This Framework outlines key considerations for developing a party’s gender policy, and addresses a variety of thematic areas essential for the advancement of women and promotion of gender equality within political parties, including leadership formation, internal decision making, internal oversight and institutional development, candidate recruitment, party programmes and platform development, outreach to voters, and campaigns.

How can it be that people who should have the most fulfilling jobs in the world are generally far less engaged and productive than those we encounter in the private sector? The root causes, we believe, are organizational cultures that are strangled by rules. Myriad rules define the public-sector workplace—rules spelling out procedural red tape, layers of decision making, regulatory compliance, and employee safeguards. These rules are put in place for the best of reasons, such as to ensure fair hiring practices and prevent corruption, favoritism, and the influence of special interests. But as rules proliferate, they often congeal into inefficient, costly bureaucracies that slow decision making, stifle initiative, discourage cooperation, and frustrate employees.

A Report aimed at fostering sustainable economic, social and environmental development across the Commonwealth, featuring perspectives from some of the world's leading commentators.

It is evident that administrative reforms are undertaken by many countries in the world today and in fact, administrative change appears to be a constant factor in regimes that desire to reform their social, political and economic systems. Normally, reform initiatives are regarded as necessary for organizations that want to adapt to the changing environment and to be able to expand and cope with increasing activities and global challenges. Nevertheless, strategies for reform initiatives will differ between sectors and also between nations as each country tries to handle reform in accordance with the country’s administrative traditions, political and cultural nuances and level of economic development. The process of reform may involve a particular sector or administration of the government or an entire level of the government such as the local government. The main characteristic of administrative reform is normally projected in attempts to decentralize powers and autonomy to lower levels of government. It connotes importance that such transition of powers is supposedly significant to the unification and development of a nation. This is especially so, as some studies have shown, where the shift of power to local government has created a series of hierarchically ordered units of administration at some of the lowest levels of government. The implication is a movement of power from the centre and may determine the scope of decentralization, nonetheless it involves a transition process that ultimately may change the characteristics of power structure of the different levels of government.

The Australian Labor Party went to the 2007 election promising a new era of cooperative federalism that would end the ‘blame game’ between federal and state governments and re-energise reform and productivity agendas. On the evidence of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting on 26 March 2008, these agendas are advancing rapidly. The communiqué foreshadowed a raft of new commonwealth-state agreements, streamlined arrangements for special purpose grants and, perhaps most significantly,