The interface between internal and external audit in the Australian public sector

This study seeks to answer the research question ‘using reliance as the pivotal consideration, what factors determine the efficient and effective interrelationship between internal and external audit?’, within the context of the Australian public sector. A qualitative approach, framed within agency theory, was adopted using a case study and structured interviews. Findings included factors supporting prior literature as well as some unique to the research described here. As a result, this article makes a contribution to the literature examining public sector internal and external audit interrelationships as well as the literature on police audit and performance. It also has practical implications for both the case study site and similar organisations throughout the world

'The ordered behaviour of the individual himself' : Cecil Cook's biological politics

By examining the thinking of a major public health bureaucrat, Dr Cecil Cook, this article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between racial thought and liberalism in Australia’s administration of ‘Aboriginal affairs’. In Cook’s appraisal of the health problems of northern Australia, 2 kinds of distinction were significant: racial (whites, ‘Asiatics’, Aborigines) and capacity for hygienic living. We argue that over the span of Cook’s career as an administrator and commentator (1925–69) distinctions of capacity were more fundamental, for he assumed that both whites and ‘Aboriginals’ could be brought to standards of conduct required of a healthy population. We review Cook’s ideas about what made the Northern Territory different from the 6 states and about the potential of miscegenation and ‘absorption’. We argue that Cook’s nationalism was not simply ‘ethnic’ but also significantly ‘civic’ and that he was fundamentally a liberal assimilationist, albeit cautious and at times coercive in his application of public health ideas to the program of civic equality. In the course of our argument, we comment on other historians’ conceptions of Cook