Profile

David Kemp AC is a Fellow with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, and an independent consultant on government and public affairs.

He was a Minister in the Howard Government from 1996 to 2004, holding the portfolios at various times of Education, Training, Youth Affairs, Employment, Environment and Heritage, and was also Vice-President of the Executive Council. He was a member of the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet in the Third Howard Government. As Minister he was responsible for introducing Australia’s first national literacy and numeracy standards and testing, the New Apprenticeship system, new school choice policies, income-contingent loans for fee-paying post-graduate students, Work for the Dole, the Job Network, and the National Youth Roundtable. In the environment area he was responsible for greatly improved protection for the Great Barrier Reef, and as a member of the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council, helped achieve environmental flows for icon sites on the Murray. He has degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Melbourne, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, USA. Mr Kemp has written extensively on political leadership, including “Leadership Practices: Reflections on Australian Political Leadership” in Paul ‘t Hart and John Uhr’s edited volume Public Leadership: Perspectives and Practices, ANU Press, 2008. He presented the 47th Alfred Deakin Lecture 2014 on “Good Government and Liberalism”; was senior Reviewer (with Andrew Norton) of the Commonwealth Review of the Demand Driven Funding System, Final Report (2013) and authored Good Government for Victoria: Review of the 2014 State Election (July, 2015). He edited and introduced the first edition since 1943 of Robert Menzies’ The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy. Mr Kemp has acted as adviser to government in Australia and to the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group on the establishment of a national training framework in China. He visited China in 1976 as senior adviser to then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, in 1993 as a Shadow Minister in the Federal Opposition, in 1999 as Minister for Education and Training in the Australian Government, and in 2005 to consult on China’s Training Framework. He has lectured on the governance of Australia in ANZSOG’s China Advanced Leadership Program. He was presented an award in the Order of Australia as a Companion of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours 2017.

ANZSOG programs

Mr Kemp teaches in the following ANZSOG courses:

China Advanced Leadership Program