The first meeting of the ANZSOG Alumni Advisory Council for 2025 has seen 12 new members bring their skills and experience to the important advisory body.
The Council was first appointed in 2018 to represent our influential alumni community of public sector leaders and give them a chance to advise on ANZSOG’s future activities. The current Alumni Advisory Council consists of 17 members from across ANZSOG’s jurisdictions in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, led by Chair Peta Roberston and Deputy Chair Joycelyn Taylor.
Coming from a diverse range of jurisdictions and professional backgrounds, the new members bios can be found here.
One of the retiring Alumni Council members is Jean Doherty, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Strategic and Corporate Services at the Northern Territory’s Department of the Chief Minister and Cabinet, and a graduate of ANZSOG’s Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) and Executive Fellows Program (EFP).
Ms Doherty has recently completed two terms as the NT member of ANZSOG’s Alumni Advisory Council, and says she wants to continue her engagement with ANZSOG and promote its activities in collaboration with other Territory Alumni.
“I thoroughly enjoyed and valued the time that I had with ANZSOG. For me, ANZSOG remains the gold standard institution for public service and public servants who are looking to continue to improve their career development pathways. I’d like to keep playing a part in keeping ANZSOG relevant, keeping ANZSOG connected with the community that public servants serve, and maintaining its focus as a best practice academic institution for government.”
Ms Doherty said that being a senior public servant in the Northern Territory brings big challenges, as well as big rewards.
“The NT is unique in what if offers and provides a rich backdrop for any public servant wanting to grow their career. But its vast distances and remoteness can be challenging, such as getting to and from other capital cities, and having access to and being part of the broader national public sector,” she said
“The EMPA was fertile ground for being able to recognise that you are not alone and that someone, somewhere has done something similar or has a way of solving a problem that you have not thought about.”
Eliot Palmer, a fellow EMPA graduate is one of the new members of the council, and is currently Head of Regulatory Practice at the Victorian Building Authority.
Mr Palmer undertook an ANZSOG Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) after being involved in a major reform program at Victoria’s Environmental Protection Authority.
“I’d really stretched myself and one of the signals from my manager at the time was the need for me to round out and sort of broaden my understanding of the roles that I might be in and the nature of the public service,” he said.
“The EMPA was an ideal way to step outside of not just the sort of environmental space but the regulatory space to understand the public sector more generally.
“It was a journey where I wasn’t consciously seeing myself as a public servant, but over time, through various steps realising that there’s a whole discipline – not just so much as a career but a world in regulation and in government more broadly.
“Satisfaction for me is finding practical ways to improve service or operational delivery and regulatory outcomes that matter and have an impact.
“One of the most compelling EMPA experiences for me is being in the room with people who are dealing with some of the toughest areas of service delivery, particularly in social services and dealing with really entrenched social problems.”
“I’ve taken a lot out of it around understanding the leadership and management space, about the balancing between being ambitious and being practical and immediate in what you’re doing.”
Mr Palmer said that he wanted to become involved in the Alumni Advisory Council to help ANZSOG ensure that its programs remained relevant and grounded in the challenges of the contemporary public sector.
“When I was part of the EMPA, I was often thinking about the pedagogy of it and the challenge around bringing academic setting to practice. I’m interested in contributing back to that question around ‘how is ANZSOG knitting its programs in with the business of doing government?’.
“I’m looking forward to being able to give feedback from a practitioner perspective on the key flagship programs and on how different proposals are shaping up or the strategic direction of ANZSOG.”