Aspects of political control in selected public transport corporations

Abstract

My interest in the public corporation began during my studies for the Diploma of Public Administration at the University of Tasmania. When the adoption of that form for the management of Britain’s nationalised industries was presented as an exciting new adventure in government. Most of us recognised that the public corporation was known before the advent of the Attlee Government, and in particular that Australian governments had already made frequent use of it. However it was not until its selection as the instrument of nationalisation by British Labour that it became a popular subject for study. Even to-day it is broadly true that the much longer Australian experience has interested few scholars and is neither well understood nor well documented. I therefore chose the Australian Commonwealth corporations as the topic for my MA thesis, and supplemented this with some essays dealing with various aspects of the corporation in Australia. However I become increasingly conscious that I was only skirting the subject: the work concentrated on the formal, legal, organisational features, and largely ignored the personal element. I concluded that it was possible for the latter to distort the operation of legislative forms, but could offer very little useful information on just how or to what extent this did in fact occur. This is, I believe, a difficulty which has confronted many students of the public cooperation. It is due in large measure to the lack of empirical case-studies about the actual working of corporations, a lack which compels observers for the most part to generalise from scanty evidence or to take a primarily legalistic or speculative approach. It is approach that Australian governments have achieved many successes with the corporate form; but there have been more than a few failures. The occasional crisis inquiries have usually pointed, explicitly or implicitly, to personal incapacity, tactlessness or lack of appreciation of the requirement of public service generally or of the delicate relationships which must be maintained between corporation and minister (or between board members and executives within the corporation, or even between the board members themselves), as contributing factors when corporations do go wrong.