Deirdre O’Neill is Associate Professor in Public Sector Management and Deputy Head of the Department of Management where she teaches into the Master of Public Policy and Management program.

She was for six years the Academic Director of ANZSOG’s Executive Master of Public Administration program. While at ANZSOG she was also the inaugural Academic Director of the Pacific Executive (PACE) Program, a public sector capacity building program delivered by ANZSOG in partnership with AusAID.

Her current research focus is workforce planning and development in the public sector. She is a Chief Investigator in an ARC Linkage Project to develop new methods for building health policy capacity in Australia. This project evolved from an earlier collaborative research project with the School of Public Health at La Trobe University and the Department of Human Service (Victoria) investigating ways to strengthen policy capacity in the health and human services sector. More recently, she completed a research project funded by the Management Advisory Committee which focused upon recruitment, retention and succession management in the Australian Public Service.

She has numerous publications, including an edited book (The Contract State: Public Management and the Kennett Government), book chapters and articles in refereed Australian and international journals. She is the author (with Professor Owen Hughes) of Business, Government and Globalization, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Journal of Public Administration.

Her PhD – “The Challenge of Administrative Reform: Public Service Reform Under the Hamer and Kennett Governments in Victoria” – was awarded by Monash University in 2000.

Selected publications

Jonson, E. P., McGuire, L. M., & O’Neill, D. (2015). Teaching ethics to undergraduate business students in Australia: comparison of integrated and stand-alone approaches. Journal of Business Ethics, 132(2), 477-491.
O’Neill, D., & Sands, V. (2014). Land transactions: The Commission of Inquiry into Special Agricultural Business Leases (SABL), Securing a Prosperous Future: Papua New Guinea – Papers from the Second Annual Alfred Deakin Research Institute Papua New Guinea Symposium, 2012. Goolwa SA Australia: Crawford House Publishing, p. 43-62.
McGuire, L., & O’Neill, D. (2013). Institutionalising a National Approach to Performance Reporting: Lessons from Two Decades of Experience with the Report on Government Services. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 72(4), 419-432
Gleeson, D., Legge, D., O’Neill, D., & Pfeffer, M. (2011). Negotiating tensions in developing organizational policy capacity: Comparative lessons to be drawn. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 13(3), 237-263.