Citation for Mr Peter Harris AO
Chancellor,
Mr Peter Harris AO is a senior Australian public servant, who has had an extensive and distinguished career in government policy setting and public administration.
After completing a Bachelor of Economics at The University of Queensland, Mr Harris joined the Australian Public Service as a graduate economist in the Department of Overseas Trade in 1976. Over the course of the following 4 decades, he served in a broad range of leadership roles in both the Federal and Victorian public service.
Through the early stages of his career, Mr Harris worked in Treasury, Finance and the Prime Minister’s Department, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Office for 2 years, as senior private secretary to Prime Minister Bob Hawke. In that time, he jointly initiated and designed the pioneering reform known as National Competition Policy that reshaped Australian domestic economy for the next decade.
From 2009 to 2013, Mr Harris served as Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the complex roll-out of the $37 billion National Broadband Network, a critical piece of national telecommunications infrastructure for Australia's digital economy.
As Chairman of the Productivity Commission from 2013 to 2018, Mr Harris applied his wide-ranging public policy experience and deep understanding of the Australian economy to produce the ‘Shifting the Dial’ report, a landmark report that detailed a comprehensive set of recommendations for lifting national productivity.
More recently, he played an important role in Australia’s pandemic response as Chief Executive Officer of the National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board during 2020; and as a Director of Infrastructure Australia from 2019 to 2021.
Mr Harris was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2013 for “distinguished service to public administration through leadership and policy reform roles in the areas of telecommunications, the environment, primary industry and transport”.
Through his leadership and expertise, Mr Harris has made significant contributions to a number of areas of public policy in Australia – and, in the process, has left a lasting and beneficial legacy for the Australian economy and community, more broadly.
Chancellor, I present to you Mr Peter Harris, Officer of the Order of Australia, Bachelor of Economics of this University, for the award of Doctor of Economics honoris causa, bestowed by the Senate of The University of Queensland.
