Australian Policy Handbook Launch – Key Highlights
On the 5th September 2023, IPAA Queensland with the support of the Queensland Public Sector Commission and University of Queensland’s School of Political and International Studies hosted the launch of the 7th Edition of the Australian Policy Handbook at Brisbane’s iconic Customs House.
The Australian Policy Handbook makes an important contribution towards achieving better public policy in Australia. It describes the processes available to develop public policy, and the relationships between political decision-makers, public service advisers, and those charged with implementing the programs and services that result.
The panel included handbook authors Professor Catherine Althaus (ANZSOG and UNSW Canberra), Peter Bridgman (Barrister and Consultant), and Dr Sarah Ball (University of Melbourne). They were joined by Ben Gordon (Department of Premier and Cabinet, Queensland), in a discussion facilitated by Associate Professor Alastair Stark (School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland).
Below we present some key highlights from the panel discussion at this sell-out event.
About the importance of the handbook…
Alistar Stark: I’m going to begin today by throwing an easy one right at Peter. It’s very rare for books to find their way onto the desks and shelves of public servants. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve this. So I want to start with a question for Peter. What is it about this book, this handbook, that speaks to the audience that’s here today?
Peter Bridgman: Thanks, Alistar. It’s grounded in practice. This is the perspective that Glyn and I had when we developed what was called the Queensland Policy Handbook, which I wrote, and Catherine was part of that process as well, in the dying days of the Goss Government in the Office of Cabinet.
And what Glyn and I in particular wanted to do was to work out how people could navigate their way through these complicated and even complex pathways of policymaking, of how do we enable public servants to help people make the best possible decision in the circumstances.
The Queensland Policy Handbook was absurdly practical!
It named the names of people and gave the telephone extension numbers that if you had a question about industrial relations, the name of who you would phone.
Later on, when we were asked by Allen and Unwin, would we elevate that document to a national document and bring in some more academic content, we kept that practical focus. Of course, we didn’t name names anymore, but I think the reason that the book has found value for people, for public servants, for practitioners of these sometimes mysterious activities of policymaking, is that it starts from practice and builds on people’s ability to deliver that high quality advice that helps people make best quality decisions by staying grounded in practice.
It manifests itself in case studies. It manifests itself in where we do talk about theories of policymaking, that they’re not esoteric, they’re real world.
Alistar Stark: I think the phrase of absurdly practical just stuck with me. That’s one that we should put up on our notice boards and whiteboards across universities. Ben, I’d like to come to you just right away for the opposing or the different perspective that you bring. If I was to give you the opportunity to sit with a Peter or sit with a Catherine and direct how they write a book for a public servant in the here and now, what kind of things would you want to be in there?
Ben Gordon: I think you’ve already hit the nail on the head. For me, and I’m sure for most of my staff, it’s the practical component. The things that struck out to me were the case studies. So it was the practical element.
I’m interested in things that have happened like Robodebt, or the introduction of euthanasia laws. I think the introduction of preschool, universal kindergarten was one of the examples. Going through the story and understanding the genesis of it and being able to relate to that as a practitioner.
Reading the case study, I’ve got a feel for the genesis of what happened, what went wrong. I think you can learn a lot from those sorts of examples. I think it’s great having a theoretical understanding of what you’re doing. It’s the practical stuff that hits home.
Alistar Stark: It’s a good accolade. It’s not just made it onto the desk of a public servant, but the bedside table of a public servant.
Alistar Stark: What’s new about the new edition? Why should the people that own number five own number seven now?
Sarah Ball: I think you’ve foreshadowed one of the big changes. I still remember finding the policy handbook as a federal public servant in the library at what is now DSS and thinking, oh, finally, someone’s going to tell me what I’m doing. And it was a really important part of the journey for me where I came into reading this book and thinking, okay, this sort of makes sense, but my experience of the policy process, I still have questions. Obviously I went on to do a PhD and continue my journey understanding policy. But then using it in my teaching, I would supplement it with case studies to bring the points home. Here’s an element of the policy cycle. This is what it’s like when we’re talking about shaping the agenda. What might that look like in practice?
