Gary Sturgess

Early years

Sturgess grew up in Dalby, Queensland, a small town approximately 200 km inland from Brisbane. He is the second of four sons of Lindsay and Joy Sturgess. He was educated at local state schools, and graduated in law from the University of Queensland.

Career

He commenced his professional career in Brisbane working as an investment analyst for one of Australia's largest mining companies, MIM Holdings Ltd. In 1980, he moved to Sydney to become the legal correspondent for the Australian news magazine The Bulletin.

In 1982, he was recruited by Jim Carlton, recently appointed as Federal Minister for Health, to serve as his private secretary. 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 development, he directed extensive research into corruption in the then NSW Government, contributing to a number of public inquiries and criminal prosecutions. His extensive filing database caused the then Leader of the Opposition Bob Carr to refer to him as "Lord of the Files".

Upon the change of government in March 1988, he was appointed as Director-General of the NSW Cabinet Office in the Liberal-National Coalition Government led by Premier Nick Greiner. In the five years he served as Cabinet Secretary, Sturgess personally drove a number of policy initiatives, including the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the corporatisation of government business enterprises, the so-called "new environmentalism" (including tradeable air, water and fishing permits), and the creation of electricity markets.

From 1990, he was involved in the "new federalism" agenda, initiated by Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Premier Greiner. He led NSW officials at a series of Special Premiers Conferences that produced new policies such as the National Competition Policy, the National Electricity Market, mutual recognition of state regulations, and, ultimately, the formation of the Council of Australian Governments.

He retired from public administration in late 1992 some months after the resignation of Greiner as Premier. From 1993 to 2000, Sturgess chaired a series of government inquiries - into business regulation, the governance of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the financial management of the Australian Federal Police and the rationalisation of Australia's border controls, among other issues.

He also served on a number of public, private and not-for-profit boards, including the Australian Constitutional Centenary Foundation, the NSW Police Board and spent seven years as a non-executive director of the Serco Group PLC, a FTSE-100 public service company operating in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

In 2000, Sturgess relocated to London, where he joined Serco as Adviser to the Board and then from January 2003, as Executive Director of the Serco Institute, whose purpose is "to foster the development of sustainable public service markets through an outward-facing programme of research and communication".

He resigned from the Serco Institute in April 2011 and returned to Australia to take up the New South Wales Premier's ANZSOG Chair in Public Service Delivery at the University of New South Wales, a research position based in the government precinct in Sydney and studying the challenges involved in front-line service delivery. In 2014, he was also appointed as Professor of Public Service Innovation at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Research interests

Since taking up the chair with ANZSOG in 2011, Sturgess has specialised in studying the relationship between policy/funding and delivery, with a particular focus on the discipline of commissioning. As part of that research agenda, he has developed a contestability framework for public services—"benchmarking with consequences"—building on the work of the British health economist Chris Ham.

Sturgess has advised a number of government inquiries on commissioning, such as the Victorian and Queensland Commissions of Audit (2012 and 2013), the National Commission of Audit (2014), the Harper Review of Competition Policy, the NZ Productivity Commission's review of social services (2015) and more recently the Australian Productivity Commission's review of human services (2016). He has also advised numerous central and line departments and agencies in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada. He lectured at the UK government's Commissioning Academy from 2013 to 2016, and has taught a three-day Commissioning Academy for the government of Ontario, Canada, since 2015.

Since 2000, he has also undertaken detailed primary research into the contractual system used for transporting convicts to Australia in the early years of European settlement, and in recent years has delivered a number of academic papers and published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals on the operation of this system.

Honours

Sturgess was awarded membership of the Order of Australia in January 2005, for services to government.

Personal

He remains involved as a director of his late father's business, Engine Australia, an Australian after-market diesel engine parts supplier. He married his wife Helen in Brisbane in 1976, and they are the parents of four children.