ADMINISTRATIVE STYLE AND SIR FREDERIC EGGLESTON*

Abstract

Abstract: Sir Frederic Eggleston's place as a political intellectual in Australia is an established one, arising out of the framework of his political thought and administrative experiences as a Minister of the Crown in Victoria in the 1920s. For Eggleston the essence of politics lay in political ideas and philosophical debate about those beliefs. In his view Australian political life would be immensely enriched if political leaders had the freedom and leisure to discuss philosophical goals, and this could only be achieved by hiving off the day‐to‐day work of government into autonomous corporations run quietly and efficiently by responsible managers. Broad policy was a matter for legislation, while its detailed implementation was best carried out by public corporation managers, protected by the legislation from sectional electorate pressures.Although Sir Frederic found the justification for his political framework in Victoria's political and administrative circumstances at the turn of the century, when sectional pressures through the legislature brought the State to the brink of disaster and insolvency, it can also be shown that the roots of his political beliefs and administrative prescriptions reach back into his childhood and young manhood. He left the narrow confines of his church‐oriented childhood home for the wider cultural and intellectual delights of his maternal relatives' social circle in the early 1900s. a move linked in his mind with his all‐important membership of the Gladstone Debating Society. This dichotomous life experience flowed through into his political perceptions, finding substance in his notion of Parliament as a debating forum for “great men who articulate the ideas which give expression to /our culture's/ aspirations and set gsals for its activities” while for efficiency's sake, “a business service undertaken by the State must be isolated from the State”.He judged Victoria's State enterprises from this perspective. In so far as they went quietly about their business, were financially sound and did not intervene in the political arena. then they met his criteria; where they did not exercise “austerity and restraint” they suffered his criticism. There is a clear link between this judgement and his own political experience which reminds us that “politics is personal and the personal is political” is both truism and warning.