Public Sector Informant: Vale Roger Wettenhall, an implacable advocate for the teaching and study of public administration

Born in Hobart in 1931, Wettenhall's father died when he was six years old. He and his younger brother were raised by his mother and grandmother and he attended the Hobart High School.

In 1955, Wettenhall married Lois Calvert, a dux student from the Friends School who became a secondary school teacher in Canberra. They had three children - Irene, Lynn and Dean who was born with Down Syndrome. For the last 48 years Wettenhall lived in Canberra with his partner Ros Byrne, an academic who had worked in Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's office.

In 1948, he joined the Postmaster-General's Department, after moving to the Public Service Board's office in Hobart. During an apprenticeship learning about how public administration worked, Wettenhall obtained Bachelor and Masters degrees and a Diploma of Public Administration at the University of Tasmania.

Anxious to study, as he ever was, Wettenhall secured a scholarship at the ANU where he completed a doctoral thesis in 1961 on the political control of public transport authorities. His supervisor was Professor Robert Parker whose reputation his student would come to match.

In 1962, Wettenhall returned to Hobart to be a lecturer and then reader in the Political Science Department at the University of Tasmania and was a visiting fellow at the University of Manchester in 1964-65. In the 1960s he produced two books, a guide to Tasmanian government administration and a breakthrough work on the 1967 Hobart bushfires of which he had first-hand experience, a book republished in the USA in 1996.

In 1971, he bounced back to Canberra where he was appointed as the Head of the School of Administrative Studies at the Canberra College of Advanced Education, later to be the University of Canberra. He established the School as a major centre of public administration teaching and research and in which he was able to transmit to his colleagues and students the enthusiasm he brought even to the obscurities of public administration. In addition to his lectures, Wettenhall cultivated debate through short courses for the professional development of Canberra public servants and those from other countries in the Asia-Pacific. He was involved with the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and the Administrative College in Papua New Guinea where he arranged an agreement for the Canberra School to provide staff to support administrative training.

As Professor of Public Administration, Wettenhall retired from the University of Canberra in 1995. Not being the retiring type, he remained as an Emeritus and Visiting Professor at the University, an honorary appointment that gave him scope to further his interests in research and publication.

In 1996 a book of essays (a festschrift), edited by Professor John Halligan, was published in Wettenhall's honour.

In addition to awards from Australian and international professional associations, he received an AM in the Order of Australia in 2010 and became an Honorary Doctor of the University of Canberra in 2016.

The foundation principal of the Canberra College Professor Sam Richardson, who brought Wettenhall to the School of Administrative Studies, said that as an administrator his recruit "always seemed to be afflicted with repining restlessness", was "not ambitious for power and did not thrive on intrigue...and found distasteful the aggressive infighting over resources". Perhaps such unease with day to day management allowed Wettenhall greater scope for his academic work, where he seemed to be everywhere, his long tenure at the University of Canberra in no way reflecting a confined academic life.

He was a constant presence in the Institute of Public Administration and he edited the Australian Journal of Public Administration from 1989 to 1995. He bristled at the loose collection of state and territory groups of the Institute. "Is it not time," he asked, for "a national institute with its own headquarters, rather than this simulated institutional relic of colonial days?" The answer to the question was "yes" and so a national institute was established. Under the influence of Wettenhall's well-mannered republican leanings, the word "Royal" was dropped from its title and it became the Australian Institute of Public Administration.

Inquisitive and sensitively aware of the lessons of others, Wettenhall spent much time studying public administration in other countries. He liked to travel and in the places he visited was often as keen to understand the ways of their government organisations as he was to see the sights. He was a public administration tourist, a rare breed in the tourist genus.

It was serious stuff. Wettenhall was deeply involved in the work of the Brussels-based International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration and the Eastern Regional Organisation for Public Administration based in Manila, whose journal he helped edit. Thus he was able to help counter the perils of insularity in the practice and study of Australian public administration, against the complacency of some locals who thought Australia didn't have much to learn from foreigners and who were happy to content themselves with the occasional genuflection before the idol of the "Westminster system" which, of course, does not exist.

Reflecting his Tasmanian heritage, Wettenhall took particular interest in the government of small countries and territories - Malta, Lichtenstein, Macau, Nauru, Norfolk Island, Australia's Indian Ocean territories and, of course, the ACT. Sympathy for the disadvantage of these places, including the impositions of larger adjacent countries, is a notable thread in his writings on them.

Wettenhall's main contributions to public administration literature, much of it based on research into Australian institutions, covers the major themes of the proper organisation of the machinery of government and the role of statutory corporations. While he was ever conscious of the democratic importance of ministers directing the functions of their departments, he was sensitive about the need for the tasks allocated by legislation to independent statutory corporations to be protected from untoward interference from governments and ministers, a line that blurs from time to time. He was also able to raise a sceptical eyebrow over the so-called corporatisation and privatisation of statutory corporation functions especially where that weakened accountability and distracted their operations from the public interest.

In addition to these grand themes, Wettenhall's writings covered local government, decentralisation, the handling of disasters, the police, administrative history and biography and much more. He edited many and contributed to all of the 12 volumes on the history of Commonwealth administration that began in 1984 dealing with the Hawke government. Not counting unpublished conference papers and submissions to parliamentary committees, the bibliography of his work contains 397 items, what Professor John Halligan says is "an unsurpassed list of publications."

In a preface to the festschrift in his honour, Professor Don Aitken, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra said that Wettenhall had a "combination of intense application and undemonstrative authority" and that his "intellectual production....had a most powerful effect on public administration" with an "unmatched impact in his field in the second half of the twentieth century". These achievements never went to Wettenhall's head, he kept his ego on a short leash and he was never boastful.

Wettenhall was an implacable advocate for the teaching and study of public administration and the development of its literature. He saw public sector management or management studies more generally as of a second order and he was apprehensive about their encroachment on what he regarded as the main games. There's plenty of justification for those apprehensions as management studies, together with obsessions with slippery notions like leadership and innovation, have pressed in on the study and practice of public administration, sometimes unhelpfully. Yet there is a fair hope that the quality, depth and breadth of Wettenhall's writings provide a bulwark from which the study and literature of public administration can assert the prominence it needs and deserves.

While his family and many others will have their sorrows and regrets at his death, they have many consolations, not only in the stature of Wettenhall's professional record but in the memory of his courteous, generous and ever interesting self.

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