Disciplinary unfairness in Queensland public service legislation

A just system of discipline within an organisation requires four characteristics: a clear set of offences, proportionate punishments clearly linked to the offences, oversight and appeals from disciplinary decisions and independence from political masters. This paper examines Queensland public sector legislation and policy from 1863 to the present to demonstrate how well these four criteria are addressed. An analysis of the presence of these four characteristics in the Queensland context finds that the public sector legislation in Queensland is in breach of the guidelines that define a just and fair system in which disciplinary action is dispensed. We argue that creation of arbitrary powers to punish or dismiss staff is unjust if the legislation does not fully inform staff of what constitutes a breach of discipline, does not guarantee proportionate punishments to offences, and/or it allows the disciplinary process to be used as a tool to coerce staff to perform in a politicised or otherwise unethical manner. We conclude by making recommendations as to how this situation may be rectified.

Why we need a population-based approach to clinical indicators for cancer: a case study using microscopic confirmation of lung cancer in Queensland

An important function of clinical cancer registries is to provide feedback to clinicians on various performance measures. To date, most clinical cancer registries in Australia are located in tertiary academic hospitals, where adherence to guidelines is probably already high. Microscopic confirmation is an important process measure for lung cancer care. We found that the proportion of patients with lung cancer without microscopic confirmation was much higher in regional public hospitals (27.1%) than in tertiary hospitals (7.5%), and this disparity remained after adjusting for age, sex and comorbidities. The percentage was also higher in the private than in the public sector. This case study shows that we need a population-based approach to measuring clinical indicators that includes regional public hospitals as a matter of priority and should ideally include the private sector.

A comparative study of governmental one-stop portals for public service delivery

The continuing need for governments to radically improve the delivery of public services has led to a new, holistic government reform strategy labeled “Transformational Government” that strongly emphasizes customer-centricity. Attention has turned to online portals as a cost effective front-end to deliver services and engage customers as well as to the corresponding organizational approaches for the back-end to decouple the service interface from the departmental structures. The research presented in this paper makes three contributions: Firstly, a systematic literature review of approaches to the evaluation of online portal models in the public sector is presented. Secondly, the findings of a usability study comparing the online presences of the Queensland Government, the UK Government and the South Australian Government are reported and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches are discussed. And thirdly, the limitations of the usability study in the context of a broader “Transformational Government” approach are identified and service bundling is suggested as an innovative solution to further improve online service delivery.

Natural disaster risk-informed for a better public infrastructure asset planning in Indonesian Central Government

The natural disasters incident that frequently hit Indonesia are floods, severe droughts, tsunamis, earth-quakes, volcano, eruptions, landslides, windstorm and forest fires. The impact of those natural disasters are significantly severe and affecting the quality of life of the community due to the breakdown of the public as-sets as one source to deliver public services. This paper is aimed to emphasis the importance of natural disaster risk-informed in relation to public asset management in Indonesian Central Government, particularly in asset planning stage where asset decision is made as the gate into the whole public asset management processes. A Case study in the Ministry of Finance Indonesia as the central government public asset manager and in 5 (five) line ministries/governmental agencies as public asset users was used as the approach to achieved the research objective. The case study devoured three data collection techniques i.e. interviews, observations and document archival which will be analysed by a content analysis approach. The result of the study indicates that Indonesian geographical position exposing many of public infra-structure assets as a high vulnerability to natural disasters. Information on natural-disaster trends and predictions to identify and measure the risks are available, however, such information are not utilise and integrated to the process of public infrastructure asset planning as the gate to the whole public asset management processes. Therefore, in order to accommodate and incorporate this natural disaster risk-information into public asset management processes, particularly in public asset planning, a public asset performance measurements framework should be adopted and applied in the process as one sources in making decision for infrastructure asset planning. Findings from this study provide useful input for the Ministry of Finance as public asset manager, scholars and private asset management practitioners in Indonesia to establish natural disaster risks awareness in public infrastructure asset management processes.

