Gary Sturgess

He currently an adjunct professor of Public Service Innovation with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University,[1] in Brisbane, Australia.

Sturgess is descended on both sides from convicts, who moved north through New South Wales to south-east Queensland in the late 19th century with the break-up of the great squatting runs.

In the 1950s, his father established an engine reconditioning business in Dalby, Queensland, a small town approximately 200 kilometres (120 miles) inland from Brisbane, serving the farming community.

Following the fall of the Fraser government in March 1983, he joined the staff of the newly elected Leader of the New South Wales Opposition, Nick Greiner, as the Director of Research and Policy Development.

In addition to policy work, he undertook extensive research into corruption in the then NSW Government, contributing to a number of public inquiries and criminal prosecutions.

In the five years he served as Cabinet Secretary, Sturgess personally drove a number of key policy initiatives, including the establishment of Australia's first anti-corruption body, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption,[2] the corporatisation of government business enterprises, the so-called "new environmentalism" (including tradeable air, water and fishing permits), and some of the earliest work in Australia on the use of markets in the electricity sector.

As part of that research agenda, he developed a contestability framework for public services—"benchmarking with consequences"—building on the work of the British health economist Chris Ham.

He has been actively involved in the application of these principles in the real world, and in 2015, he was appointed by New South Wales Cabinet to chair a Commissioning and Contestability Advisory Board, advising the NSW Minister for Corrections.

[8] Since 2000, Sturgess has also undertaken a great deal of original research into the contractual arrangements used for transporting convicts to Australia in the early years of European settlement, and the legal, financial and commercial system underpinning it.

He has delivered a number of academic papers, published articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as The Mariner's Mirror, the Great Circle and the Australian Economic History Review, and a series of essays on the operation of this system.

In tracking down the descendants of those involved in the early years of the Botany Bay system, he has located a number of important artefacts from the period, including a miniature of a NSW Corps captain who arrived on Australia's Second Fleet, and a silver cup presented by Governor Arthur Phillip to the captain of the first ship to catch a whale off the NSW coast.