Sir Arthur Harold Tange AC, CBE (18 August 1914 – 10 May 2001) was a prominent Australian senior public servant of the middle to late 20th century.

Tange was considered one of the most influential people in the government of Australia for nearly 30 years, earning him respect and disdain in equal measure.

[1] Tange joined the public service during World War II, having previously worked for the Bank of New South Wales 1931–42.

[5] To this end he was instrumental in the decision to set up a primary tri-service college for the joint training, academic and military, of all officer recruits in the services, known as the Australian Defence Force Academy.

A further motive for developing the academy (which is an affiliated academic college of the University of New South Wales) was to equip the future leaders of the defence forces with a broader humanistic perspective, as well as a technical education, to enable them to eventually make the wider contributions to defence policy that Tange felt was lacking in the senior uniformed officers of his generation.

Tange's role in the changes saw him regarded as both a forward-looking visionary, and as displaying arrogance and ignorance and being zealously committed to secrecy.

[7] The conservative forces in the military and coalition parties in Australia often regarded him as a man bent on destroying the sensible and time-honoured traditions of the individual services, whilst the political left in the universities, unions and labour movement saw him as a prime example of the old public service 'mandarin' who told his ministers what to do and pursued a conservative agenda no matter who was in government at the time.