Andrew Podger

Public Administration in China and Australia: Different Worlds but Similar Challenges (中国和澳大利亚的公共行政管理：不同的世界，相似的挑战)

Comparing systems of government in such different countries as China and Australia is immensely difficult. Both countries have their own distinct traditions of governance and understandings about how to organise and operate government and the services they provide. Australia with a long democratic history has developed traditions of ‘responsible government’ within a federal context and with competition provided by two predominant adversarial political parties. China since its revolution in 1949 has developed relatively authoritarian traditions with single-party rule and gradational hierarchic controls within a decentralised polity. Despite these differences, increasing numbers of people in each country want to understand the other countrys key features of public administration, and often they start such a journey by asking questions based on their knowledge of their own governmental system to investigate the features and principles of the other. This is the approach we have taken in this paper. After reviewing the different political contexts, we explore the institutions of governance as well as the political and financial relations between levels of governments (central, provincial, local). Finally, we come back to the implications for public management and future governance arrangements. 对中国和澳大利亚这两种截然不同的政府系统进行比较确实非常困难。两个国家都有其独特的政府管理传统，并且对如何进行政府组织和运作以及政府提供的服务的理解也各不相同。有长期民主传统的澳大利亚已经在联邦制框架内形成了“负责政府”的传统，而政府主要由两个敌对政党互相竞争来组建。而自从1949年革命后，中国已经形成了相对专制的一党专政传统，并在分权政体中形成了等级分层控制模式。尽管存在这些差异，越来越多的人都希望了解彼此国家在公共行政管理方面的主要特点，并且他们通常都是根据对自己国家政府系统的了解来评判另一个国家的体制特点和原则。这也正是本文所采用的方法。在对不同的政治背景进行回顾之后，我们对两个国家不同的治理体制以及各级政府之间（中央政府、省级政府和地方政府）的政治和财政关系进行了探讨。最后，我们还对公共管理以及对未来政府管理的制度安排的影响进行了讨论。

Public Administration in China and Australia: Different Worlds but Similar Challenges

Comparing systems of government in such different countries as China and Australia is immensely difficult. Both countries have their own distinct traditions of governance and understandings about how to organise and operate government and the services they provide. Australia with a long democratic history has developed traditions of ‘responsible government’ within a federal context and with competition provided by two predominant adversarial political parties. China since its revolution in 1949 has developed relatively authoritarian traditions with single-party rule and gradational hierarchic controls within a decentralised polity. Despite these differences, increasing numbers of people in each country want to understand the other countrys key features of public administration, and often they start such a journey by asking questions based on their knowledge of their own governmental system to investigate the features and principles of the other. This is the approach we have taken in this paper. After reviewing the different political contexts, we explore the institutions of governance as well as the political and financial relations between levels of governments (central, provincial, local). Finally, we come back to the implications for public management and future governance arrangements. 对中国和澳大利亚这两种截然不同的政府系统进行比较确实非常困难。两个国家都有其独特的政府管理传统，并且对如何进行政府组织和运作以及政府提供的服务的理解也各不相同。有长期民主传统的澳大利亚已经在联邦制框架内形成了“负责政府”的传统，而政府主要由两个敌对政党互相竞争来组建。而自从1949年革命后，中国已经形成了相对专制的一党专政传统，并在分权政体中形成了等级分层控制模式。尽管存在这些差异，越来越多的人都希望了解彼此国家在公共行政管理方面的主要特点，并且他们通常都是根据对自己国家政府系统的了解来评判另一个国家的体制特点和原则。这也正是本文所采用的方法。在对不同的政治背景进行回顾之后，我们对两个国家不同的治理体制以及各级政府之间（中央政府、省级政府和地方政府）的政治和财政关系进行了探讨。最后，我们还对公共管理以及对未来政府管理的制度安排的影响进行了讨论。

Enduring Challenges and New Developments in Public Human Resource Management

Australia has its own unique institutional arrangements within which its civil services operate, yet its experience in public sector human resource management over the last 40 years or so has much in common with that of many other Western democracies, including the United States. It faces enduring challenges such as the relationship between politics and administration while its approach to public management has evolved from traditional Weberian administration through new public management to a much more complex, open and networked system. While the role of government in society has not radically changed, the way in which that role has been exercised has changed significantly. Government employees represent a smaller proportion of the workforce, what they do and their skills have changed dramatically, internal arrangements to foster ethics and to manage staff are different today, new approaches have been adopted to compensate and motivate employees, the diversity of employees has widened, and the place of human resource management (HRM) in agencies’ strategic management processes has ebbed and waned. In each of these areas, human resource (HR) managers in Australia today face difficult questions about future directions. Most of these will be familiar to HR managers in other countries.

