Three years later : the record of implementation

Abstract

The record of post-war administrative reform in other countries is hardly a reassuring guide to the outcome of the Commission's work in Malta. In the growth years of the 'sixties and 'seventies, public complaints about bureaucratic inefficiencies did not erode public complacency about 'big government'; the security and the patronage that it dispenses furnished attractive compensation. In affluent countries, it was only in the 'eighties that public opinion lent consistent support to political ideologies that are antithetical to administration. During the decade, startling ideas about the future shape of national public services began to be implemented with greater or lesser vigour. Britain's 'Next Steps' and privatization programmes are perhaps the best known, but others are just as radical: they call for alternatives to the nineteenth- century model of bureaucracy which is what most governments have been content to administer with during the twentieth century's decades of rapid change.