When we were talking about the new edition, myself and David Threlfall, another one of the new authors, this was a big thing for us as well as the other authors. We wanted to bring in that element that we had from our teaching experience, from our ongoing work to say let’s provide some illustrative examples of what this might look like in practice. We wanted to bring in new instruments, new voices, I think was a really important component of that. Really bringing in the diversity of how thinking is moving about who we include in the policy process and how we can include more diversity.
And instruments are changing.
I think even what’s in the edition now, we could probably write a whole new chapter on everything that’s going on with machine learning and AI. It’s this constant evolution, but it’s exciting to be able to take that time with each edition to look at how that evolution is impacting the policy process.
I also think one of the nice additions here is that we brought in a new focus on policy success and really trying to drive home that understanding what a good policy is actually quite challenging, and there are lots of different ways of thinking about success. So that was a nice addition as well.
Alistar Stark: It’s difficult for me to swallow the success stuff because I’m such a gloomy Scotsman. The positive nature of it runs against it, but that’s a theme that’s emerging in the academy, isn’t it, success? And what we see when we analyze policy through success, which can be, it can make us feel better, but it also leads to newer insights, doesn’t it?
Catherine Althaus: I think that there’s a positive public administration theme now in the scholarship, a very deliberate part on many scholars around the world. And that was actually something we also included in the new additions has been the focus; moving away from just thinking about problem solving, towards value propositions, and also let’s look for the opportunities. What’s the positive spin we can bring to the role that public services play and how can we think about society with respect to not just problems, but opportunities.
I think that’s a very marked difference, both in scholarship, hopefully in the practice, in terms of practitioners thinking about where can we add value? Where can we provide new innovative ideas? How can we set up Australian society towards different identities and a different future?
What does good looks like?
Alistar Stark: Reasons to be cheerful, I like it. Okay, that’s the nice stuff out the way. That’s the fluffy stuff dealt with. Now I’m going to start pushing you a little bit. These guys, as public servants, operate in a world of complexity. It’s a world with competing objectives, lots of different positions about what a good process looks like, what a good outcome or output looks like.
I want to get us talking about what good looks like from your various perspectives. And really, what I would like to do is try and push you for that one thing. You have a captive audience here that has to deal with this complexity.
The book reflects that there’s lots of things in it, lots of different areas that someone could go to. I want the one thing from each of you, beginning with Catherine. What’s the one lesson, the one process, the one thing to pursue that could make a process better, an outcome more effective? It’s a tough one.
Catherine Althaus: It is, but I’m going to say that I would turn to something that seems to be uniquely Australian, which is our pragmatism, and I think we should actually take a lot of pride in that. So we believe in the policy handbook that we can give you a sense-making tool, and we talk about the London tube map. It’s not accurate. It’s not to scale, but it helps you navigate things. And we see the handbook like that. We’re not telling you that this is the recipe.
We’re saying to you, use your judgment, use your knowledge, use your application, use your pragmatic kind of ability to apply these lessons to the various situations that you face.
We’re placing a lot of trust and a lot of faith in you, and I think that’s a big skill in terms of dealing with complexity.
It’s actually that local knowledge.
It’s the skill to apply that can really make a difference when it comes to cutting through the challenges of complexity. And I’ll just be an academic and add one extra thing which is that notion of lots of people talk about the VUCA world, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned there in terms of bridging the best of scholarship and practice.
As Ben mentioned, it’s good to be reminded actually of some theoretical constructs because they’re meant to help you. They’re not meant to make your life a misery. They’re there to be a springboard against which you can start to make really informed and even better application judgments. And VUCA is a concept like that.
When you think about complexity, what do we mean precisely?
Is it complexity per se or is it volatility? Is it ambiguity?
And each of those aspects or dimensions of modern policymaking require different strategies actually to cut through.
