Australia

A basic premise of this chapter is that public service leadership is subsequently a product of administrative culture, which in turn is reflected in how senior public servants are trained. The extent to which administrative culture is a decisive factor and how training shapes leadership development needs to be explored against the backdrop of a country’s political structure and public management paradigms that contextualize, focus and channel the institutions and programs for developing the capabilities of senior public servants. The training model for a public service system is also subject to internal perspectives about the provision of training and development agency needs and conceptions of leadership. Australia has been strongly influenced by British tradition, but the result needs to be considered with its new world context and the environmental factors that have shaped its identity. A strong strain of egalitarianism has been pervasive in Australian society and has influenced how the Australian senior public service has been constituted. Nevertheless, the managerialisation of the national public sector has been the most enduring feature of the last three decades, and approaches to leadership associated with Anglophone systems have been prevalent.