Reflections on Australian politics and policy

I came not knowing much about Australian policy or its political system. That’s partly because it was never really on my radar, but also because it – unduly in my view – seems to receive scant reporting overseas. To be fair I probably still don’t, but it’s been a fairly intensive time here and I’ve been fortunate to meet with politicians past and present as well as senior officials from six of the nine governments here. So, for what they are worth, here are some personal reflections on policy and politics down under…

First, it’s very clearly a new era. Like when you look back at an old photo and suddenly realise your hair cut was out of date even for then, Howard represented a bygone period, and the legacy of his time in office was as much a lack of action as taking the country in some unpleasant directions (like the migrant detention camp in Nauru).There’s now a lot of goodwill and optimism for the future, and strong economic foundations on which to realise progressive goals on health, education, the environment and fairness. On the downside too many issues were pushed into the “too difficult” box for too long and are now long overdue for attention – in particular national infrastructure, social equity, and the natural environment.

Second, the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is an interesting and rather unusual leader but ultimately underwhelming. A former public servant, he came into power on the wave of a public desperate to come up for air and look to the future. He has made some good steps forward – on reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, on international engagement, on climate change, on investment in skills and infrastructure. Yet he’s beginning to slip into the territory of endless reviews and initiatives with no clear sense of how they will all land or fit together. Of course this view may be a little premature – he is only one year in – but with a reputation built on technocratic expertise you have to deliver or you’ll fall; and when you do it’ll be fast. Most critically, he lacks a capacity to compelling describe a vision or excite people around that. Change not from, but to.

Third, policy making and public services here are going through a real culture shock after years of relative ease and inaction. There’s much to improve on: a lack of statistics and robust evidence base; weak think-tank and research groups; sloppy policy making processes; an absence of real scrutiny and rigour. In so far as there are articulated ends for public investment there’s still an insufficient account of the means to get there. Blair may have found them late, but the ideas behind market design and user empowerment were fundamentally right. One of the biggest challenges for Rudd will be creating this ‘enabling’ policy infrastructure and capability to drive the outcomes he’s after – and it won’t come quickly or without some heavy lifting.

Fourth, all countries have imperfect governance arrangements and Australia’s is its nine-government federalism. You can obfuscate into the language of vertical fiscal imbalance, or decree that it’s always been that way, but it is broken, doesn’t work for the challenges that Australia faces, and needs to be fixed. The proposed National Partnership Payments won’t solve it, are disingenuous, and will leave the problem to fester for another political generation. I don’t have a perfect solution by any means but a better start would be an honest and principled discussion of where roles and responsibilities should sit and how they might be exchanged.

Fifth, a very positive feature here, and also a good thing about having states, is that policy is made much closer to the community. They are more involved in decisions; policy makers have more regard for the genuine outcomes of policy and not just whether it is theoretically pure and tractable; and politicians devote their time and effort to understanding individual stories and experiences. Just to take one example: there’s much the UK could learn for its next spending review from Queensland’s Toward Q2 work on how to engage, involve and communicate priorities to the public.

Sixth, the policy challenges are unsurprisingly very similar to the UK. Both countries struggle with how to ensure all regions and citizens benefit from a more globalised and knowledge based economy. Both look to prevention, early intervention and personal responsibility to address rising expectations and demands on public services. Both are committed to addressing climate change, and weigh up difficult tradeoffs in how best to transition to a low carbon world. And both the British and Australian public cite quality of life, family and community as the most important things in life yet their politicians jostle to find the appropriate narrative and tools to reach them.

Yet there are also some subtle differences. The most pressing social challenges are here found in extremely remote areas, and this brings with it distinct service delivery challenges not found in the UK. Moreover, Australia’s economy and population are growing much faster than the UK, with consequential upsides and a need to manage changing hotspots like on congestion and infrastructure. Finally, a more balanced and diversified economy than Britain’s, policy makers down under ponder about Australia’s economic future and what balance for risk and reward to target.

