“There is indeed a case to be made that the water has been muddied somewhere between the realms of the public and the private and that the central problem is the confusion of value sets. The businessman who aggrandises public responsibility to himself is likely to offend the ordinary person eventually, as will the public servant who wishes to play businessman. Perhaps the core problem is that all the developments described above have been driven by self-serving top dogs – those who have ascended to the commanding heights of both the public and the private sectors and who may now enjoy an unconsciously collusive relationship. In the end, it is always the ordinary person, and that includes the taxpayer, who foots the bill – and smells a rat.” Alistair Mant
G’Day. Here is a sensational paper on the changing role of government by leadership consultant Alistair Mant, the author of ‘Intelligent Leadership (Allen and Unwin) and chairman of the United Kingdom’s Socio-Technical Strategy Group, which studies system function and dysfunction. Mr Mant spends a third of his time in Australia working with government and private sectors on leadership, government modernisation and organisational structure. Sounds heavy, I know, but the speech is super accessible and extremely thought provoking.
“Muddying the waters?” was distributed at this year’s annual conference of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and is the best analysis I’ve read on the different roles of the government and corporate sectors, and the terrible dangers we face with the adoption of corporate values by Government and the emergence of private-public ‘partnerships’ for public infrastructure. As you know, I believe that redefining the role of government – national and global – is a pressing issue in our neo-liberal world, and that the key to Labor’s present policy paralysis is its unwillingness to properly address this matter. The Liberals have enthusiastically adopted the private sector model for the public sector with sometimes disastrous results, such as as its now halted attempt to outsource all its information technology to the private sector (see HIH: Will Costello be nailed?)
After I recently decided that the role of government would be the Webdiary’s theme for a while, Webdiarist Richard Moss detailed the recent wholesale government sell-offs of its building to the private sector, with the result that quite soon, it will be captive to landlords charging monopoly rents (see Sacrificing humanity on the altar of cheap ideology). Richard calls the rush to privatisation and outsourcing “a national scandal that the media have somehow missed”.
He wrote: “In many instances, the government agency becomes virtually the captive of the provider, especially if it is a large multinational, because after a few years the agency has no basis on which to judge the relative quality, effectiveness or price competitiveness of the services it is getting. Game over.”
Richard’s comments followed my piece wondering how on earth it came to be that a private company manages our detention centres ( Woomera: Reducing Australian values to private profit.)
Thank you to Sue Jackson of the Australian Institute of Company Directors for finding a copy of the paper and sending it to me in electronic form. I’d love to receive your comments and recommendations of other cutting edge work in this area. I’m hoping that Simon Crean, or whoever leads the ALP, will pick up the ball and give a detailed speech on the role of government under “new” Labor sometime soon.
The private/public boundary: Muddying the water?
by Alistair Mant
This is a paper supporting the forum of the same name at the Australian Institute of Company Directors conference; Canberra 14-16th May, 2003.
The best business people and the best public servants are very like each other – public-spirited entrepreneurs and businesslike public servants – but their roles are fundamentally different.
In the Beginning…
There was a time when the distinction between public service and private business was much clearer than it is now. For example, just at the level of vocational choice, persons of a cautious or dutiful disposition could always hope to find some kind of long-term career in the public sector. The presumption was that the pay would not be enormous but the risks would be minimal – probably a job for life and a relatively generous pension in return for loyalty and discretion. In the British civil service, given a following wind, there might even be a gong at the end. The other, less tangible, satisfaction was the sense of having contributed directly to the common good.
By contrast, entrants to the private sector have always walked in through two quite separate doors. The “workers” expected to earn a bit more than lowly public servants and tended to rely on organised unions to fight for any security of employment. They traded absolute security of employment for the chance of better money, often earned spasmodically from shift-work, overtime and occasional bonuses. In the smaller private firms it could be a relatively hand-to-mouth existence but at least you probably knew the owners personally and could hope for some kind of reciprocal loyalty.
The other door was for middle-class and probably graduate entrants to the ranks of “management”, most of whom looked forward to a long-term “career” in one of the main banks, or a pastoral house – rising eventually to the senior echelons. Although in more recent years those managerial types have been increasingly exposed to occupational uncertainty, it has never occurred to them to unionise themselves. They just didn’t see themselves as “workers” – more as members of the owner “family”.
