A Comparative Examination of Cultural Change within the Australian and New Zealand Treasuries

Abstract

Manifold similarities between Australia and New Zealand provide social scientists with unique opportunities for comparative analyses of the two countries. In this paper, we attempt to explain cultural change within their respective Treasuries in terms of their secretaries' use of agenda-setting, strategic recruitment and "expression games." A different institutional context allowed the New Zealand Treasury (NZT) to exercise a more dominant influence than the Australian Treasury (AT), although the Post-War hegemony of a market failure paradigm meant that it was deeply influential in both agencies. The erosion of the authority of this paradigm in the 1980s induced significant "cultural re-invention" in both Treasuries as they aligned themselves with reformists committed to policies derived from the government failure paradigm. The stronger reaction to the alignment of the more dominant NZT has placed it under more pressure than the AT to reinvent itself again in the 1990s.