Management practices in Australian local government

There has been considerable refmm in the Australian public sector to bring it into line with 'New public management' (NPM) principles, and local govemment has been no exception to refmm. Implementing such reform successfully requires the use of new management practices. This Australia-wide study aims to identify the incidence of contemporary management practices in local govemment which are consistent with NPM, and to examine differences which may occur due to the different geographical locations of local govemment. The results suggest the tyramw of distance does impact on rural and remote authorities, which have a lower take up rate of contemporary practices. The results also indicate that people management practices are more important to local govemments than other more 'efficiency' oriented practices.