After the second world war, nobody much questioned an enhanced role for the State in the citizen’s private affairs – it was pervasive and paternalistic – after all, everybody needed a bit of looking after at the end of a long hard war. That was an understandable development but it certainly wasn’t “natural” for members of our human species. After all, it is only in relatively recent time that our ancestors emerged from Africa to eke out an existence in the “fertile crescent” in the middle east. We survived then, if we survived at all, in smallish family or tribal bands and our personal “welfare” was much less important than the collective needs of the group. Really large employment organisations, within which people anticipated orderly “careers”, were a very recent creation of the 19th and 20th centuries.
After the second world war, the biggest private businesses were still almost as paternalistic as the public sector. They expected not only to provide lifelong “careers” for the better workers but also to continue to provide traditional goods and services to their long-standing customers in time-honoured ways. They expected continuity in their relationships with both employees and customers and they assumed that government would ensure a level commercial playing field. Big firms such as banks and oil companies, riding the wave of post-war prosperity, actually behaved quite like major government departments-until the oil price shocks of the 1970s. From then on, it was 19th century tooth-and-claw business as usual.
The Guardians and the Traders
The distinguished American scholar Jane Jacobs (1) reminds us that the distinction between our public and our private selves is deeply rooted in our human nature. She points out that those early human beings had really only two ways of surviving and of apprehending their world. The hunter-gatherer existence meant foraging for whatever sustenance the locality provided. Most lives were brutish and short. But once we began to cluster in towns and to domesticate grains for agriculture – just a few thousand years ago – that more stable and predictable mode of life lent itself to the emergence of guardians -natural leaders who took it upon themselves to protect territory and look after people – an early instance of “government”.
The other mode of existence she called the commercial or trader mode which provided the means for exchange and trading across more-or-less stable geographical boundaries. Traders emerged as soon as there were predictable surpluses. Traders are good at trading but you ought not to rely on them for guardianship of traditional beliefs and standards. Jacobs makes the crucial point that the trader modality relies just as much on trust between human beings as the guardian or governing modality. Business grinds to a halt without mutual trust. That is why the financial engineers at Enron in the USA, Equitable in the UK and One.Tel and HIH in Australia were so damaging for mainstream business.
So for Jacobs, the guardian’s precepts are all about continuity, discipline, rules, hierarchy, loyalty, patronage, civic pride, social cohesion, mature dependence on authority and. in the best sense of the word, conservatism. That, traditionally, has been the realm of government and, by extension of public service.
The trader’s precepts, on the other hand, are all about creative discontinuity, initiative, competition, innovation, co-operation across boundaries, risk, negotiation, thriftiness and a freedom from immediate or narrow loyalties – the realm of business.
The important point is that both modes are deeply embedded in our human nature and both are necessary for our collective welfare. We need good strong government for the protection of our possessions and for the disciplined regulation of our personal and commercial behaviour. We also need to survive in a fiercely-competitive world of international markets. What’s more, Jacobs argues, our repertoire is limited to these two modes – our choice as a species has always been to take from nature what we can, peacefully or otherwise, (so long as nature’s bounty lasts) or to trade what we can glean or manufacture.
Our best hope is that our guardians and our traders can work in parallel for the common good without demonising each other or fudging the natural boundary between them. All too often, business nowadays sees government as a sea of anti-progress “Sir Humphreys” who generate red tape, obfuscate at every turn and aggrandise unaccountable power to themselves behind closed doors. Government, on the other hand, is now beginning to see much of the business world as in the grip of greedy, inefficient (and equally unaccountable) fraudsters, charlatans and the occasional megalomaniac.
Russia in the 1930s fell totally to its guardians. The result was an almost complete disappearance of true markets and of legitimate entrepreneurial activity. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, all that bottled-up illegitimate entrepreneurship is in danger of swamping the body politic. Our traders need to be strong but so too do our guardians. As in most things, it’s a matter of balance.
The Need for Global Guardians
As some have argued, the guardian/trader relationship has been much complicated by the phenomenon of globalisation. There was a time when the separate governments of major countries could regulate the behaviour of major multinational firms, especially as to the movement of money across geographical boundaries. No longer. If we wish for a workable international relationship between the guardians and the traders then the guardians are going to have to go global as well as the corporations. Such global guardians as we have (including the UN) can hardly be said to have fulfilled our needs.