Project governance : ethical decision making in project procurement in the Malaysian public sectors

Managing public sector projects in Malaysia is a unique challenge. This is because of the ethical issues involved during the project procurement process. These ethical issues need attention because they will have an impact on the quality, cost and time of the project itself. The ethical issues here include conflict of interest, bid shopping, collusive tendering, bid cutting, corruption and the payment game. In 2006, 17.3% of 417 Malaysian government contract projects were considered sick due to contractors' performances that failed to conduct the project according to the project plan. Some of the sick projects from these statistics are due to the ethical issues involved. These construction projects have low quality due to the selection of the contractors, done unethically due to personal relationships instead of professional qualifications. That is why it is important to govern the project procurement processes to ensure the accountability and transparency of the decision making process to ensure that these ethical issues can be avoided. Extensive research has been conducted on the ethical issues in the tendering process or the award phase of project management. There is a lack of studies looking at the role of clients, including the government client, in relation to unethical practice in project procurement in the public sector. It is important to understand that ethical issues not only involve the contractors and suppliers but also the clients. Even though there are codes of ethics in the public sectors, ethical issues still arise. Therefore, this research develops a project governance framework (PGEDM) for ethical decision making in the Malaysian public sectors. This framework combines the ethical decision making process together with the project governance principals in guiding the public sectors with ethical decision making in project procurement. A triangulation of questionnaire survey and Delphi study was employed in this research to collect required qualitative and quantitative data. A questionnaire survey was conducted among the public officials (the practitioners) who are currently working in the procurement area in the Malaysian public sectors, in identifying the ethical behaviours and factors influencing further ethical behaviour to occur. A Delphi study was also conducted with the assistance of a panel of experts consisting of practitioners that have expertise in the area of project governance and project procurement as well as academician, which further considered the relationship and the influence of the criteria and indicators of ethical decision making (EDM) and project governance (project criteria, organisational culture, contract award criteria, individual criteria, client's requirements, government procedures and professional ethics). Through the identification and integration of the factors and EDM criteria as well as the project governance criteria and EDM steps for ethical issues, a PGEDM framework was developed to promote, and drive consistent decision outcome in project procurement in the public sector. The framework contributes significantly to ethical decision making in the project procurement process. These findings not only give benefit to the people involved in project procurement but also to the public officials in guiding them to be more accountable in handling ethical issues in the future and to have a more transparent decision making process.

Race matters : Indigenous employment in the Australian public service

This thesis demonstrated that race mattered as a contributing factor to the low Indigenous participation rates within the Australian Public Service. The thesis showed that the public service reproduced social relations privileging non-Indigenous executives while positioning Indigenous executives as deficient. The thesis explains how the everydayness of racism assumes the racial neutrality of institutions because the concept of race is externalised as only having relevance to the racial other. Non-Indigenous executives regard Indigeneity as being synonymous with inferiority to explain Indigenous disadvantage. Consequently, the Indigenous experience of everyday racism is perpetuated and contributes to declining rates of employment.

Learning routines used by firms during construction of infrastructure projects using the alliance procurement method

Collaborative contracting has emerged over the past 15 years as an innovative project delivery framework that is particularly suited to infrastructure projects. Australia leads the world in the development of project and program alliance approaches to collaborative delivery. These approaches are considered to promise superior project results. However, very little is known about the learning routines that are most widely used in support of collaborative projects in general and alliance projects in particular. The literature on absorptive capacity and dynamic capabilities indicates that such learning enhances project performance. The learning routines employed at corporate level during the operation of collaborative infrastructure projects in Australia were examined through a large survey conducted in 2013. This paper presents a descriptive summary of the preliminary findings. The survey captured the experiences of 320 practitioners of collaborative construction projects, including public and private sector clients, contractors, consultants and suppliers (three per cent of projects were located in New Zealand, but for brevity’s sake the sample is referred to as Australian). The majority of projects identified used alliances (78.6%); whilst 9% used Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) contracts and 2.7% used Early Tender Involvement contracts, which are ‘slimmer’ types of collaborative contract. The remaining 9.7% of respondents used traditional contracts that employed some collaborative elements. The majority of projects were delivered for public sector clients (86.3%), and/or clients experienced with asset procurement (89.6%). All of the projects delivered infrastructure assets; one third in the road sector, one third in the water sector, one fifth in the rail sector, and the rest spread across energy, building and mining. Learning routines were explored within three interconnected phases: knowledge exploration, transformation and exploitation. The results show that explorative and exploitative learning routines were applied to a similar extent. Transformative routines were applied to a relatively low extent. It was also found that the most highly applied routine is ‘regularly applying new knowledge to collaborative projects’; and the least popular routine was ‘staff incentives to encourage information sharing about collaborative projects’. Future research planned by the authors will examine the impact of these routines on project performance.

