Speaker Highlights

Recognising the significance of the event, a number of major speakers have already committed to present at the Congress.

You can also read about the wide range of speakers, sessions and activities planned by downloading our Congress brochure.

PERCY ALLAN AM

Session: Building public administration in our region

Percy Allan was appointed National President of the Institute of Public Administration Austalia (IPAA) in 2010.

In the past 15 years, Percy has advised national, state and local governemnts in Australia and Asia on public policy, finance and management. He has conducted independent reviews into builders warranty insurance, the Northern Territory’s finances and the sustainability of NSW local government. In the last six years he has undertaken nine reviews of individual local governement bodies.

In 1996 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contributions to public sector reform.

DENISE AMYOT [Canada]

Session: We know what you are thinking

Denise is immediate Past President of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada [IPAC]. For the last ten years, IPAC have surveyed Canada’s most senior public servants on their views about their work environment. Canada’s economic, political and administrative systems have many parallels to Australia and, as part of an IPAA/IPAC collaboration, Denise will present the results of unique comparative study on the experiences of Canadian and Australian administrators.

PROFESSOR IAN ANDERSON

Session: Big Thinkers

Professor Ian Anderson is the foundation Chair in Indigenous Health at the University of Melbourne. In 2012, Professor Anderson joined the University’s senior leadership team as Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Higher Education Policy). He is currently Director of Murrup Barak, the Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development, in the Provost Division. Professor Anderson chairs the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Equality Council.

Ian has worked in Aboriginal (Koori) health for over twenty-five years. During this time he has been involved in a number of job contexts: as an Aboriginal health worker, health educator, general practitioner, policy maker and academic.

DR ROBYN ANNEAR

Session: A history of public administration in ten objects

Dr Annear is a historian and author of numerous books including the widely acclaimed Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne and A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne. She is a member of the Library Board of Victoria, and a past Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria.

Dr Annear will present two pieces of new work specially for the IPAA 2012 Congress: ‘The History of Public Administration in 10 Objects’ and ‘Shame, Shock and Scandal – The Struggle to Professionalise the Victorian Public Service.’

PROFESSOR DANIEL BELL

Session: Confucianism and public administration

Daniel is a Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy and Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Political Philosophy at Tsinghua Univeristy in Beijing. The author of China’s New Confucianism (Princeton University Press, rev. ed. 2010), he will discuss trends in political reform in China and their normative challenges to ‘Western’ ways of political thinking.

PROFESSOR GEERT BOUCKAERT [Belgium]

Session: Big Thinker – Trust and public administration

Geert is a European public administration thought leader. He is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Public Management Institute at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium. He is widely recognised expert on public administration reform across a range of countries.

JOHN DALEY

Session: Public administration and think tanks

John is Chief Executive of the Grattan Institute. He has 20 years experience spanning policy, academic, government and corporate roles at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oxford, the Victorian Department of Justice, consulting firm McKinsey and Co and most recently at ANZ where he was Managing Director of the online stockbroker, E*TRADE Australia.

John’s current research and publishing interests include government prioritisation, the objectives of government, the situations in which government intervention is justified, and the limits to government.

PROFESSOR WOLFGANG DRECHSLER [Estonia]

Session: Big Thinker – Is public sector innovation over-rated?

Wolfgang is Professor and Chair of Governance at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia and former Advisor to the President of Estonia. He has also served as Executive Secretary with the German Wissenschaftsrat during German reunification, as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow and a Senior Legislative Analyst in the United States Congress. He was the Vice Chairman of the executive board of Praxis, Estonia’s pre-eminent public policy think-tank.

WILLIAM D. EGGERS [United States]

Session: Big Thinker

William literally wrote the book on Government 2.0. He is also the author of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon… Getting Big Things Done in Government which was a Washington Post best sellers and is one of the United States’ best known authorities on government reform. He is currently the executive director of Deloitte’s Public Leadership Institute and is responsible for research and thought leadership for Deloitte’s Public Sector practice. See his latest thinking @wdeggers

PAUL FRIJTERS

Session: Big Thinker

Paul is a Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland and an adjunct professor at the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences.

He is also a Research Director of the Rumici Project. The project monitors rural to urban migration in China and Indonesia.

Paul holds a Ph.D. on welfare and well-being in Russia from the University of Amsterdam. He has a wide range of research interest, specialising in happiness, labour market, health economics and econometrics. His recent research into rural-urban migration in China produced new evidence and a prediction that China would be the largest economy in the world with the next 10 years.

GREG HYWOOD

Session: Big Thinker – Rapid change

Greg is a former Executive Director of Policy in the Victorian Government’s Department of the Premier and Cabinet and is currently CEO of Fairfax Media, one of Australia’s largest media organisations. He is a Walkley award-winning journalist and has reported on business and both business and foreign politics for the Australian Financial Review for nearly 17 years.

JANE-FRANCES KELLY

Session: Public Administration and the urban world

Jane-Frances Kelly set up Grattan’s Cities Program in 2009 after a career developing high-level policy in the public, private and non-profit sectors in Australia and the United Kingdom. Prior to coming to Australia in 2004, Jane-Frances spent three years at the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, a role that invloved providing evidence-based policy advice to Prime Minister Tony Blair and the British cabinet.

TESS LEA

Session: Big Thinker

Anthropologist Tess is an ARC QEII Research Fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Tess specialises in social policy assemblages across health, housing and education portfolios. Her current body of work focuses on the question ‘Can there be good policy in regional and remote Australia?’

JIM McGOWAN

Session: Understanding Change

Jim is the recently retired Director General of the Queensland Department of Community Safety, which includes having responsibility for the Queensland Ambulance Service, Queensland Fire and Rescue Service, Emergency Management Queensland and Queensland Corrective Services. He led the Department’s response to some of the most devastating natural disasters in Queensland’s history, including recent floods, cyclones and bushfires.

DR ORLANDO MERCADO [Philippines]

Session: Building public administration in our region

Dr Mercado is Professor of Public Administration at the University of the Philippines and Secretariat-General of the Eastern Regional Organisation of Public Administration, which represents states, groups and individuals in Asia and the Pacific. He has been a broadcaster, senator and senior government minister in the Philippines. He was also the first permanent representative of the Philippines to ASEAN.

PETER MITCHELL

Session: Is this what I signed up for?

Peter has a unique perspective on public administration and immigration issues. He worked for the Commonwealth Department of Immigration from 1990 to 2003 as a long-term Compliance Officer. He later rose to Manager of the Kosovar and East Timoriese ‘Operation Safe Haven’ in 1999 and Manager of the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. He is the author of Compassionate Bastard, an insider’s account of the dilemmas inherent in a job that deprives people of their liberty through the application of Australian Law.

TERRY MORAN

Session: Big Thinker – Reforming for value

Terry was, until very recently, Australia’s most senior public administrator. As Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, he chaired the Advisory Group on the Reform of Australian Government Administration which developed a comprehensive blueprint for reform of the Australian Public Service.

ALAN NANKERVIS

Session: Big ideas and public sector performance management

Alan is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Managemetn at RMIT University, and an Adjunct Professor of HRM at Curtin Business School. He has worked at universities in the UK, Canada, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, China and Sydney.

Alan is the co-author of ten books on HRM and management, and has been researching the relationship between performance management and organisational effectiveness for fifteen years.

PROFESSOR MICHELLE PAUTZ [United States]

Session: Public administrators on the silver screen

Professor Pautz is from the University of Dayton, Ohio where she teaches in the Masters of Public Administration program. As well as researching domestic environmental policy, she has a particular interest in how administrators are portrayed in popular culture. In a unique research project with IPAA, she will present the first ever comparative study on how public administrators are depicted in the top 100 Australian and Hollywood films.

PROFESSOR PAUL L. POSNER [United States]

Session: Big Thinker – Opportunities in a time of fiscal austerity

Professor Posner is the Director of the Public Administration Program at the George Mason University. He led the budget and public finance work of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) for 14 years before coming to George Mason. During the period, he led GAO’s work developing long term models of the federal budget, outlining opportunities for reform in major federal programs, and recommending changes to the budget process to provide greater visibility to long term issues.

PROFESSOR JOS RAADSCHELDERS [United States]

Session: Napoleon and public administration

Professor Raadschelders holds the Henry Bellmon Chair of Public Service at the Ohio State University in the United States. He has a particular interest in the history of administration, including Napoleon’s role in European administrative development. He is the author and editor of numerous books including Church and State in European Administrative History and the Handbook of Administrative History.

PETER SHERGOLD

Session: Big Thinker – New ways of working

Peter is Macquarie Group Foundation Professor at the Centre for Social Impact and is the new head of the New South Wales Public Service Commission. From 2003 to 2008, he was Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

TAN SRI MOHAMMED SIDEK [Malaysia]

Session: Building a public service that can adapt to economic, technological and social change

Tan Sri Mohammed Sidek Chief Secretary to the Malaysian Prime Minister. Over the last 30 years Malaysia has diversified its economy from dependence on exports of raw materials to expansion in manufacturing, services, and tourism. As part of its plan to become a self-sufficient industrialized nation by 2030, the Malaysian Government is undertaking a substantial program of public sector reform.

HELEN SILVER

Session: Building a public service that can adapt to change

Helen is Secretary of Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet. She leads the Department, and the Victorian Public Service more generally, in advising and serving the Premier and Government of Victoria. Prior to her current position, she was a member of the Council of Australian Governments’ Reform Council, established to monitor progress of COAG reforms agreed between the Commonwealth, State Governments and Local Governments.

DR SHASHI THAROOR [ India]

Session: Garran Oration

Dr Tharoor is a former UN Under-Secretary-General and Indian Minister of State for External Affairs. India’s central and state government employ 10 million public administrators, serving a population of 1.2 billion people. Dr Tharoor will examine the challenges of administering in both a super-state and in the international arena.

JENNIFER WESTACOTT

Session: Big Thinker – Doing public administration better…

Jennifer is CEO of Business Council of Australia, an association of the chief executive officers of 100 of Australia’s top companies and has extensive policy experience in both the public and private sectors. For over 20 years Jennifer has occupied critical leadership positions in the New South Wales and Victorian Governments. Subsequently she was Director and National Lead Partner at KPMG, heading up the firm’s Sustainability, Climate Change and Water practice and its NSW State Government practice.

PAM WHITE

Session: Lessons for public administration from disater response

Pam was head of the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, created by Commonwealth and Victorian Governments to oversee and coordinate the largest recovery and rebuilding program Victoria has ever faced. The 2009 Victorian bushfires were the worst in Australia’s history, devastated 109 communities across the state, destroyed more than 2,000 homes and damaged around 430,000 hectares of land. By the time the fires were contained, 173 people had lost their lives, many others were seriously injured and more than 3,400 properties were destroyed or damaged.