But overall I’m left with an impression of optimism and of a country and policy environment that isn’t hostage to a past and has great opportunities to forge new directions. All of which means there’s much to watch in the future…

Achieving Culture Change

I gave a talk on ‘culture change’ today to the communities and indigenous policy parts of the Queensland Government. (The supporting slides are below – and are a slight excuse to test out a new Google PowerPoint embedding function).





My argument was in four parts:

• First, that people’s cultural influences really do matter for the choices they take in life – and in turn these are particularly driven by the influence of our family, peers, community, as well as the organisations we spend our time in.
  


• Second, that the attitudes, values and norms we derive from these affect our behaviour in often quite unpredictable ways along with other factors like the legislation, information or rewards we face. So we might have a value of a university education being important because the people around us have reinforced this, but it’s only when we are provided with the information and financial support to actually go that it becomes a ‘behaviour’.
  


• Third, that government policy needs to get more sophisticated at understanding the different influences acting on different people. Sticking with the example, providing simple information about university options may be enough for some but others might not even value it in the first place. In which case policy needs to consider much more about how to promote different courses of action ‘upstream’, for example through thinking about the nature of relationships and relationship support.
  


• Fourth, following this approach seriously has some quite big implications for government: being able to develop the case to target different people with different types of support; using a range of disciplines and approaches to get better insight into how people make decisions (and not just economics); and being ready to invest in securing big change for the long term and not just looking for the quick wins (which the more punitive legislative approaches tend to provide). And all the while treading the ‘elastic band of public opinion’ carefully to avoid crossing the boundary into paternalism and the nanny state.
  

Whether any of this is relevant for communities and indigenous policy here is I think part yes and part no. Yes in that current policy like the Northern Territory intervention applies a very limited set of levers in a very intensive and indiscriminate manner. So it places the entire community under income management whereby an adviser decides how to spend your money (unlike the welfare reform pilots in Queensland which will use income management in a limited and targeted way). My view is that the Northern Territory intervention will only serve to reinforce negative signals about community development and personal responsibility. The culture change work is also relevant because of the broader messages about promoting strong families and positive role models, as well as provision of support and advisory services.

Yet the real missing piece is on the supply-side: namely that most indigenous communities are so remote and so lacking in real jobs that there’s little to practically aspire to. There are jobs in the mines, but these merely replace one form of passivity with another and don’t offer a diverse set of life courses.

To a certain extent it reminded me of a visit to Salford I made in writing the original longer discussion paper. What Salford has been doing quite effectively is integrating their community redevelopment policy with the local economy and businesses (not least helped by the BBC’s move up there) along with adopting some cultural and behavioural support policies. What this could mean in community policy speak would be shifting away from the intense place-based initiatives of the past to integrating policy on community assets and opportunities with policies on skills, capabilities, and with cultural capital and personal and mutual responsibility. All of which returns me to my conclusion from the Aurukun blog: that welfare reform and community development is only going to work once someone’s got a sustainable economic vision for these remote communities - which would let loose a whole virtuous circle of cultures, behaviours, and outcomes.

Rapid demise of the NSW Strategy Unit

More positive feedback following my visit to the now collapsed NSW Government in the papers (see post on strategy and subsequent collapse) :


"Several sources have told The Daily Telegraph that in the government's dying days Mr Walters spent more time in Ms Meagher's office than he did at his office in Mr Iemma's newly created "Strategy Unit".

The outfit, whose four weeks of operation still sends even the most hardened political insiders into hysterics, was immediately abolished by the new Government."

Another success in spreading the brand...

The Art of Strategic Government: ten principles for modern government

After spending the last few weeks on visits to several state and commonwealth departments I've become strongly of the view that strategic capabilities really need beefing up down under. I'm intending to test the waters on this soon based around the following principles.

I'd be grateful for views -- anything missing, need adding or re-framing?

1. Have a clear sense of the big picture - after all governing is about more than just a technocratic exercise, it's about that society which an elected government seeks to create and that which it seeks to avoid.
   
   
2. Organise people, programmes and resources around this - for example through a clear and consistent approach to public service reform.
   
   
3. Create institutional spaces for strategy and high-level policy analysis, and to act as an innovation bridge between local and national.
   