Inter-sector senior leader transitions : experience and outcomes

Purpose The purpose of this article is to explore the experience of senior leaders who move into the public sector from other sectors of the economy, a process we refer to as inter-sector senior leader transitions. This is a little researched area of public sector leadership yet has significant implications for fundamental public sector reform. Design/methodology/approach We employed an interview design to elicit senior leaders' stories of their transition into the public sector. Findings The data suggest that successful senior leader transitions are more likely when a set of conditions is met; (1) the leader transitions into CEO role, rather than levels below CEO, (2) Ministers provide inter-sector transition support, (3) senior leaders develop responses to stress, (4) senior leaders reject high formalization, (5) their change processes focus on building capacity, and (6) senior leaders confront dysfunctional organizational relationships directly. Research limitations/implications The research relies on a relatively small sample. However, access to senior managers at this level can be difficult. Nevertheless, those senior managers who participated were very willing to share their stories. Practical implications If public sector organizations are to realize the value of successful leaders from other sectors, they need to invest in structured processes that facilitate the transition. A laissez-faire approach is not viable given the cost of such transitions. Originality/value The paper focuses on a little researched area of leadership experience which has significant implications for the development and change of the public sector.

Ruptured relations : guerrilla theatre, time & Pranksterish disability performance practice

Guerrilla theatre tends, by its very definition, to pop up unpredictably – it interrupts what people might see as the proper or typical flow of time, place and space. The subversive tenor of such work means that questions about ‘what has happened’ tend to the decidedly less polite form of ‘WTF’ as passersby struggle to make sense of, and move on from, moments in which accustomed narratives of action and interaction no longer apply. In this paper I examine examples of guerrilla theatre by performers with disabilities in terms of these ruptures in time, and the way they prompt reflection, reconfigure relations, or recede into traditional relations again - focusing particularly on comedian Laurence Clark. Many performers with disabilities – Bill Shannon, Katherine Araniello, Aaron Williamson, Ju Gosling, and others – find guerrilla-style interventions in public places apposite to their aesthetic and political agendas. They prompt passersby to reflect on their relationship to people with disabilities. They can be recorded for later dissection and display, teaching people something about the way social performers, social spectators and society as a whole deal with disability. In this paper, as I unpack Clark's work, I note that the embarrassment that characterises these encounters can be a flag of an ethical process taking place for passersby. Caught between two moments in which time, roles and relationships suddenly fail to flow along the smooth routes of socially determined habits, passersbys’ frowns, gasps and giggles flag difficulties dealing with questions about their attitude to disabled people they do not now know how to answer. I consider the productivity, politics and performerly ethics of drawing passersby into such a process – a chaotic, challenging interstitial time in which a passersbys choices become fodder for public consumption – in such a wholly public way.

An investigation of the impacts of Excellence in Research for Australia : a case study on accounting for research

This is the first study to explore the way Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), a research assessment exercise introduced in the Australian higher education sector in 2010, fostered the development of strategically oriented Management Accounting technologies in the form of Performance Management Systems (PMS) to achieve research excellence within an Australian university. It identifies ERA's intended and unintended consequences. While ERA enabled the creation of tighter controls in the PMS of faculties, departments and individual academics within the university, enhancing its reported research performance, the impact on academics was low job satisfaction, increased workload and a higher focus on research than teaching.

Organisational change in public organisations

This research applies a multidimensional model of publicness to the analysis of organisational change and in so doing enriches understanding of the public nature of organisations and how public characteristics facilitate change. Much of the prior literature describes public organisations as bureaucratic, with characteristics that are resistant to change, hierarchical structures that impede information flow, goals that are imposed and scrutinised by political authority and red tape that constrains decision-making. This dissertation instead reports a more complex picture and explains how public characteristics can also work in ways that enable organisational change.

Public Finance for REDD+ in Kenya

Kenya aims to prepare for both public and private Reduced Emission from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) investment flows. This chapter examines how current Kenyan law can be used as a starting point for building a regulatory regime to support public sector finance. For present purposes, ‘public sector finance’ is defined as money flowing from multilateral international institutions and bi-lateral donor funds. Key issues addressed by this chapter • The nature and form of public sector finance for REDD+ in Kenya. • The management and laws relating to public funds in Kenya; • Mechanisms that can be utilised to manage risk associated with REDD+ investments with a focus on Kenyan anti-corruption laws and policies; • The regulatory regime for distributing the benefits from REDD+ investment to relevant forest stakeholders.

