The transition in the roles, functions and activities of Australian Ombudsman from those contemplated at the start of the 1970s to current practice in 2006 has been remarkable. Early research on the Ombudsman in Australia argued that the office was an alien concept to Australia that had been remarkably successful in terms of receiving and resolving complaints and establishing a good reputation with the public, but that the office had received marginal attention in legal scholarship and had a problematic relationship with other parts of the administrative landscape. Australian Ombudsmen have transformed from an alien (and barely understood) import on the edge of public administration, assigned a secondary and assistant role, to being regarded as a central component of administrative justice. There has been a significant redistribution of focus and activity from an original complainant-focused, incident-based approach to an institution-focused and performance-based approach to investigation.

The administrative law and public administration landscapes in Australia have radically changed since the 1970s. More importantly the rate, extent and impact of those changes continue to compound in the early decades of the twenty-first century. This raises some interesting questions about the capacity of an institution, initially configured as a third-hand antipodean import of a nineteenth century instrument of Swedish law reform, to function in a rapidly changing Australian environment two centuries removed from its Swedish beginnings.