The World Bank, currently under Australian leadership, is doing its best to redress the balance between rich country global firms and poor country village economies.
In a seminal HBR paper in 1996, Henry Mintzberg (2) drew attention to what he referred to as the newly fashionable idea of “virtual government” which contains the belief that the best government is no government at all. This model, he argued “represents the great experiment of economists who have never had to manage anything”. It is certainly true to say that underlying the fashion for public service outsourcing was a defensible belief that government had traditionally taken on too much and that a better public/private balance had to be struck. The question always is: what should that balance be?
Keeping an eye on the Future
At the practical level, many of our present discontents about public service and private profit come down to the issue of time-scales. If we rely on our guardians for anything, it is the long-term view. As we live longer and longer, it is reasonable that we expect government to ensure that we are looked after in a civilised way in our declining years. That means carefully-planned long-term financial provision. If that personal provision is underwritten by a private supplier such as AMP or (in the UK) Equitable Life, then we must hope that some guardian ensures that prudence and the long view dictate strategy in that firm.
What happened at Equitable was that energetic youngish people, in the endeavour to compete successfully in a short-term marketplace, took a punt on likely interest rates thirty or more years into the future. Nobody can see that far head and intelligent people know that nobody can do so. The punt on the markets broke the firm when another set of guardians (the judiciary) forced the company to honour its fixed-rate return products as interest rates fell. What were the senior management up to? Well, they too were being “incentivised” by very short-term targets designed to impress other young men in and around stock markets. They were trading but their time-scales were all wrong. Australian readers don’t need reminding about the AMP case.
HIH and Enron were similar stories, with the same mix of executive short-sightedness and optimism that everything will be all right (please God) at some time in the future. In theory, there are regulators to keep an eye on corporate mischief – in practice, no regulator or guardian can hope to penetrate the complexity of modern financial accounts. Enron used to be a modestly-sized pipeline company. Pipes are useful objects but the marketplace for shifting fluids and gases from one place to another is a mature one and the profits no more than steady, though reliable. So an inflated Enron invented a new “market” whose principal virtue was that no guardian could hope to understand it.
Enron also demonstrated the weaknesses of internal regulation by non-executive company directors. The non-execs are meant to be “guardians” of a sort but the sensible reforms to corporate governance proposed by Sir Adrian Cadbury (3) and his imitators were meant to be taken up by consensus and collegiality amongst business people – a form of self-interested trading. Enron reminded us that there is still a role for the external guardians – those guardians with the authority to put people in jail if need be.
Jim Collins did us all a favour by pointing out in Built to Last and Good to Great (4) that long-term profitability in the private sector always flows from the energies of low- key, uncharismatic (but clever) executives who spend years and years building up the steady momentum of market domination. These are the kinds of traders who are older and wiser and dedicated to creating admirable firms as the vehicle for successful trading way into the future. As one corporate head put it – “my aim is indeed shareholder value -but shareholder value in perpetuity!”
At one time, the West Australian Treasury had a good guardian’s rule – a principle of “intergenerational equity”. The idea was that no government would be allowed to buy popularity today by mortgaging the next generation’s prospects. Does that rule still hold?
Valuing the Sir Humphreys
If we can’t rely on more than a handful of private companies to keep an eye on long-term viability, can we trust government to keep its head? Well, a number of things have changed in public service in recent years. Firstly, the terms and conditions of public service employment have changed markedly in many countries. Almost gone in Australia is the old principle of tenure – the idea that a “permanent” head of department, trained over thirty years to be a reliable guardian, could and should stand up to short-termist government ministers so as to offer “frank and fearless” policy advice in the national interest without risk of summary removal or marginalisation.
This means that public servants have become much more like private sector managers -subject to “performance management” (whatever that means in a policy role) and to a private sector-like risk/reward package. Government ministers too have become more like businessmen in the maintenance of their private offices, staffed by non-elected and non-accountable (to the public service) policy wonks, spin doctors and business and special interest representatives. The creation of semi-autonomous government departments, modelled on mini-corporations, may improve management control and responsiveness but it fatally ties public servants to particular departments and therefore dilutes their loyalty to a broad public service ethos. Once isolated, they can be bullied.
