Performance Audit of Australian Public Private Partnerships: Legitimising Government Policies or Providing Independent Oversight?

Performance auditing in a New Public Management (NPM) setting presents auditorsgeneral with significant challenges in problematising and auditing effectiveness. The literature suggests that in providing guidance as to how NPM policies should be implemented, some state audits have developed as a means of legitimising policy implementation, rather than providing independent opinion about whether policies have been implemented effectively and public money spent appropriately. In the context of public private partnerships (PPPs), what constitutes ‘effective’ oversight remains contested. This paper presents Australian evidence about the focus and extent of state audit oversight of PPP projects. It investigates the use by auditors‐general of processes established in PPP policies to frame performance audit investigations to determine whether Australian auditors‐general have critically evaluated the effectiveness of the implementation of PPP projects.