Economic rationalism in Canberra revisited - evidence for a principal-agent problem

Michael Pusey in "Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A nation-building state changes its mind" (1991) argued that Senior Executive Service (SES) officers in the Australian Public Service had a major influence on policy-making. This was particularly the case for those in the central agencies (the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury and the Department of Finance) who he say as advocates of “economic rationalism”. This thesis revisits these claims by interviewing the current generation of SES officers in the Treasury and Department of Finance and finds significant differences between today's attitudes and those reported by Pusey.