BIM for sustainable whole-of-life transport infrastructure asset management

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) showed that, in 2004, owners and operations managers bore two thirds of the total industry cost burden from inadequate interoperability in construction projects from inception to operation, amounting to USD10.6 billion. Building Information Modelling (BIM) and similar tools were identified by Engineers Australia in 2005 as potential instruments to significantly reduce this sum, which in Australia could amount to total industry-wide cost burden of AUD12 billion. Public sector road authorities in Australia have a key responsibility in driving initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the construction and operations of transport infrastructure. However, as previous research has shown the Environmental Impact Assessment process, typically used for project approvals and permitting based on project designs available at the consent stage, lacks Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that include long-term impact factors and transfer of information throughout the project life cycle. In the building construction industry, BIM is widely used to model sustainability KPIs such as energy consumption, and integrated with facility management systems. This paper proposes that a similar use of BIM in early design phases of transport infrastructure could provide: (i) productivity gains through improved interoperability and documentation; (ii) the opportunity to carry out detailed cost-benefit analyses leading to significant operational cost savings; (iii) coordinated planning of street and highway lighting with other energy and environmental considerations; iv) measurable KPIs that include long-term impact factors which are transferable throughout the project life cycle; and (v) the opportunity for integrating design documentation with sustainability whole-of-life targets.

Government grants - an abrogation or management of risks?

New public management (NPFM), with its hands-on, private sector-style performance measurement, output control, parsimonious use of resources, disaggreation of public sector units and greater competition in the public sector, has significantly affected charitable and nonprofit organisations delivering community services (Hood, 1991; Dunleavy, 1994; George & Wilding, 2002). The literature indicates that nonprofit organisations under NPM believe they are doing more for less: while administration is increasing, core costs are not being met; their dependence on government funding comes at the expense of other funding strategies; and there are concerns about proportionality and power asymmetries in the relationship (Kerr & Savelsberg, 2001; Powell & Dalton, 2011; Smith, 2002, p. 175; Morris, 1999, 2000a). Government agencies are under increased pressure to do more with less, demonstrate value for money, measure social outcomes, not merely outputs and minimise political risk (Grant, 2008; McGreogor-Lowndes, 2008). Government-community service organisation relationships are often viewed as 'uneasy alliances' characterised by the pressures that come with the parties' differing roles and expectations and the pressures that come with the parties' differing roles and expectations and the pressurs of funding and security (Productivity Commission, 2010, p. 308; McGregor-Lowndes, 2008, p. 45; Morris, 200a). Significant community services are now delivered to citizens through such relationships, often to the most disadvantaged in the community, and it is important for this to be achieved with equity, efficiently and effectively. On one level, the welfare state was seen as a 'risk management system' for the poor, with the state mitigating the risks of sickness, job loss and old age (Giddens, 1999) with the subsequent neoliberalist outlook shifting this risk back to households (Hacker, 2006). At the core of this risk shift are written contracts. Vincent-Jones (1999,2006) has mapped how NPM is characterised by the use of written contracts for all manner of relations; e.g., relgulation of dealings between government agencies, between individual citizens and the state, and the creation of quais-markets of service providers and infrastructure partners. We take this lens of contracts to examine where risk falls in relation to the outsourcing of community services. First we examine the concept of risk. We consider how risk might be managed and apportioned between governments and community serivce organisations (CSOs) in grant agreements, which are quasiy-market transactions at best. This is informed by insights from the law and economics literature. Then, standard grant agreements covering several years in two jurisdictions - Australia and the United Kingdom - are analysed, to establish the risk allocation between government and CSOs. This is placed in the context of the reform agenda in both jurisdictions. In Australia this context is th enonprofit reforms built around the creation of a national charities regulator, and red tape reduction. In the United Kingdom, the backdrop is the THird Way agenda with its compacts, succeed by Big Society in a climate of austerity. These 'case studies' inform a discussion about who is best placed to bear and manage the risks of community service provision on behalf of government. We conclude by identifying the lessons to be learned from our analysis and possible pathways for further scholarship.

The impact of socialisation on graduates’ public service motivation : a mixed method study

The need to attract and retain a high calibre cadre of public servants today has resulted in a renaissance of interest in public service motivation (PSM) within public management literature. This article outlines a study of PSM with graduate employees within an Australian public sector. The study extends our understanding of PSM by adopting a longitudinal, mixed method design, including surveys and individual interviews, to consider the effects of socialisation on levels of PSM. Results show an organisation's mission and values do not affect individual PSM while work type and communication style is vital and organisational socialisation can provide a negative influence.