Budgetary control of Australian police services and the new governance of security
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852305051684 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Budgetary control of Australian police services and the
new governance of security
Benoît Dupont
Abstract
Through the example of the Australian police services, this article examines the
impact of the New Public Management tools on strengthening administrative
accountability. Governments, faced with increasing social demand for security,
have launched into political auctions on the themes of police activity and social
control. Relationships between the authorities and the police administrators have
been redefined, mainly through more rigorous budgetary control. After a rapid
examination of the administrative context that led to the implementation of
programme budgeting — the main government tool in this area — the article
examines the tensions that resulted from its introduction. Particular emphasis is
placed upon the limitations of such a tool in the field of security, which is under-
going profound reconfiguration as a result of increasingly frequent cooperation
between public, private and hybrid actors.
The last two decades of the 20th century were marked in the industrialized countries
by a general movement of reform of the public sector based on the reduction of the
extent and spheres of state intervention. The Anglo-Saxon societies, which share a
neoliberal vision of the relationship between the administrative structure and civil
society, are unquestionably leading such changes. In Great Britain and the USA, as
well as in New Zealand, Canada and Australia, the monolithic and inflated adminis-
trative structure has given way to an ‘entrepreneurial’ administration applying com-
pany ‘managerial’ principles (Hood, 1991; Chevallier, 1994: 45). The salient features
of this approach have been studied by many researchers (for example Cheung, 1997)
Benoît Dupont is Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal. Canada. It is a translation of the
article published in French under the title: ‘Le contrôle budgétaire des services de police australiens et
la nouvelle gouvernance de la sécurité’. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their com-
ments and suggestions.
Copyright © 2005 IIAS, SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 71(1):71–82 [DOI:10.1177/0020852305051684]
72 International Review of Administrative Sciences 71(1)
and we shall restrict ourselves to pointing out the pre-eminence of the aims and
effectiveness over the methods and procedure.
Behind, however, a clear effort to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the
public service, a new dialectic on political control of the administration occasionally
stands out. Managerialism, the contractual state and all other transformations of
New Public Management (NPM) have without any doubt sought to redefine the
parameters of the traditional dichotomy relating to the development of public poli-
cies and their implementation (Chevallier, 1994: 448). Nonetheless, the enthusiasm
with which governments have adopted similar reforms despite divergent political and
ideological leanings, reveals some of the indirect benefits which they are planning to
obtain, mainly strengthening their control over a technical department, whose inde-
pendence they are seeking to reduce. This increase in ministerial control, advocated
by the paradigm of ‘public choice’, has been eased by the revision of budgetary tools,
the modernization of performance assessment systems and the renegotiation of
the terms of the bureaucratic market.1 Paradoxically, these tools for the reform and
revitalization of public service have thus strengthened the political decision-makers’
power of management over the daily functioning of the departments for which they
are responsible. Although, in theory, these management responsibilities are, in the
new administrative model, delegated to decentralized services, the new allocation of
resources tools, coupled with a statistical monitoring in real time, offer the central
services new methods of controlling public action.2
This overinvestment in the processes of developing and implementing public
policies by political leaders indirectly compensates for the state’s disengagement
from the economic and social spheres. If, in fact, state interventionism within its
Keynesian incarnation had lived, it would, nonetheless, remain a powerful govern-
ment instrument in the sectors in which the state still has undisputed pre-eminence,
with public security ranked highest. In this context, the governability of the institutions
responsible for its implementation represents a vital political imperative, particularly at
the time of elections. Through a case study relating to the new budgetary practices
imposed on the Australian police services since the beginning of the 1980s, it is
possible to illustrate in a practical way how NPM tools can be diverted from their
obvious objectives in order to strengthen the administration’s accountability with
regard to its political masters.
After having specified the organizational features of the Australian police system
and its links with the political system in the first part, the second part will show how
the traditional resources allocation tools have been replaced by sophisticated public
accounting instruments. Finally, the third part will show how these tools have allowed
the authorities to increase their control over the direction of public security policies,
before concluding with the genuine significance of this new method of control.
The Australian policing system and law and order policies
The federal structure of Australia lies at the origin of a decentralized but nonetheless
unified policing system (Bayley, 1985: 54). Each state has a police force which
operates independently within a separate legislative framework. At national level, a
federal police force has limited jurisdiction in the fields of white-collar crime and
Dupont Budgetary control of Australian police services 73
organized crime. In terms of workforce, Australia has, on average, 215 police officers
for 100,000 inhabitants (Steering Committee for the Review of Commonwealth/State
Service Provision [SCRCSSP], 2002: 384), which places it ahead of Canada (179) but
behind Great Britain (242), the USA (250) and France (295) (Maguire and Schulte-
Murray, 2001: 90). As far as expenditure linked with police activities is concerned, this
amounted to 2275 million euros for the fiscal year 2000–01 (SCRCSSP, 2002: 376).
In the same way as the other public services, the Australian police forces have not
escaped the ministerial reforms which have followed one another since the begin-
ning of the 1980s (Dupont, 2002). In the case of the police services, the central theme
of these reforms, apart from the improvement of productivity, has been account-
ability. Within the policing context, the service’s accountability can be obtained by
means of two types of procedure. The first involves a direct control of police activities,
while the second emphasizes the obligation to give accounts and give explanations
afterwards. The first type rests on a style of control based on obedience, whereas the
second leads to a negotiation process, which gives the police service greater latitude
(Chan, 1999: 252). Within the Anglo-Saxon context, it is paradoxically the latter which
is indicative of the traditional doctrine of separation between political institutions and
law enforcement organizations, effective operational control resulting from a more
‘continental’ approach (Brogden et al., 1988: 151–2; Reiner, 1995: 76–7).
The origin of limited operational accountability, which is characteristic of police
services, is found in the legal theory of the ‘independence of the constable’, set out
by English and Australian courts. In common-law countries, police officers are granted
a legal status which, in theory, grants them some operational autonomy from orders
emanating from their hierarchy or political appointees. English legal decisions have
strongly influenced this theory, which has been implicitly extended to the operational
autonomy of the police hierarchy.3 Their interpretation, which also applies in Australia,
makes a distinction between operational decisions and policy decisions made by
politicians, considerably reducing the intervention capacity of Police Ministers.
Although this legal construction guarantees in theory a minimum instrumentalization
of the police services for the Australian citizens, it is particularly frustrating for elected
officials, whose objective it is to...
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