As a frequent visitor to Australia during the first run of “Yes Minister” on local TV, I found myself worried by the unholy glee with which Australian public servants were tarred with the “Sir Humphrey” brush. Nobody in Whitehall or Westminster talks about the “Westminster system” because it is taken for granted. Of course the Sir Humphreys can be smug and devious but most people in the UK understand that they still represent the least worst way of ensuring the separation of powers upon which democracy depends. In Australia, it looked to me as though public service itself was being demonised and scapegoated, and a humble TV series was being misused to that end.
If we think we need guardians to preserve thoughtful long-term strategy, then we have to ask what kinds of rules and safeguards those guardians require in order to do that work on our behalf. If we turn them into businessmen then in due course they will begin to behave like businessmen (Throughout this paper, whenever I use the term businessman it is used deliberately and pejoratively to indicate behaviour which, thankfully, one is much less likely to find amongst businesswomen.). Is that really what we want? Of course, we need to reform public service continuously but we dare not emasculate our guardians. We need them more than ever in a world dominated by business short-termism.
The Third Way
In the 1990s, a significant new idea emerged in the UK with great importance for the private/public boundary – the “third way”. This is a Blairite “new Labour” idea, though it appears to have originated in Clintonian think tanks. The “third way” played some part in the overwhelming electoral success of the rebadged Labour Party in the late 1990s. The idea helped Labour to throw off its image as a union-dominated and fundamentally Luddite party of opposition to big business and old privilege. “New” Labour would be ideologically neutral- neither pro-business nor slavishly statist. The guardians (government) would work flexibly with the traders (private business) in a new kind of “partnership”. “Partnership” quickly became the buzz-word of this new world.
Superficially, this was an attractive idea. It meant accepting finally that central states cannot control complex modern societies from the seat of government. The guardians can establish the correct boundary conditions for the operation of institutions but they cannot run everything in the way that the Soviet Union attempted in the 20th century. On the other hand, it also meant an acceptance that the “hidden hand” of the market could not be relied upon to regulate the affairs of men – the guardians still have a duty to regulate and when necessary to intervene directly when imbalances and inequities occur.
It is not really a new idea. Something like this animated the great Sir William Hudson (5) in his stewardship of the Snowy Mountains Scheme over nearly half a century. The Snowy Mountains Authority (a public institution) sat at the heart of the enterprise and preserved the corporate intelligence, but whenever the unions became especially cantankerous Hudson was happy to farm out major works to an array of private sector contractors with whom he maintained good relations. He was always happy to threaten to call in the private sector – a tactic that the unions understood and respected. Hudson really was a “third way” operator.
Fudging the Boundary – “PFIs and PPPs”
The idea of public/private “partnership” enshrined in the “third way” spawned a new kind of relationship between the public and private sectors, mainly in the outsourcing of public
sector services. In fact, it assisted the successful export of a new product from the UK -the private/public partnership (“PPP”) or the private finance initiative (“PFI”) business model. (It is a British export in the sense that a large proportion of the public sector work outsourced has gone to British companies around the world). This is an idea which is as popular with parts of the public sector as it with the private – a true “win/win”. Politicians and businessmen love it. Does this mean that it serves our interests in the long-term? Read on.
At the simplest level, a PFI scheme is a device for accelerating necessary public expenditure by entering into a partnership relationship with the private sector. The idea is that short-term public expenditure will diminish because the private sector is bearing a substantial burden of short-term cost – and assuming some of the burden of risk. The payoff to the private sector lies in the long-term revenue stream (up to and beyond thirty years) written into the contract. Government likes this because present expenditures are shifted “off the books” and there has been a notional transfer of financial risk to the private sector. As a general rule, government ministers also love to open shiny new facilities now – even if the costs are borne by others, later on.
But we have noted already that nobody can see thirty years into the future. The cautious citizen may wonder whether a revenue stream of public (taxpayers’) money really ought to be based on an inflexible and binding, legal contract. If the deal turns out to be profitable to the private sector, well and good – the issue is how profitable? It takes a mighty clever government procurement department to devise a contract capable of clawing back a reasonable return on the public contribution as circumstances change over time – over thirty years maybe – and private companies are showing an alarming tendency to disappear overnight. Some of them use “special purpose vehicles” to finance PFI projects – a means of separating PFI money from the main accounts – not a practice calculated to instil confidence post-Enron.
