Amanda Smullen

Conceptualising Australia's tradition of pragmatic federalism

This article reviews existing scholarly debates about Australias pragmatic federalism and seeks to refine it conceptually. It does so against the background of burgeoning international governance literature informed by insights from philosophical pragmatism, as well as in the context of disjuncture in Australian inter-governmental experiences. Pragmatic federalism is posed not merely as a one-dimensional notion referencing a series of ad hoc inter-governmental arrangements over time. Rather, it is conceptualised as multi-dimensional and encapsulating a confined range of institutional designs and postures that can (potentially) be observed across different policy fields and over time. An initial demonstration of the utility of the heuristic to recent empirical experience and change is presented. The consequence is more serious engagement with both the formal and informal features that characterise inter-governmental arrangements at different levels of government, and attention to the degrees to which dialogue and practices are connected. 本文考察了有关澳大利亚实用联邦制的学术辩论，并试图将其概念精炼。本文写作背景包含了开始出现的国际治理文献、哲学实用主义以及澳大利益政府间关系的裂变。实用主义联邦制并非仅仅是参考了一系列政府间安排的单面观念。它是一个多面的、包括一系列制度方案和姿态，而这些在不同政策领域内，在很长时间内都是可以观察到的。本文对近年的实证经验及变化的阐释功用做了初步的说明。最后是对于不同政府级别上的政府间正式及非正式特征更为严肃的介入，对于对话与实践关联程度的关注。

Translating Agency Reform

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s a new international reform category emerged, the agency. Although not always consistent with local titles, the agency label was associated with public sector arrangements observed in countries as diverse as England (O’Toole & Jordan 1995), Sweden (Fortin 1996; Gustafsson and Rhodes 1989), Portugal, Japan (James 2000), The Netherlands (Ter Bogt 1999; Van der Knaap et al. 1997), Latvia (Pollitt et al. 2001; Pollitt 2002), New Zealand (Boston et al. 1996), Canada (Aucoin 1990), and Australia (Armstrong 1998; Rowlands 2002) — to name just a few examples. Agencies were also introduced by the European Commission to assist in EU policy making (Keleman 2002) and they were enforced upon developing countries such as Ghana and Tanzania as a condition for financial aid from the World Bank (Talbot & Caulfield 2002; Minogue et al. 1999). Their spread was the consequence of seeming universal agreement that they were a good thing and could bring about a range of benefits to all kinds of cultural political administrative contexts (see OECD 1997a:19). By the turn of century however the success story of agencies had changed. They were no longer regarded as solutions in a whole range of contexts but rather as a problem for accountability and coordination (OECD 2002; James 2004; Smullen 2004).

Not Centralisation but Decentralised Integration through Australia's National Mental Health Policy

This article challenges dominant perceptions of Commonwealth centralisation in Australias federal system. While recognising the Commonwealth has entered a range of policy fields not anticipated by federal founders, it argues this does not equate to a generalised unidirectional and hierarchical orchestration of state/territory functions. The crucial case of mental health policy is presented as an alternative scenario in Australias federal experience. Theoretically key challenges from the multi-level governance literature are proffered against the centralisation thesis. These include queries about the origins of Commonwealth directives and assumptions of zero-sum notions of state/territory autonomy. Brief empirical analysis highlights the role of the Commonwealth as a conduit of horizontal and vertical flows of knowledge through the national mental health policy agenda. Given disconnect and diversity between national ambitions and their realisation at state/territory level, it is argued better proceduralisation through bottom-up peer dialogue and feedback present alternative routes towards decentralised integration.

Mutual Learning about Health System Performance in Australia's Intergovernmental Health Committee System?

