In a recent intervention within the debate about the managerialist reconstitution of Australian public bureaucracies, the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Finance, Michael Keating (1989, p.124), sums up what he calls theraison dêtreof the reforms “as changing the focus more to ‘management for results’”. He proposes that the aim in this has been “to focus management attention on the purposes of programs and the cost‐effective achievement of outcomes rather than simply on inputs an