3: Public Sector Management in the State of Victoria 1992–1999: Genesis of the Transformation

Internationally, the past two decades have seen considerable change in the management and control of public sector organisations. Often viewed as closely related to the election of ‘market-oriented’, conservative governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s (as in Britain), but also evident in labor or socialist administrations in Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, such changes have been classified as producing ‘new’ public (sector) management (Boston et al., 1996; Olson et al., 1998). This managerialist reform movement has been promoted on the grounds that the public sector was too large and cumbersome, organized on the wrong principles and in need of reinvention and institutional renewal (see Osborne & Gaebler, 1993).