More to the point, if something goes wrong, that transfer of risk to the private sector may turn out to be illusory. If the deregulated supplier of an essential public service goes broke, which government is going to sanction a closedown of the railways or the electricity generators or the jails? The good citizens of California discovered that private firms given control of the upstream electricity generation market may abuse that power. If that, in turn, breaks the distributors then capitalist theory says those distributors should go to the wall. The Governor of California, as anybody could have predicted, stepped in to bailout the private sector distributors with public funds. No politician likes blackouts.
So the PPP or PFI idea represents a hugely important development in the private/public relationship. Government has embraced the idea of “fly now pay later” on a massive scale. The government of the day can reduce present public expenditure and thus reduce present taxes. In the short term, that is a win/win for everybody. The problem is that all the private contractors must take their cut from every deal struck – after all, they have private shareholders to satisfy. That cut has to reflect the generally higher costs of borrowing by the private sector.
In the end, it all has to be paid for by the next generation, by which time the power of the guardians to regulate anything at all may have diminished to the point of powerlessness. All this is happening at a time when government is advising citizens to start saving seriously for their retirement in their twenties because they may well live for another seventy years. Effectively, government is saying “pay now fly later” to the individual citizen whilst doing exactly the opposite in the public policy sphere. Until we are clearer about long term costs and benefits of the PFI experiment, the risk is that the citizen will pay both now and later.
Whatever happened to Capitalism?
The economic historian Nathan Rosenberg argued that capitalism in its purest sense is an experimental, risk-taking system within which learning is inevitable:
” … one of the most distinctive features of capitalist economies has been the practice of decentralizing authority over investments to substantial numbers of individuals who stand to make large personal gains if their decisions are right, who stand to lose heavily if their decisions are wrong, and who lack the economic or political power to prevent at least some others from proving them wrong. Indeed, this particular cluster of features constitutes an excellent candidate for the definition of capitalism”. (6)
Consider this in the light of the PFI experiment, for it is an experiment. In the PFI case, government and the private sector come together to share costs and (notionally) risks. If the private/public “partnership” concerns an essential service (the kind that cannot be allowed to cease as a result of temporary financial embarrassment on the part of the provider) then both the costs and the risks (the traditional preserve of capitalist enterprise) are likely to end up in the public domain – but not the profits. Jane Jacobs’ “traders” were true entrepreneurs – running real risks in the hope of great reward – and learning all the time. When we fudge the private/public boundary, we run the risk of creating a monstrous public/private hybrid – neither risk-taking nor accountable. It certainly isn’t capitalism.
None of this means that partnerships between the private and the public are necessarily wrong. There are well-proven examples of such partnerships working just as they are supposed to. Also, the contract-making skills of public servants are, perforce, improving by the day. The point is that it would be quite wrong to blame business – the traders – for filling a yawning gap left by government’s decision to hand over to others some of its key powers. J. K. Galbraith pointed out a long time ago that the smartest businesspeople abhor true competition – it’s much too expensive and chancy – far better to monopolise the market for public services and pocket all the profits. One clever politician put it well – that privatisation can be a marvellous means of privatising profit and socialising loss.
Values, “Marketisation” and God
It won’t have escaped the reader’s attention that any reference to long-term outcomes takes us into the realm of values. “Marketised solutions” may deliver short-term gains to society but if their cumulative effect is to destroy the planet, our children will not have gained (a point made as long ago as 1973 by the great E. F. Schumacher (7) in the seminal book Small is Beautiful). If we save money now on prisons by sub-contracting to cynical experts in the low-level warehousing of human beings, then we may cut costs now but we will certainly ensure a high level of recidivism and greater danger and cost downstream. But more important, we will also eventually offend ourselves by the inhumanity of our actions.
During the Prime Ministership of John Major in the UK, government published what it called a “Citizen’s Charter”. This was designed to ensure that people should not be ripped-off by avaricious traders or arrogant public sector service suppliers. In truth, it was a customers’ charter. We can interpret this in two ways – either government was cynically over-selling the idea in order to deflect attention from real market abuses – or (more worrying still) government no longer understood the difference between the rights of consumers and the rights of citizens.
