What are the consequences of incessant reform? Losing trust, policy capacity and institutional memory in the Queensland core executive

This chapter explores the cumulative effects of machinery of government change and successive waves of public-sector reform on the institutional memory of the Queensland core executive. Focused particularly on the period from 2005 to 2015, it reviews how the traditions, beliefs and practices of the central networks that comprise executive government in Australia’s most decentralised state were affected by four changes of Premier, a slew of administrative reforms, and one largely anticipated, and another unexpected, change of government. The chapter presents an insider’s account of unfolding reform in Queensland during the period under study. Throughout this time, the author has been an ‘active member researcher’ (Adler and Adler 1987) who has worked closely with the political-administrative networks at the centre of Queensland government in roles that have included: a member of the Board of the Queensland Public Service Commission; a consultant; a professional educator; a researcher; a confidante; and now a ‘critical friend’. The chapter draws on documentary and interview data collected in the course of my evolving affiliation with the networks under study. It presents an ‘insider’s story’—comparable to Norell’s (2009) account of governance in the Swedish city of Karlstad. My insider’s account is told from the perspective of continuity amidst the ceaseless change affecting informants and respondents. There is widespread concern that forty years of continuous reform and change to the public sector has seriously undermined institutional memory and governments’ capacity to learn from experience. The Queensland case is an opportunity to consider, in microcosm, the medium-term impact and implications of frequent, discontinuous change, on the beliefs, traditions and practices of central core executive networks and for the quality and efficiency of governance. The chapter also reflects on the opportunities and dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork for the active member researcher and the analytic usefulness of this perspective for administrative ethnography.