Abstract
Competition policy represents the marketisation of the public sector, and the loss of its identity in relation to the private sector. Competition policy redefines all government agencies and activities as businesses, and in so doing, places them on a business enterprise basis. From which point it makes sense to ask how these government businesses, like all business enterprises, should come under the framework of trade and competition policies. It also makes sense to propose that government enterprise should not have an unfair competitive advantage with regard to its now-constituted private sector competitors: this is expressed in the principle of ‘competitive neutrality’. The inexorable direction of this restructuring of the public sector is one of marketisation: the bias is against the continuation of government ownership and for the privatisation of erstwhile government enterprises (see Goot 2010); and where government funding is still required for welfare services, the relationship is contractualised as one between the funding agency and private (for-profit and not-for-profit) agencies that competitively tender for government business. Public service turns into contract management and becomes a form of ‘market managerialism’ (Considine and Painter 1997, 10). Competition policy, more precisely, refers to the institutional framework for the marketisation of the public sector. In this context, those (like the team who produced the final report of the Competition Policy Review (CPR) who engage in the formulation of competition policy, and those (like the Australian Productivity Commission) who implement and evaluate it are market managerialists writ large. The following chapter should be read as a case study of contemporary market managerialism.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Triumph of Managerialism?: New Technologies of Government and Their Implications for Value |
Editors | Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Rowman and Littlefield |
Pages | 103-125 |
Number of pages | 23 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781786604897 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781786604880 |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- competition
- government policy
- managerialism
- social service
- welfare state
- Australia