Andrew Podger’s monograph, The Role of Departmental Secretaries, Personal reflections on the breadth of responsibilities today, is an important contribution to the broader public policy discourse in Australia. Andrew has been, at times, an unflinching commentator on issues of bureaucratic performance, accountability and responsiveness to government. Andrew’s reflections are drawn from his own experiences within the inner circle of Australian policy-making. In this monograph, he presents a highly nuanced portrait of the role of Commonwealth departmental secretaries.

This volume of essays represents the first systematic attempt to explore the use of the past in the making of citizenship and immigration policy in Australia and New Zealand. Focussing on immigration and citizenship policy in Australia and New Zealand, the contributions to this volume explore how history and memory are implicated in policy making and political debate, and what processes of remembering and forgetting are utilised by political leaders when formulating and defending policy decisions.

Fiducial Governance: An Australian republic for the new millennium represents an attempt to grapple with the challenges of designing governance regimes suited to the new millennium. Power’s monograph asserts the need for the reform of Australian governance and charts Australia’s fitful progress towards a republican future. Along the way he sketches a framework for constitutional reform, mindful of the strengths and weaknesses of the current system of government and the contest of ideas about the role and configuration of Australian Heads of State.

This edited collection examines Commonwealth administration under the leadership Prime Minister Kevin Rudd from 2007-2010. This was a remarkable period in Australian history: Rudd’s government was elected in 2007 with an ambitious program for change. However, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, these ambitions were thwarted by a range of factors, not the least being Rudd’s failure to press ahead when he confronted ‘road blocks’ such the ETS or managing his massive agenda which constantly elevated issues to ‘first order priority’.

Predictable and unpredictable challenges continually confront the policy settings and policy frameworks of governments. They provide a constantly changing dynamic within which policy-making operates. Governments at all levels are asking their public services to identify innovative and workable reforms to anticipate and address these challenges. Public service leaders around the world are struggling not only to better anticipate emerging demands but also to address reform backlogs.

Before television, radio, and later the internet came to dominate the coverage of Australian politics, the Canberra Press Gallery existed in a world far removed from today’s 24-hour news cycle, spin doctors and carefully scripted sound bites.

This historical memoir of a career reporting from The Wedding Cake of Old Parliament House offers a rare insider’s perspective on both how the gallery once operated and its place in the Australian body politic.

Australia lacks a scholarly book that covers recent developments in public sector governance in Australia and blends cross-disciplinary perspectives from law, management, public administration and public policy. The primary reason for writing this book is to fill the gap in the treatment of this subject, and to provide insights from empirical evidence and current practice.

This collection brings methods and questions from humanities, law and social sciences disciplines to examine different instances of lawmaking. Contributors explore the problematic of past law in present historical analysis across indigenous Australia and New Zealand, from post-Franco Spain to current international law and maritime regulation, from settler colonial humanitarian debates to efforts to end cruelty to children and animals. They highlight problems both national and international in their implication.

This book examines the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of Australian cabinet ministers. It examines the sorts of jobs ministers do, what is expected of them, what they expect of the job and how they (are supposed to) work together as a team. It considers aspects of how they are chosen to become ministers; how they are scrutinised by parliament and the media; and how ministers themselves view accountability. It also looks at the causes of calls for ministers to resign, examines scandals around ministers and assesses ministerial accountability.

From 1950, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Māori women became nationally or internationally renowned. Few reached the heights of international fame accorded Evonne Goolagong or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and few remained household names for any length of time. But their growing numbers and visibility reflected the dramatic social, cultural and political changes taking place in Australia and New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century.