introduced. Personnel selection based on the merit principle was exempted
from the new framework, and this continues to be contentious.
Canada’s changes in 1967 largely brought public service management
back within the remit of direct ministerial supervision through a statutory
committee of the Cabinet, the Treasury Board, which combined budget and
administrative management with that of the public service. In 1981, the Civil
Service Department in the UK, as the Treasury command concerned with
personnel and management had become (in 1968), was abolished, expend-
iture functions returning to the Treasury, the remainder forming an office
within the Cabinet Office. In 1987, the Public Service Board in Australia was
abolished, though a limited number of personnel functions found a home
under a public service commissioner. Australia’s distinctiveness in thefield of
public service management was largely at an end, notwithstanding expanded
responsibilities vested in the commissioner in 2012.
14.7 Conclusion
It has been the major aim of this chapter to identify and describe distinctive
features of Australian (national) government as it evolved during the twenti-
eth century, drawing extensively on comparison and contrast with practice in
Westminster and Ottawa. In concluding, it is worth addressing, albeit briefly,
how this distinctiveness is viewed and what difference, if any, it makes.
The distinctiveness has not in general been well regarded or even well
acknowledged. This was, perhaps, most conspicuously exemplified in the
1975 parliamentary crisis, which culminated in the dismissal of the Whitlam
government, and the simultaneous dissolutions of the two Houses of the
Australian parliament. Throughout the crisis, the embattled prime minister,
Gough Whitlam, who usually was most brazen in boasting his nationalism,
readily fell back on British rhetoric in defence of his parliamentary situation, as
if he were in a remake of the UK Budget crisis of 1909–10. In this, he reflected
fairly pervasive Labor thinking hostile to the Senate and the federal structure of
which it was a major feature. Whitlam was, in his thinking, an unrepentant
unificationist and unicameralist. He was hardly alone in these dispositions.
The three-year term of the House of Representatives is partly an inheritance
of Chartism (which favoured annual parliaments). It has been, for many
decades, under attack as an impediment to long-term policy-making and
planning, largely at the hands of executive-oriented analysts who favour
decisiveness over the discussion and debate favoured by the relatively few
advocates of parliamentary proceeding and values.
The Governor-General as an institution seems, ironically, to be an admired
part of the body politic. There has, intermittently, been a campaign to replace
J. R. Nethercote