Mintzberg (2) points out that this over-simple view of the world neglects the many forms of hybridised ownership to be found in western society – including co-operatives and not–for-profit organisations. Even in the USA, the not-for-profit sector is growing fast. He reminds us that we are not merely “customers” of government; we are also subjects (with obligations), citizens (with rights) and clients (with much more complex needs than straightforward commercial customers). We have to remember that in the temple of greedy capitalism – the USA – there has always been a good deal of formal regulation (look at the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890), as well as many implicit rules governing corporate reputation and community collaboration.
The guardians used to reflect and embody some of our deepest human values. Those values evolved in the context of local community life, reciprocal trust and the generational continuity of extended families. Government existed, above all, to preserve that “natural” order. Once the public sector begins to be “marketised” we have to look elsewhere for the sustenance of those deeper values. It may be no coincidence that as government retreats, religions of all kinds advance. Religion at least offers a view of humankind beyond the market trader.
Where to from Here?
There is indeed a case to be made that the water has been muddied somewhere between the realms of the public and the private and that the central problem is the confusion of value sets. The businessman who aggrandises public responsibility to himself is likely to offend the ordinary person eventually, as will the public servant who wishes to play businessman. Perhaps the core problem is that all the developments described above have been driven by self-serving top dogs – those who have ascended to the commanding heights of both the public and the private sectors and who may now enjoy an unconsciously collusive relationship. In the end, it is always the ordinary person, and that includes the taxpayer, who foots the bill – and smells a rat.
That is why the most exciting developments in both public and private spheres now centre on local community – local business – local administration – and shared local values. The new buzz-phrase is “joined-up solutions to joined-up problems” Of, simply, ‘joined-up government”. The Australian Social Entrepreneurs’ Network (8) – seeking out and connecting local enterprise and local social responsibility – is more likely to show the way forward in the public/private debate than any “partnership” between the Sir Humphreys and the big money men. The same applies to “place management” (9) – an Australian idea with the potential to reinvigorate local government through focussed delivery effectiveness and greater transparency. The job of central government is to listen and learn from these natural developments on the ground.
At the personal level, the best business people and the best public servants are very like each other – public-spirited business people and entrepreneurial public servants. But that only works well when their different roles are clearly distinguished. We need our guardians and we need our traders and we need to be clear about the difference.
Key Institutions
There are a number of Australian institutions which might play a part in rethinking the proper balance between the public and the private sphere. To offer just two examples, the Australian Institute of Company Directors itself has devoted a great deal of attention to issues of corporate governance -especially in relation to the guardian role of non-executive business directors. So long as the public/private water is muddied, AICD is well-positioned to offer some guidance as to public sector governance too. It is certainly in a position to investigate in a frank and fearless way the self-serving part played by the big international management consultancies in both driving the PFI experiment and picking up the proceeds from it.
We can assume that the new Australia/New Zealand School of Government (based in the University of Melbourne) will adopt an equally uncompromising approach to studying the impact of the new and emerging public/private balance. The School will certainly be in a position to examine the long term costs and benefits of existing public/private “partnerships” in a systematic and critical way. It could also help to provide hard empirical evidence about those core activities which must be the prerogative of government and those less central activities which may, with appropriate safeguards, be placed in the private domain. All over Australia, centres for the study and promotion of good corporate governance are now focussing on the public domain. The new, internationally-networked Centre for Corporate Governance at UTS is a good example.
There is no reason at all why Australian and New Zealand scholarship and scepticism should not lead the world in the understanding of what has become a problematic global issue. Nobody else has cracked the problems.
Footnotes
1. Jacobs, Jane; Systems of Survival, Vintage (NY) 1994
2. Mintzberg, Henry; Managing Government, Governing Management, HBR May 1996
3. Cadbury, Sir Adrian; The Cadbury Committee – Report of the Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, Gee (London) 1992; see ccg
4. Collins, Jim; Built to Last (with J. Porras), HarperBusiness 1997 and Good to Great, HarperCollins 2001 Mant, Alistair; Intelligent Leadership. Allen & Unwin 1999 (chapter 4)
5. Rosenberg, Nathan; Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics & History, CUP 1994, p 98 Schumacher, E. F; Small is Beautiful. Abacus (UK) 1974
6. Social Entrepreneurs’ Network; see social entrepreneur’s network
7. Mant, John H; Place Management as an Inherent Part of Change: a Rejoinder to Walsh, Australian Journal of Public Administration 61 (3) September 2002; pp 111-116