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I am grateful indeed for the many kind things said in the book. I never expected to deserve the descriptions lavished there; they still leave me somewhat dazed. I am spared much intellectual criticism that could be made of my work. Most of the authors let it off very lightly: that could be because it is too bland to excite conflict. But there is some criticism in what I have managed to read: a little on intellectual matters and the rest on pedagogical matters. I suppose this is what you would like me to respond to.

It is a daunting honour to tread in the illustrious footsteps of those who have previously delivered this Oration. It is also a personal pleasure, because Sir Robert Garran was the gracious and tolerant chairman of the Canberra University College Council that gave me my first academic post. Impressive but totally unpretentious, Sir Robert was a man that I could look up to, literally as well as figuratively. In 1938, however, I was scarcely aware that Garran had been the first Commonwealth public servant, a permanent head for thirty‐one years and, as Attorney‐General John (later Sir John) Latham put it a few days after Garran retired in January 1932, "guide, philosopher and friend to every Federal Cabinet" during those years1

Since the early 1950s a spate of large‐scale inquests on government administration has swept the English‐speaking world, under governments of all political complexions. The phenomenon has received no general explanation, but its continuity has had certain practical advantages. It has added to the stock of techniques for conducting inquiries. It has suggested that linking investigation with implementation may reduce the risk of "pigeonholing". It has revealed the importance of political support for essays in reform. The experience also invites, by now, some reflections upon the role of vested interests in the reform process, the impermanence and relativity of particular recipes for reform, and the constant emergence of new perspectives for appraisal of administration. Although Professor Wilenski's Interim Report* is well over a year old, his Review is still in full swing, and is worth discussing not only on its own merits but also for the way it illustrates some of these points.*Directions for Change: An Interim Report, by Professor Peter Wilenski, Commissioner, Review of N.S.W. Government Administration, Sydney, D. West, N.S.W. Government Printer, November 1977. Pp. ix + 353. Illustrations by Patrick Cook.

SummaryI shall now try to recapitulate the argument of the paper and to draw a conclusion from it.The early pages gave evidence that, although the Australian government during the 1960s took the initiative in setting up the constitutional framework for a democratic polity, on the whole they assigned primacy, especially in the second half of the period, to policies of economic development. Without entering into the merits or successes of those policies themselves, I attributed the basic order of priorities to a mixture of motives and assumptions.The first assumption was that Australia's colonial responsibility and her commitment to heavily subsidised economic development required restraints on political development, and hence the prolongation of colonial dependence. The conflict between this assumption and Australia's trusteeship obligations could be rationalised by the notion of cautious 'preparation' of the people for self‐determination, under Australian official guidance, and with the bait of continued Australian aid. This rationalisation seemed to be supported by a 'vulgar' Marxian belief in the primacy of economic activity and the secondary importance of political and other social functions. However, it was also hoped that economic change need have no awkward political repercussions. To sustain that hope, it was further assumed that while the colonial regime lasted, the government of Papua and New Guinea could be treated as essentially an administrative task, untrammelled by the claims of autonomous political ideologies and interests.If the policy makers for Papua and New Guinea held such a set of assumptions, consciously or otherwise, it would go far to explain some of the leading features of the country's governmental history in recent years: the strength of its economic planning machinery and the lack of sophistication in its administrative and political dealings; the relatively perfunctory efforts at political 'preparation'; the attempts to keep local government and the public service 'non‐political' and to contain incipient politics in the House of Assembly; the paternalistic controls over members of formal government institutions; above all, the failure to maintain meaningful communication with the groups of people most profoundly affected by the incidence of economic development itself.For experience had falsified the basic assumptions of policy, so far as they accord a primary role to economics, relied on a comfortable continuance of the colonial relationship, and conceived government mainly in terms of administration. Politics the demand for the reconciliation of conflicting interests by autonomous negotiation—had erupted in local government, in the House of Assembly, in political associations, and in the villages. I t had erupted in spite of the assumptions of the regime—and also because of them, for the more rigidly such beliefs are practised, the more violent is the reaction likely to be.The conclusion, then, is that politics is independent of economics, and interdependent with it. In the government of Papua and New Guinea, as of any such country, political skills are as important as economic planning if economic growth is to be matched by political stability.

AUSTRALIA ADMINISTERS THE GREATER PART OF THE NUMEROUS mountainous, volcanic, jungle-clad tropical islands to its north, collectively called New Guinea. Indonesia administers the lesser part west of the 141st meridian. There are about two and a quarter million people in the 'Australian' part, of whom only 35,000 are not indigenous Papuans or Melanesians. One-third of the population live in Papua, the more southerly section, which has been an Australian Territory since 1906; two-thirds in 'New Guinea', administered by Australia as a mandate since 1921, and a Trust Territory since 1946, when unified control of the two Territories under a single Administrator was confirmed by the Trusteeship agreement. The Australian administration has engaged in an active programme of economic and political development only since the end of the war with Japan (a good part of which was waged in the Territory).