Efficiency Auditing by the Australian Audit Office: Reform and Reaction under Three Auditors‐General

The efficiency audit programme of the Australian Audit Office, which began officially in 1979, was the first substantial move towards performance auditing in Australia. The history of that programme is outlined in support of an argument that the nature and purpose of public‐sector performance audit have not been fully settled. Far from being an established discipline, performance audit is still evolving. This evolution is a contested process in which auditors, the agencies they audit and the Parliaments they report to, dispute such basic questions as why, what and how performance should be audited, and by whom. It is argued that successive Australian Auditors‐General have had a large personal influence on the development of performance audit at the federal level in their country. These arguments take on new relevance with recent and very ambitious proposals for reform of the Australian Audit Office that bear marked similarities to those advanced when efficiency audit was first proposed in the mid‐1970s.