Michael de Percy (born 1970) is an Australian academic and political scientist who is a senior lecturer in political science in the Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society at the University of Canberra in Australia. According to Toby James, de Percy co-developed theoretical tools which show how technological and institutional legacies limited the policy options available to deploy new communications technologies in Australia and Canada. [1] He was among the people who supported change in the Australian Broadcasting Legislation amendment in 2017. [2] In 2022 de Percy was appointed to the Australian Research Council's College of Experts. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon [3] and served as an army officer before becoming an academic.
De Percy's PhD thesis, supervised by John Wanna, developed a model of path-dependent, punctuated equilibrium [4] to facilitate process tracing in a comparison of communications technology policy outcomes in Canada and Australia. He further expanded the research with his article in Policy Studies to also identify policy regimes. [5]
De Percy has co-edited scholarly works on transportation policy, [6] public administration, [7] and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid and international relations. [8] His other works include telecommunications policy in Australia [9] [10] and Canada, [11] transport policy, [12] [13] models of government-business relations, [14] populism, [15] institutional exhaustion [16] and political leadership. [17]
De Percy serves with industry bodies in the transport, telecommunications, and energy sectors. He is the Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, [18] and the Vice President of the Telecommunications Association (TelSoc). [19] He is a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. [20] De Percy collaborated with the Australian Civil-Military Centre on a project on Syrian refugee women in Jordan and Lebanon, where he co-authored three commissioned occasional papers. [21]
De Percy teaches political science subjects, and has edited and written several books and scholarly articles on the topic. [22] He also teaches leadership in the University of Canberra's MBA program. He maintains a blog on his research and political commentary, Le Flaneur Politique. [23]
De Percy is a conservative political commentator and his articles appear weekly in The Spectator Australia and he provides political commentary each fortnight on Spectator Australia TV.
From 1 January 2025, de Percy has been appointed as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy. [24] De Percy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, and a Member of the Royal Society of New South Wales. [25] In 2022, he was appointed to the Australian Research Council's College of Experts and will serve until the end of 2025. [26]
The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university and member of the Group of Eight, located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and institutes.
Gareth John Evans, is an Australian politician, international policymaker, academic, and barrister. He represented the Labor Party in the Senate and House of Representatives from 1978 to 1999, serving as a Cabinet Minister in the Hawke and Keating governments from 1983 to 1996 as Attorney-General, Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Transport and Communications and most prominently, from 1988 to 1996, as Minister for Foreign Affairs. He was Leader of the Government in the Senate from 1993 to 1996, Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 1998, and remains one of the two longest-serving federal Cabinet Ministers in Labor Party history.
Sir John Grenfell Crawford was an agricultural economist and a key architect of Australia's post-war growth.
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The Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA) is an Australian research institute and think tank which focuses on International relations. It publishes the Australian Journal of International Affairs. It is one of the oldest active private research institutes in Australia.
William Edward Hanley Stanner CMG, often cited as W.E.H. Stanner, was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
Helen Dolly Hughes was an Australian economist. She was Professor Emerita at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. Hughes has been described as Australia's greatest female economist.
David Murray Horner, is an Australian military historian and academic.
Ross Gregory Garnaut is an Australian economist, currently serving as a vice-chancellor's fellow and professorial fellow of economics at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of numerous publications in scholarly journals on international economics, public finance and economic development, particularly in relation to East Asia and the Southwest Pacific.
Michael Gerard L'Estrange is an Australian academic and former public servant. He is the former Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, in Canberra. L'Estrange had earlier served a long career in the Australian public service including as a diplomat and as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Don Aitkin AO (1937–2022) was an Australian political scientist, writer, and administrator. Until 2012 he was Chairman of Australia’s National Capital Authority. He served as Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra from 1991 to 2002, and as Vice-President of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee in 1994 and 1995. He played an influential role in the evolution of national policies for research and higher education from the mid-1980s, when he was the Chairman of the Australian Research Grants Committee, a member of the Australian Science and Technology Council, and Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Appointed as the first Chairman of the Australian Research Council in 1988, he established the new body as a national research council of world class; its funding trebled during his term of office. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1998.
Crawford School of Public Policy is a research-intensive policy school within the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University which focuses on Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The school was named after Sir John Crawford, and its current director is Professor Helen Sullivan.
The Telecommunications Association (TelSoc), formerly the Telecommunication Society of Australia (TSA), has served the Australian telecommunications industry as its learned society since its initial formation as the Telegraph Electrical Society in 1874, in response to enthusiasm for the then new engineering science of electrical telegraphy. Since then, TelSoc has evolved in response to the industry's growth through successive phases of industry restructuring: the introduction of telephony by the private sector (1880); nationalization following Federation of Australia (1901); the passing of the Postmaster-General's Department's monopoly role (1902–1975) to the arms-length government business Telecom Australia (1975–92); and the introduction of competition with the staged privatisation of Telecom Australia's successor, Telstra, in 1991, 1997 and 2005.
The Development Policy Centre (Devpol) is an aid and development policy think tank based at the Crawford School of Public Policy in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Devpol undertakes independent research and promotes practical initiatives to improve the effectiveness of Australian aid, to support the development of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands region, and to contribute to better global development policy.
James Charles Ingram was an Australian diplomat, philanthropist and author whose career culminated in his post as the eighth executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), a position which he occupied for ten years.
Peter Geoffrey Edwards, AM is an Australian diplomatic and military historian. Educated at the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford, Edwards worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide before being appointed Official Historian and general editor of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975 in 1982. The nine-volume history was commissioned to cover Australia's involvement in the Malayan Emergency, Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation and Vietnam War. Edwards spent fourteen years at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) writing two of the volumes, while also researching, editing, and dealing with budget limitations and problems with staff turnover. Since leaving the AWM in 1996, Edwards has worked as a senior academic, scholar and historical consultant. In 2006 his book Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins won the Queensland Premier's History Book Award and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Non-Fiction.
John Wanna is Professor Emeritus at both the Australian National University (ANU) and Griffith University. Before retiring in 2019, Wanna was the Foundation Professor with the Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) based at the ANU. He held this position from 2004 to 2019. Prior to that he was Professor of Public Policy at Griffith University.
Kim Rubenstein is an Australian legal scholar, lawyer and political candidate. She is a professor at the University of Canberra.
Coral Mary Bell was an Australian academic at the University of Sussex, the London School of Economics, and the Australian National University, who wrote extensively about international relations and power politics.