   
4. Establish rules and incentives for the strategic and long-term - for example through targets, performance management, accounting reform.
   
   
5. Use strategic systems management to drive results - New Public Management mostly worked well for the Democrats and New Labour. But now we need a more nuanced and differentiated account of public services - for example harnessing various approaches from information and accountability to customer transformation to choice and empowerment when and where they work best.
   
   
6. Recognise the different roles and relationships between the state and citizens in today’s society (e.g. as citizens, subject, service users etc…).
   
   
7. Build public value through debate and dialogue on the key long-term issues (e.g. climate change, obesity).
   
   
8. Make ready to test, trial and evolve policy ideas over time.
   
   
9. Invest in the capacity and capability of the workforce.
   
   
10. Be decisive on making tough choices, especially where these involve costs now.

Taking the long term view in policymaking

I spent last week at Sydney's Graduate School of Government. It's run by Geoff Gallop who is the ex-Premier of Western Australia and good friend of Tony Blair's since their college days together. Geoff was kind enough to invite me to Sydney as a visting fellow and guest lecturer at the University.

I gave a number of talks on strategy and policymaking, as well as an evening address on long-termism in government (rather embarassingly to most of the public service's top brass from past and present). It'll be podcasted soon, but otherwise available here.

My argumentation was that we should broaden the concept of long-termism; and that governments are typically poor at planning for the long-term, but increasingly need to get better at it, and can do so through:

1. Creating spaces for long-term thinking in the architecture of government, with examples of the Strategy Unit, Foresight and so on
2. Using independent reviews and more independent analysis to create public value and consensus on long-term issues, such as through the Nick Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change
3. Designing systems, rules and incentives for long-termism through reform to national accounting rules and performance management approaches
4. Developing a culture and practice of long-termism in the public service workforce
5. Aligning strategic policy analysis to a level most appropriate to taking the long-term view

Interestingly, in so far as these are the right components, I think the UK is ahead of other countries. In discussion I also tried to emphasise that different combinations of these will be approporate in different circumstances. So, for example, simple accounting rules is unlikely to be much use in addressing the long-term threat of climate change, but the public value approach through honest and open debate might be more so.

Strategy in government

One of the things that seems have recently dawned on the Government is that an ambitious reforming agenda kind of requires a public service that is fit for purpose. Rudd’s recent attack on the public service backfired somewhat, although there’s more considered thought going on about how to beef up the Government’s analytical and strategy capacity. As an example see Rudd’s speech on public services.

So today I gave a talk on what makes for a good strategy function in government, drawing on (in my view) the lessons of the UK’s Strategy Unit. My magically neat recipe of 10 ingredients was:

1. Have a clear commissioning structure: responsive to needs and priorities but also two-way exchange (‘intelligent customers’)


2. Be flexible in recruiting: control of recruitment, flexible on T & Cs, mix of backgrounds, international experience, analytically superb


3. Keep a flat structure with few hierarchical chains, mostly relatively senior roles, commission out work, regularly bring in new staff


4. Manage a mixed portfolio of work and try to balance over time (surges/ troughs)


5. Invest in intellectual capital and have clear knowledge management processes


6. Prioritise quality control (e.g. red-teaming, critical friends, steering groups)


7. Have a consistent and long term approach to stakeholder management


8. Clear about the need to both master the analytical trends but also see the big-picture (i.e. tradeoffs, narrative, framing of choices)


9. Be inclusive and outward-looking to avoid group-think (e.g. think-tanks, academia)


10. Be forward-looking: anticipate the future trends and policy challenges in short/medium/long term (e.g. horizon scanning)
    
    

Against these the Strategy Unit probably got better over the years in relation to its commissioning structures, analytical capacity and knowledge management processes. It probably slipped a bit on actually generating the ideas in the first place, and is arguably, though perhaps necessarily, more introspective and short-term focused than ever.

Overall though I think the UK’s Strategy Unit is still the premier organisation of its type anywhere in the world; if Rudd does want to beef up capacity here he would do no harm drawing heavily on its model.