The Office for the Public Sector, along with IPAA, was delighted to present A Level Playing Field – Gender Equality in Leadership Summit, an inaugural event to empower public sector employees to drive inclusive leadership where men and women are equally represented, valued and rewarded.

The program featured:

• Rabia Siddique – hostage survivor, former war crimes prosecutor, international humanitarian and retired British Army officer
• Christine Nixon – Men, Women and Systems “, what needs to be done to achieve equality.
  For quite some time it has been suggested that if we just “fix the women”, or “if the men just stepped up”, or if the HR, recruitment, reward systems worked fairly then all would be solved.
  The presentation will focus on the key changes that need to be made by Men and Women and to the systems they work within.
• a lively debate between public sector leaders including Chief Executives
• presentation on unconscious bias by Male Champion of Change, Martin Parkinson, Secretary, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
• hands-on leadership development exercises “Keep your brain on the game” with Anna Lee.

Amanda Blair, Co-Chair of the Premier’s Council for Women was the MC for the day.

The new Gender Equality in Leadership Strategy was launched featuring the gender equality hat-trick: Leadership Accountability, an Empowered Workplace and Sustainable Talent Pipeline.

In the final issue of Public Administration Today ideas around ‘productivity’ were explored. This edition featured articles from notable sector thought leaders on insights across performance, innovation and the relation to productivity. Articles included:

• Important to distinguish between productivity and efficiency: Terry Moran on public service productivity pg 04
• Productivity ‘product’ crisis: Doug McTaggart poses some penetrating questions about whether the public sector can
  improve its productivity without a better understanding of consumers and what they want. pg 06-07
• Productivity Paradox: Janine O’Flynn says looking more broadly to a range of measures of ‘performance’ is much
  more practical and meaningful than a never-ending quest for (the paradox of) ‘productivity’. pg 08-09
• Authentic Productivity: Renu Agarwa, Christopher Bajada,  Paul J Brown, and Roy Green examine why current productivity approaches fail us. pg 10-13

To read the full edition see below…

IPAA SA, in conjunction with the Office for the Public Sector, presented A Modern Public Sector – The Reform Agenda. The forum was hosted by Chief Executive, Kym Winter-Dewhirst from the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.

Kym shared his vision about future transformation and reform that will help build a modern public sector. The event aimed to inform public sector employees about why public sector reform is needed, what the reform initiatives are trying to achieve, and how the Department of the Premier and Cabinet aims to reach those outcomes.

The audience also learned how Kym’s background has helped inform the reform agenda, and how they can play a part in building an even better public sector.

Erma Ranieri, Commissioner for Public Sector Employment was the MC for the forum.