Australian budgeting and beyond: Exploring John Wanna’s scholarly surplus

Abstract

When I think of defining encounters with John Wanna, where I developed a measure of him as a scholar and person, he was not 'in the room'. The first involved receiving an email from him because John had been to Ottawa and learned about my work on the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat in the context of government restructuring and deficitreduction strategies (Lindquist 1994(Lindquist , 1996. He thought it similar to his 'thick', organisationally and historically informed, and recently published work on Australian budgeting and its Department of Finance (Wanna, Kelly and Forster 2000). Two invitations flowed from this: the first was to contribute a chapter to a comparative collection he was planning on Controlling Public Expenditure (Wanna, Jensen and de Vries 2003); and the second, his insistence that, during my first journey to Australia, 1 I take a 24-hour side trip to fly to Brisbane (since 'nothing was happening in 1 This was for an intriguing symposium in May 2001 organised by Meredith Edwards and John Langford on 'New Players, Partners and Processes: A Public Sector Without Boundaries?' in early April 2001, which resulted in a book collection (Edwards and Langford 2002).