New Public Management and Industrial Relations in the Australian Public Service: an Overview

The New Public Management (NPM) is the label applied to a literature which posits the need to recast the management of public bureaucracies on the lines of business enterprises. This approach has been adopted in the Australian Public Service (APS). While the roots of reform can be traced back to the 1975 Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (RCAGA), the reform process has accelerated since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996. This paper sets out the key principles of NPM and the predicted implications for the employment relationship. It then examines the APS reform process and employment outcomes. We conclude on the available but limited evidence that there are significant centralist deviations from the NPM model and that in the more recent period of reform increasing emphasis has been placed on efficiency at the expense of equity.