 250 history teachers, students and curriculum officials from around Australia. Anna hopes to continue researching areas of history and national identity in the future.
Michael de Percy is a lecturer in government-business relations at the University of Canberra where he is also a doctoral candidate. His thesis focuses on the impact of the government-business relationship in deploying broadband infrastructure in Canada and Australia. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College Duntroon and was previously the principal of a Canberra-based consulting firm specialising in government financial management. Before taking his current appointment, he consulted on strategic management issues with small-medium enterprises in the telecommunications industry.
Richard Evans is a journalist and an academic. He has worked on newspapers and legal magazines, and was a lecturer in journalism at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His work has appeared in HQ, Quadrant, the Age, Overland and The Republican, and been broadcast on ABC Radio National. His book, Constructing Australia, published by Melbourne University Press in 2007, tells the dramatic story of political turmoil, private tragedy and conflict that lie at the heart of three epic engineering events in Australia's history: the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Perth-Kalgoorlie Pipeline and the Overland Telegraph.
Ian Marsh holds the ANZSOG Chair of Public Management at the University of Sydney. Professor Marsh, a former Senior Fellow of the Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, took up his chair at Sydney in early 2005. A graduate of the Kennedy School of Government, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Professor Marsh was formerly an Associate Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management, Research Director of the Liberal Party of Australia, and Associate of McKinsey & Co, and Private Secretary to the Minister for Defence. Professor Marsh is author of several books, including Beyond the Two Party System: Political Representation, Economic Competitiveness and Australian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Into the Future: The Neglect of the Long Term in Australian Politics (with David Yencken, Black Inc. 2005) and three edited collections: Australian Political Parties in Transition? (Federation Press, 2006), Democracy Governance and Regionalism in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2006) and Globalisation and the People (with Jean Blondel, Takashi Inoguchi and Richard Sinnott, Routledge, 2006).
Professor Lyndsay Neilson is currently on leave from the Victorian Government, advising the government of Dubai on the future management of urban Dubai, and the government of Saudi Arabia on the future development of Riyadh, the national capital city. Professor Neilson holds the position of Under-Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in Victoria, and was Secretary of the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment from 2002 to 2006 and Secretary of the Department of Infrastructure from 2000 to 2002. He was previously Director of the Centre for Developing Cities at the University of Canberra and Deputy Secretary in the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Regional Development. At the time of the initiation of the Better Cities Program he was Chief Executive of the National Capital Planning Authority in Canberra. He has extensive experience in Australia and internationally in urban research, planning and management consultancy, public policy development and public administration.
Michael is a Professor of Sociology at UNSW and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Michael left school at 15 and worked in Tasmania as a photographer, a farm labourer and a shop assistant before studying at the Sorbonne and later at the University of Melbourne. He was a school teacher in Tasmania before moving to The United States where he completed his doctoral studies in sociology at Harvard University. Over the last 20 years at the University of New South Wales Michael has taught on social theory, the media and the public sphere, economic ideas, and, most recently, on quality of life in Australia. He was listed in 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of Australia’s top 100 public intellectuals. His theoretical and research interests have focussed on quality of life, on the experience of time, on trust and civil society, and the changing nature of political and economic culture in Australia. In the early 1990s Michael Pusey's book Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind, started a national debate on economic rationalism and brought the term into public usage. It showed how Canberra had been taken over by 'economic rationalists' and warned of the economic and social costs of free market economic reform. Since then he has been studying how Australians experience markets and economic structures. His most recent book, The Experience of Middle Australia, examines the impact of economic restructuring on incomes, jobs, families, communities, politics and Australian culture.
Anthony Shepherd is Chairman of the Board of Directors, Transfield Services, a leading international provider of operations, maintenance, asset management and project management services. He was first appointed a Director in March 2001. He is also Chairman of the ConnectEast Group, the public company which is developing the $3.8bn EastLink Tollroad in Melbourne. Anthony began his career in the Public Service in 1963, when he joined the Federal Department of Supply. In 1974 he started with the Pipeline Authority, eventually moving to the position of Assistant Secretary before joining Transfield Group in 1979. He was Bid Manager for the successful bid for the ANZAC Warships Project in 1988/1989 and in 1989 became the inaugural Chief Executive Officer of the Infrastructure Development Corporation Pty Limited (IDC). IDC was established by the then State Authorities Superannuation Board, State Bank of NSW and Perry Development Finance Group as a company which advised and assisted the private sector in developing public infrastructure. He was an executive of the Transfield Holdings Group and Chief Executive Officer of its Project Development Division until 2000. Anthony was responsible for the Sydney Harbour Tunnel Project, Melbourne CityLink Project, as well as a number of other build-own-operate transfer (BOOT) projects and the redevelopment of Walsh Bay. He chaired the consortium which won the Lane Cove Tunnel Project and was an inaugural Director of Transurban Limited. He is a Trustee of The Sydney Cricket Ground and a member of the Premier’s (NSW) Business Roundtable.
John Wanna is the Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration at the Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University. He is the director of research for the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). The author or editor of 17 books, John Wanna has produced a number of research-based studies on budgeting and financial management including: Budgetary Management and Control (1990); Managing Public Expenditure (2000), From Accounting to Accountability (2001), and most recently Controlling Public Expenditure (2003). His most recent books include Yes Premier: Labor Leadership in Australia’s State and Territories, and Westminster Legacies: Democracy and Responsible Government in Asia and the Pacific. He was a chief investigator in a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded study of the ‘Future of Governance in Australia’ (1999-2001) and is currently chief investigator of the ARC funded project ‘Improving Decision Making in Government Service Delivery’. His research interests include Australian and comparative politics, public expenditure and budgeting, and government-business relations.
Dr Robert Wooding is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania. He has been working on a book about the history, society and governance of inland Australia, with a particular emphasis on the West Darling region. Previously, he had a career of close to two decades in the Australian Public Service in Canberra, mostly at the senior executive level in the departments of Health and Ageing, Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Dr Wooding has a PhD in History from the University of Sydney on the politics of re-planning the Indian city under colonial rule. Dr Wooding has recently taken up a senior advisor position within the Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Water Resources in Canberra.