Since the early 1990s Australia, through the Australian Health Minister’s Advisory Council, began the process of developing a national health system performance framework. This includes service delivery measures for hospitals and has been used as a template for national data collections in mental health services. National performance frameworks have since become part of promoting greater integration of policy making and service delivery across Commonwealth and State jurisdictional health functions. The key focus of this paper is upon inter-governmental processes and routines to develop Australian national performance regimes in the realms of health and mental health care services. It presents initial findings from 26 elite interviews working across the inter-governmental interface, including some data about experiences of service managers. The report provides two contributions to the existing literature on Australia’s federal health system and more specifically health governance. Firstly, it presents a literature review of studies and theoretical concepts that have been deployed to examine cross jurisdictional processes of decision making. There is particular attention for the European literature on inter-governmental committee systems. Secondly, the paper presents initial findings from an explorative study of Australia’s inter-governmental machinery in the realms of health and mental health care services. This explorative study was based upon an initial 26 elite interviews from respondents working (or having worked in) Australia’s inter-governmental machinery, including some respondents from representatives of relevant Commonwealth semi-autonomous bodies. The researcher also observed two inter-governmental committee proceedings although reported data here draws only from interviews. These findings provide a first insight into the inner workings of Australia’s inter-governmental health machinery. It is argued that there has been evidence of mutual learning from Australia’s National Health Performance initiatives, and, exchanges and recommendations for future research to further investigate and pinpoint the causal processes through which mutual learning occurs are provided.

Theoretical Concepts and Tools: Rhetoric and Culture

This chapter presents the conceptual framework used to analyse and compare official agency talk. It describes in detail concepts from both the New Rhetoric and Grid Group Cultural Theory (GGCT). Both of these perspectives offer different heuristic tools for comparing similarities and differences in agency talk across The Netherlands, Sweden and Australia. They are particularly appealing to this study because they are sensitive to how similar reform practices and even labels, such as agencies, can be situated in entirely different discursive structures. In answering the research question of how agency reform has been constructed across different political cultures they provide a way to distinguish both the rhetorical styles and cultural flavour of agency talk. They can also be used to examine how these aspects of national agency talk have changed or remained stable over the period studied.

The Trajectory of Agency Talk Across The Netherlands, Sweden and Australia

This chapter presents initial findings about the nature of agency talk in The Netherlands, Sweden and Australia. It applies the concepts of the New Rhetoric and Grid Group Cultural Theory to government documents that initiated and described agency reforms across the countries. For now the focus is upon identifying the distinctive trajectories of agency talk that were adopted across the countries, the specific issues they dealt with, and any durable features of this talk. This includes identifying the themes and rhetorical strategies exhibited in national agency accounts over time, as well as the cultural flavour of the arguments.

Comparing Official Agency Talk: National Speaking Styles and the Role of Cultural Context?

This chapter focuses upon the role of the political culture in shaping national accounts of agency reforms. It brings together the findings about the trajectories of national agency talk in the previous chapter and compares their rhetorical similarities and differences. Patterned similarities and differences in the styles of speaking across high and low group political cultures would indicate that agency talk has been shaped by national political culture rather than a (transnational) fashionable story. By contrast, similarities in official agency accounts across different political cultures would indicate that there were common agency stories spreading independently of cultural context. Preliminary findings about similarities in agency talk across different political cultures are presented in this chapter though their detailed analysis is deferred until the following chapter. This is to enable the separate examination of the explanatory role of culturally flavoured stories.

The Role of Culturally Flavoured Stories and Their National Translations

This chapter analyses and compares official agency talk according to the cultural flavour of argumentative themes. It shifts from the national level of analysis in the previous chapter to consider patterns in rhetorical styles at the level of cultural stories. There are a number of reasons for examining agency accounts according to their cultural flavour. Firstly, similar patterns in the way cultural stories are told across high and low group cultures provide evidence that stories, independent of political culture, also shaped official agency talk. The cultural flavour of these common stories will be identified, as well as the rhetorical styles that characterized them. In addition, the nature and degree of similarities of rhetorical elements at the level of cultural story will be more closely examined.

Agency Reform: Tracing a Public Management Fashion

The focus upon national agency talk in this book departs from the claim that agency reform had constituted a public management fashion throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Pollitt et al. 2001). This fashion had manifested itself in both a certain kind of trans-national story about public management, but also in certain kinds of practices. This chapter sets the scene for the theoretical and empirical analyses of national agency accounts in the later chapters of this book. On one hand, it sketches an international story of agency reform as presented by the Public Management Committee (PUMA) within the OECD. It is shown how this story changed with the passing of the new millennium. On the other hand, this chapter also presents an overview of practices of agency reform in The Netherlands, Sweden and Australia. Agency reform initiatives in these countries also changed during the period of the international agency fashion. The overview of the contents and development of national agency reform initiatives presented in this chapter is used as a background to situating the national agency accounts described in the remainder of the book.