The Concept of ‘Merit’ in Australia, China and Taiwan

The article provides a description of Australian approaches to ‘merit’ and an overview of the other symposium articles on the application of merit in China and Taiwan. The term ‘merit’ is commonly used in Australia, China, and Taiwan as an important attribute of good government service, but it means different things in different countries, reflecting both different institutional arrangements and differences in culture. Australias current application of the merit principle is described in some detail. The principle and its application have been subject to debate throughout the last century and continue today. The debates reflect social attitudes at the time and developments in the role of government and the skills government requires, and changes in the Australian labour market. Key debates include the role of women, treatment of ex-servicemen, importance of graduate recruitment, equal employment opportunity, and staff perceptions of fairness and the application of merit in employment decisions. China has a long tradition of autocracy and a long history of competitive examinations for joining government service. It faces the challenge of whether it is possible to embrace a merit principle where politics and administration are not distinguished. Merit is also applied within a culture that gives considerable emphasis to personal relations (guanxi). Taiwan also draws on Chinas long experience with examinations. A key challenge now is whether it gives too much emphasis to equality and fair access to public sector employment opportunities and too little to the skills and experience different government agencies require. These different approaches and different challenges reflect differences in the three countries relating in particular to the role of government, the relationship between politics and administration and culture.

How political institutions, history and experience affect government budgeting processes and ways of achieving ‘value for money’

All governments face the challenge of scarce resources, requiring budgetary management processes for identifying the resources required by and available to government, and then for allocating them and ensuring their use or deployment represents value for money. Such budgetary and financial management processes need to routinely inform decision-making and protect the integrity of the way public resources are used—with some public accountability to indicate that their uses are properly authorised and reflect the policies of legitimate government leaders. The processes ideally should also facilitate assessments of how well the resources have been used, and of whether and how efficiently expenditures have achieved the objectives of the policymakers.

Conclusions: An historic triumph that presents big challenges for public policy

The first conclusion from all the material presented in this book concerns the scale of the changes underway, both nationally and internationally. They are perhaps the most significant demographic changes in human history, building on the dramatic reductions in infant mortality over the last century or so and the fall in fertility rates over the last half-century (the precise timing varying significantly amongst different countries), leading to substantial increases in life expectancy at older ages as well as more people reaching old age. These changes will be permanent, requiring fundamental and ongoing re-conceptions of the life-span of individuals and the age profile of societies, affecting family and community relationships as well as individuals’ planning for lifetime wellbeing. As a result, we need perhaps to consider the idea of ‘multiple beings’ over the life-span with individuals choosing more and different roles at different ages.

Introduction to special topic: contemporary challenges for financial management and budgeting in China

The four articles in this special topic are drawn from Chinese contributions to a workshop on ‘Value for Money’ organised by the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration held at the National Taiwan University in Taipei in November 2015. The Dialogue holds a workshop each year at a university in the PRC, Taiwan or Australia for scholars and practitioners to share experiences in addressing common challenges of public governance and administration. These four Chinese papers focus on different aspects of the common challenge to achieve value for taxpayers’ money. Hanyu Xiao examines the problem of misuse of public resources by public officials through extravagant position-related expenditures—on travel, cars and hospitality. He finds that informal rules or culture often outweigh the formal rules in China, undermining efforts to curb this misuse. He recommends action to ensure formal and informal rules complement each other, requiring, on the one hand, that the formal rules do not take frugality too far making it hard for officials to do their jobs and, on the other hand, that a culture of excessive deference to authority and excessive emphasis on personal material gain must also change. The financial management framework and stronger rules on position-related consumption represent an essential discipline in promoting efficient and effective use of public resources and ethical behaviour. Interestingly, the Australian financial management legislation explicitly requires the ‘economic, efficient, effective and proper use of resources’, where ‘proper’ means ‘ethical’ and ethical behaviour is actively promoted throughout the public service. Zao Zao Zhao examines the way China has been implementing budgetary and financial management reform, particularly the introduction of Performance-Based Budgeting (PBB). She uses case studies to describe and analyse the important role of Performance Evaluation Intermediary Institutions (PEIIs) in the reform process, not only in providing essential expertise but also in ensuring independence of evaluations and external involvement so that the process is not just internal to government and finance departments but acknowledges the importance of a broader public and political dimension to resource allocation decisions. In a country like Australia, this challenge of having both objective evaluation and political decisions