Translating national policy to local reality in Australia’s Northern Territory

For someone who’s worked in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) government for over a decade, Jean Perkins understands the operational realities of delivering services in one of the country’s most remote and complex jurisdictions.  

Across her public service roles, one thing has remained constant: a focus on the appropriate use of public money to deliver public value, which stands as a core value that shaped every job she held, from workforce planning to policy to reform. 

Now serving the NT Police Force as a Senior Programme Director for Reforms, she sits between two forces: reform policy ambitions set at a national level, and applying policy to the local context.  

If national reforms are not sustainable or practical for the local reality, the region risks missing out on the intent of that reform.  

In her experience, reform succeeds or fails on coordination, not on new policy or new systems, since national plans rarely arrive as one single fit.  

That’s where she helps to close the gap. 

“Large scale reform requires people who can connect policy intent, funding, governance, technology, operational delivery requirements, and make sure those are all aligned, often across a multi-year time frame. 

“My job is less about designing what the reform looks like, but helping the organisation navigate all of the complexity to get there,” she says to GovInsider, who frames her role as removing obstacles.  

She shares about what it takes to have reforms that are effective, why collaboration matters, and how success is made possible through common constraints.  

Reform with an organisation, not to it 

“Reforms are only sustainable when they can be embedded into business processes, when systems are changed, when governance is stood up, and when everyday operational practice is fundamentally changed in line with the reform,” she says. 

Perkins makes a clear distinction on how reform is implemented, reflecting a core operating principle for her team: “we don’t do reform to an organisation, we do it with them.” 

For that reason, co-design and collaboration are essential to making reforms work, she adds. 

“Wherever possible, do genuine co-design with the end users of whatever the reform is affecting. It’s a lot easier for people to adopt change when they understand why the change is happening.” 

Perkins shares that subject matter experts (SME) are involved in projects to leverage their operational lens and expertise to understand implications and applicability of changes.  

While some national reforms have a set direction and co-design becomes more challenging, she considers that every reform, no matter how directive it is, can have room to involve users in the design in some capacity. 

“I don’t see [co-design] as a nice to have, I think it’s critical when we got reform activities that people view as too important or too time sensitive. 

“If you think we don’t have time to engage people, or you don't have time for [reforms] to fail, they will fail if you don't tap into the right expertise. If it's important, if it's worth doing, it's worth involving the people that the change is impacting.” 

Her team also works with other government agencies from different levels, and non-government organisations, depending on the context and nature of the reforms, she adds. 

Teamwork makes the dream work 

Perkins also shares about leading a large multidisciplinary team that coordinates delivery across reform environments.  

Just like how she values SME for projects and co-design, she notes having diverse expertise in her team as a necessity.  

“We don’t need everyone to think alike, we just need everyone to move in the same direction,” she says. 

Her role as a leader is building the conditions for others’ best work, not being the smartest person in the room. 

“I genuinely want people in my team who are smarter and better than me because that means our team is smarter and better,” says Perkins, adding that she learns the most from the people across her teams, working with different sets of expertise but working toward the same objectives.  

The teams change according to project, fluctuating in size and technical resources, and they are located all around Australia.  

“Being able to work remotely and effectively with people is one of my favourite parts of my role,” she adds. 

Expectations to keep up 

Working in a comparatively smaller jurisdiction in Australia, Perkins notes that there are some pressures shared across jurisdictions but compound differently in the NT. 

Across the Australian public sector, there’s an increasing expectation that jurisdictions should share information and work across borders to meet public expectations around transparency and accountability, says Perkins. 

But for the NT, these expectations collide with a separate challenge of dealing with legacy systems and legislation that is decades old in some cases. 

“We’re almost having to run at double pace of our other jurisdictional counterparts,” she says, as foundational systems are expected to modernise while simultaneously delivering national reform. 

But these tensions are a constant, rather that something to solve, says Perkins.  

Balancing innovation with privacy, governance, and public trust are a responsibility that public organisations must do to keep that trust intact, no matter how challenging. 

Success when it’s no longer a reform 

While changing legislation or implementing new technology can be challenging, they’re often the easiest parts of a reform, says Perkins. 

The hardest part is “changing behaviours of people, changing processes and making things business as usual,” she notes.  

Since reforms can take months or years to evidence tangible results, one way Perkins tracks effectiveness is to check whether people still frame it as a reform.  

If a frontline staff sees it as their regular way of operating, that is success, she says. 

For other public sector officials involved in reforms, she suggests developing evaluation strategies that include long-term reflections about what happened since the reform was implemented, to understand the sustainability of it and learn from its outcomes.