The Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 371–377 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8500.2008.00595.x BOOK REVIEWS Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries in Australia Scott Prasser (LexisNexis Butterworth, Sydney, 2006, ISBN 978409322545, 358 pp.) The public inquiry has been a familiar investi- gating tool in Australian public administration at least since the 1819 appointment by the then British government of John Thomas Bigge as a commissioner to inquire into the condition of New South Wales (which then included Van Diemen’s Land as a semi-autonomous depen- dency). Government was of course then all- pervasive. But the Australian colonies happily followed the British royal commission/board of inquiry tradition after they became self- governing through the later 19 th century, as did the new Commonwealth after the states feder- ated in 1901. These inquiries variously tested opinions about rising policy issues governments would have to contend with; examined the causes and effects of serious accidents, natural disas- ters and the like; investigated matters that had been the cause of public scandals; and, either broadly or narrowly, considered the working of administrative arrangements and offered pro- posals for their improvement. In the reform- ing decade of the 1970s inquiries of the lat- ter kind were particularly prominent, led by the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration and the so-called mini-Coombses in most states. There have, over the years, been several scholarly studies of this Australian usage, with Dietrich Borchardt, L.A. Hallett, Elaine Spiegel (now Thompson) and Bob Smith and Patrick Weller among the noteworthy au- thors/editors. But none has pursued the study of Australian inquiry instruments more thor- oughly or assiduously than Scott Prasser, who is now teaching at the University of the Sun- shine Coast in Queensland. He has been track- ing them as they go about their work at least since the period of the Hawke government, and over recent years he has taken that study back to the dawn of the Australian Commonwealth period. The book under review is a valuable compendium of relevant information and asso- ciated discussion and analysis drawn from this whole long and sustained enterprise. The basic chapter organisation runs from a discussion of matters of definition and classi- fication, through some historical and compara- tive material on trends in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States and a consideration of reasons why govern- ments appoint inquiries; to the important eval- uatory issues of impact and implementation. Along the way there is an extended examina- tion of the way in which inquiries work, which includes a number of significant case stud- ies – notably three royal commissions (Aus- tralian Government Administration: Coombs, appointed 1974; Activities of the Federated Ship Painters’ and Dockers’ Union: Costigan 1980; Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: Muirhead 1987), and four committees of inquiry (Review of Commonwealth Administration: Reid 1982; and three on the Australian Financial System: Campbell 1979, Martin 1983, Wallis 1996). Fi- nally a series of appendices lists all such in- quiries appointed by Commonwealth govern- ments from 1901 to 2005 and provides a more detailed functional classification of inquiry ac- tivity by all Commonwealth governments from 1949 to 2005 (Menzies to late-term Howard). The presentation and argument are compre- hensive and quite intricate, as befits a volume produced by a law publishing firm. It is not a book for the general reader, but rather serves as an encyclopaedia of knowledge about Aus- tralia’s public inquiry activity at federal level. All of us who connect with these inquiries from time to time, or want seriously to know C  2008 The Authors Journal compilation C  2008 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia