Flexible Work, Flourishing Regions: A New Vision for Public Sector Leadership
“Place shapes purpose — and purpose can reshape place.”
When Bayan Yazdani talks about regional Australia, he is not speaking from a distance. He is speaking from Darwin — a city that knows something about existing at the edge of national attention, and about the gap between how policy is made and how it lands in the communities it is supposed to serve. For Bayan, that gap is not just a policy problem. It is a leadership failure — and one the Australian Public Service has both the opportunity and the obligation to address.
A 2023 Menzies Global Voices Fellow, Senior Consultant at Nous Group and now Senior Policy Officer at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Bayan brings an unusually rich set of lenses to questions of public sector innovation and regional equity. His undergraduate studies in psychology, international relations and French, followed by a Master of Business Administration specialising in international trade and development, gave him both the analytical tools and the cross-cultural fluency to understand inequality not just as a domestic problem but as a structural one — rooted in how institutions are designed and for whom.
The APS Problem Nobody Is Talking About
The pandemic changed how Australians work. For two years, the Australian Public Service demonstrated — clearly and at scale — that policy and program administration roles could be performed successfully from anywhere. Productivity held. Teams adapted. And for a moment, it seemed like the geographic barrier between regional Australians and quality public sector employment might finally be challenged.
Then the return-to-office pressure began
Bayan’s policy paper, developed through the Menzies Global Voices Policy Fellowship and presented at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, identified precisely this tension — and argued that the APS is missing a critical opportunity. Recent reforms negotiated between the Community and Public Sector Union and the Australian Public Service Commission expanded flexible work arrangements for existing public servants. But they left recruitment untouched. The result is a system that remains structurally biased toward those who live in, or are willing to relocate to, capital cities — and most often, Canberra.
For rural and regional Australians, this is not a minor inconvenience. Poverty rates in regional areas are consistently higher than in major cities. Unemployment runs at 7.4% regionally compared to 5.8% in urban centres — against just 3.1% in the ACT. And the barriers to relocation are rarely just financial, though they are often that too, with Canberra’s rental prices remaining among the highest nationally. They include carer responsibilities, disability, cultural and kinship ties to country and community, and the simple reality that uprooting your life for a junior public service role is not a trade-off that should be demanded of talented people simply because of where they were born.
“Place shapes purpose,” Bayan reflects, “and purpose can reshape place.” His argument is that a genuinely flexible APS — one that embeds location-agnostic work from recruitment through to exit, not just for those already inside the system — could become one of the most powerful levers available for reducing the economic inequality that runs between Australia’s capitals and its regions.
The View From Marrakech
Presenting this argument at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Morocco placed Bayan’s domestic policy proposal in a global frame. The meetings, which convene finance ministers, central bank governors and development leaders from around the world, are where the macroeconomic architecture of opportunity is debated and shaped. And the question at the heart of Bayan’s work — how do institutions distribute access to meaningful, well-paid work, and what does it mean when that access is geographically concentrated — is one that resonates far beyond Australia’s borders.
Bayan’s broader career has always moved across scales. His New Colombo Plan Scholarship and Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange experience deepened his understanding of how people-to-people ties and intercultural fluency shape the possibilities for cooperation and development. His work as an AFS Intercultural Programs Facilitator, and his volunteering with the Australian Red Cross supporting migrants and refugees navigating employment barriers, reflect a consistent orientation toward people at the structural edges of opportunity — those for whom the system’s design is most consequential. He was also recognised as one of 18 Asia-Pacific Sustainability Stars for his contributions across these domains — an acknowledgement that his work sits at the intersection of people, place and purpose.
Public Service as a Vehicle for Social Mobility
What makes Bayan’s vision distinctive is its insistence that the public sector itself must lead the change it advocates for. Governments routinely call for regional investment, rural resilience and place-based policy. But if the institutions designing those policies are staffed almost entirely by people who live in capital cities — people without lived experience of the challenges they are trying to solve — the quality of what gets designed is inevitably diminished.
Flexible APS recruitment is not, in Bayan’s framing, simply a workforce convenience. It is a social mobility intervention. It is a way of bringing the perspectives of regional Australians — from Darwin to Devonport, from Broken Hill to Broome — into the rooms where national priorities are set. And it is a way of ensuring that talented people in those communities do not have to choose between serving their place and building a meaningful career.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, this kind of thinking — connecting public sector innovation to equity of opportunity, and grounding policy ambition in lived experience — is precisely the kind of leadership we exist to support. Bayan’s work is a reminder that the most important reforms are not always the most visible ones. Sometimes they begin with a question about where people are allowed to work — and what it means when the answer excludes most of the country.
Bayan Yazdani is a 2023 Menzies Global Voices Fellow. Applications for the 2026 Global Voices Fellowship are now open. If you are committed to leadership that bridges place and policy, champions equity of opportunity, and is willing to rethink how public institutions serve all Australians, we invite you to explore the Fellowship and stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s broader emerging leadership community.
Australia’s public institutions are not failing regional communities because of a lack of intention. They are failing because they have been built around a geography of power — one that concentrates decision-making in capital cities and quietly excludes the perspectives of those who live furthest from them. Bayan Yazdani’s work makes the case that this is not inevitable. It is a design choice — and design choices can be changed.
His vision of a genuinely flexible Australian Public Service is not a workforce convenience. It is a social mobility intervention — a way of ensuring that where a person is born does not determine whether they can contribute to shaping the country’s future. Purpose, in Bayan’s framing, is not something that belongs only to those with the means to relocate. It belongs to every talented person in every corner of Australia who has something to offer and deserves a system willing to meet them where they are.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, this is precisely the kind of leadership we exist to support: grounded in place, connected to community, and willing to ask the hard questions about who our institutions are actually designed to serve. Applications for the 2026 Global Voices Fellowship are now open. If you are committed to leadership that bridges place and policy and champions equity of opportunity for all Australians, we invite you to explore the Fellowship and stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s emerging leadership community.
