By providing insight into the focus areas of the government of the day, machinery of government arrangements are a vehicle through which to analyse the main concerns of governments across Australia.
Machinery of government changes are a major driver of organisational change within public sector bodies. Often with minimal notice, affected departments can be required to restructure their operations to focus more closely on government priorities.
There are five main reasons why machinery of government changes occur:
- To enable a clearer focus on priority areas
- To promote greater coordination between different policy areas
- To achieve broader political objectives
- To achieve greater levels of efficiency across the public sector
- To address an underperforming department.
This publication presents the current machinery of government arrangements for all Australian governments in one place for easy reference. It also highlights unique differences in the approaches taken by individual jurisdictions and recent trends that affect machinery of government changes.