Public Policy and Administration

Abstract

Australians, suggested Alan F. Davies, exhibit a ‘characteristic talent’ for bureaucracy. A people who pride themselves as laconic larrikins nonetheless prove adept at administration, constructing a ‘nationai government machine’ which is ‘thoroughly professional at the core’, able to draw nourishment from an ‘envelope of representative democracy’. Such an achievement, concludes Davies, sits uncomfortably with Australian self-image ‘because we have been trained in the modern period to see our politics in terms of a liberalism which accords to bureaucracy only a small and rather shady place. Being a good bureaucrat is, we feel, a bit like being a good forger’ (Davies 1958, 3).

Thanks to editor Rod Rhodes, fellow contributors and, in particular, John Ballard, Mark Considine, Jane-Frances Kelly, John Wanna and Patrick Weller for comments on earlier drafts.