ANZSOG’s EMPA gives students the chance to learn from Aotearoa New Zealand

Place-based learning is at the heart of ANZSOG’s Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA), and students will again have the chance to learn from the Aotearoa New Zealand context in 2026 through a week of teaching and learning in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in November, as well as an immersion in Cairns for those enrolled in the Governing in a Market Economy subject.

Academic Director, EMPA, Dr Christopher Walker said the Wellington immersions will give students a deeper understanding of issues in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the differences and similarities to the Australian context. 

“We want them to be stretched and better understand the broader public sector landscape, and the potential they have as public servants to improve the wellbeing of their communities,” he said. 

“With the change of government in 2023 and ongoing debate about the future of relations between the Crown and Māori, Aotearoa New Zealand has a huge range of issues with relevance to other jurisdictions.”  

The 2024 immersion coincided with a hikoi – a peaceful protest by 45,000 Māori and their supporters – against the New Zealand Government’s Treaty Principles Bill, which aims to reinterpret the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. 

The upcoming 2025 Wellington teaching week will include panels featuring public sector Chief Executives and senior academics from Aotearoa New Zealand, who will give students a frank and fearless perspective on the topics of ‘Public administration in the global context’ and ‘Leadership in uncertainty: responding to change and leading reform’. 

These will run alongside teaching of the Managing Public Sector Organisations subject, and the presentation of the EMPA’s capstone Work Based Projects by the graduating cohort. 

EMPA students visited Darwin in 2023, Cairns in 2024, and Christchurch in early 2025. These place-based learning experiences have given them a more in-depth understanding of the role of place and how government and non-government organisations can work together in innovative ways that are shaped by the local context. The return to Cairns in 2026 will involve immersive activities designed in partnership with local Queensland government agencies.  

Dr Amanda Wolf, Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) and Associate Professor (Teaching) in the School of Business and Government at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, is an academic adviser for the EMPA subject Work Based Project. 

She said that place-based learning ‘really works when you have an experience that is highly transferable, and the learning isn’t confined to that experience but is embedded in the person’.  

“New Zealand cases and New Zealand experiences are somewhat easier to get your heads around because the stories can be collapsed a bit. There’s only so many relevant documents, so many experts who know the space. You can get that full picture quite quickly so that the span of what you can take in over a short period of time is enormous.”  

Victoria University School of Management academics Professor Todd Bridgman and Dr Ben Walker (Ngāti Raukawa) teach the Managing Public Sector Organisations (MPSO) subject, and look forward to engaging with the EMPA cohort over three days. 

“We put a ‘critical reflexive pedagogy’ at the core of MPSO. That’s the belief that we learn best not by being given a whole lot of information that we absorb, but by reflecting thoughtfully on our own practice as a teacher, manager or someone who is being managed,” Professor Bridgman said.  

“The important part is using that material as a tool to get them thinking about their own practice and the experiences that they’ve had, and then some kind of evaluation of what we’re calling their ‘personal theory of management’. By the end we hope that they’re more consciously aware of their management style, and they get some value out of that awareness.” 

Dr Walker says the pair broaden the discussion about management by incorporating First Nations perspectives into the work which he says are ‘more humane and relational’.  

“You relate to them as whole human beings who are embedded in their genealogy and their communities. As opposed to the sort of more impersonal Western default, interacting with people in terms of their roles,” he said. 

“I share with the students the story of my own family, and the evolution of its relationship with our Māori side, down through the generations. It basically tracks the evolution of New Zealand’s relationship with its Māori identity from pre-colonisation, through the stigma and assimilation of colonisation, then the reawakening and rediscovery to the point where going down through to the next generation, we’re starting to get back to a place of normalisation. I tell a really complex national history at the level of my own life and family.” 

Sally Washington, ANZSOG Practice Fellow (Policy Capability and Public Management) is New Zealand-based and contributes to the EMPA across a range of subjects. She says that learning about how Aotearoa New Zealand is incorporating ‘Te Ao Māori’ (Māori ways of being and doing) into the way public servants operate provide some of the most profound ‘ah ha’ moments for Australian students.  

“Spending time in place means that the lessons are not just theoretical – students have the opportunity to see and feel a place by engaging with local leaders and seeing where and how they work,” she said. 

ANZSOG’s Executive Master of Public Administration is a unique two-year program designed specifically for the public sector and delivered with ANZSOG’s partner universities. The EMPA explores the core principles of public sector management and leadership in a contemporary context and is designed for public sector professionals who are committed to serving at the highest levels of government. Since 2003, more than 70 EMPA students have gone on to hold roles as CEOs or Secretaries (equivalents) after completing the program.  Applications for the 2026 EMPA program are now open and closing soon.