During the 1980s some remarkable public administration
reforms took place in the Commonwealth primary
industries portfolio statutory research and marketing
authorities. These reforms implemented dual
accountability arrangements which legislated the
requirement for the authorities to be held accountable
directly to government and Parliament, as well as to
industry and community bodies which held either a
financial stake in the authorities or a stake in the
outcomes of their activities.
This dissertation discusses the nature of the dual
accountability arrangements in the broader context of
administrative and accountability theory, with particular
emphasis on its place in the evolution of public
enterprise and of more open, participatory and socially
responsive public administration. It also considers the
1980s reforms in the historical context of Australian
primary industry institutionalisation and agrarian
socialism.
The dissertation concludes that dual accountability can
strengthen an organisation's accountability while at the
same time reduce the need for close administrative
control. Dual accountability acknowledges that the
fundamental processes of an organisation's
accountability should apply in more than one direction,
and that the decentralisation of these processes actually
fills the voids left by removing control mechanisms. The
dissertation also identifies variations in the application
of dual accountability principles across primary industry
authorities and suggests that there is potential for the
principles to be applied to other areas of government administration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219269 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Price, Richard, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Management |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Richard Price |
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