It might be we need more information, we need more inclusion, we need some restructuring of our ideas or processes. We need different techniques to combat or confront the specifics of the complexity we’re facing. So I think it’s that marriage of the best of scholarship and practice, but really putting that faith in application and meeting the circumstances that you face. I think that’s an really important lesson for all of us.
Alistar Stark: I like the pragmatic element. It speaks to a huge amount of emerging policy research, which is trying to bring more pragmatism along with, and sometimes in competition with the principles. And it speaks to adaptive governance, which you are all about. I’m happy to go down the line if anyone wants to go next. I want to hear from everybody on this question. The one thing that will improve the lives of the public servant, Ben.
Ben Gordon: You can be a great writer, a great technical expert in your field. It might be great economic modelling content. You can be a really great content expert, but particularly in the department we are in, the content changes rapidly.
New things hit your plate, so to be a content expert on everything, you have to be exceptional.
So having that ability, that skill to be able to pick up a phone and someone trusts you to be able to go, “Hey, I am the expert on it. I reckon this,” and have that judgment call about that, then informing what you are thinking.
That’s that then informing what you are thinking. I think that’s probably the one thing. If I was advising my staff, that’s the one thing in my area that is probably most important to their success. It’s less and less common where you are the expert in your domain and it comes up, that moment, and you run with it, and you own it.
But the next day, talking about some topic that I’ve never even heard of, and you must start at the start.
You can get there a lot faster with friends.
Make Friends
Alistar Stark: I was going to say that. You need friends. It’s a great message. I’m feeling happier as a consequence of this discussion. That’s a strange feeling for me.
Sarah Ball: I think mine is supplementary to that. The go-to advice I tend to give people working this space is… It’s a two-parter.
Be humble and be curious.
Like you were saying, head down, bottom up.
You can get very focused on the things that you are an expert in, but actually taking the opportunity to ask questions and to interrogate and challenge your beliefs really can only strengthen the work that you do. This is part of…real evidence-based policy is about drawing on diverse strengths and diverse ideas.
I think that that humble, curious approach to policymaking will always stand you in good stead.
Ben Gordon: I completely agree.
Peter Bridgman: There is no one thing. I think this will resonate with what everyone else has said as well. The policy domain exists in its context, which is large, institutional forms inside bodies politic, influenced and buffeted by people who want things to change both from outside and inside.
There’s no one thing because we’re in this complicated mess where that context sits alongside the content, which I think is still the biggest driver.
Know your stuff. There is no such thing as a content-free policy officer.
You can have your content-free managers, but the primary challenge for many of us who work in the policy domain is, what are we dealing with?
That’s the content question. Even if it’s a novel question, a huge amount of effort has to go upfront to understanding what is the content. So, process as well sits in there, the context, the content and the processes that we use.
A lot of The Australian Policy Handbook is about the processes.
What are good processes?
We say this in the book in about four different ways.
You can’t guarantee good outcomes just by good process, but if you’ve got bad process, then you’re relying on luck to get a good outcome.
The other thing is the soft skills, that Ben mentioned. I think they’re really important.
When I teach this to early-career public servants, I talk about the four Rs, typically. Of course, one of them doesn’t have an R at all at the start. Reasoning, which is the thing that you get employed for, on top of your position description, your ability to think critically, whatever. Reasoning, writing. Because most communication is in written form. It’s a core skill and you can’t really be a good policy officer and guide good outcomes if you can’t express yourself in the way that it is received by the decision makers.
Reasoning, writing, relating. Get friends. It is really, really important.
The higher up you get in public policy, the more you rely on those people around you, so the more important it is that you have the skills to draw out the good things from other people.
Lastly, resilience. Because this is a world of pain, hurt and disappointment which, of course…
Alistar Stark: Yes, we’re back on home territory.
Peter Bridgman: Being able to bounce back, being able to take the feedback, as unfair as it is, or the red writing that Ben puts all over someone’s otherwise good briefing note.
Ben Gordon: That’s me.
Peter Bridgman: I think, a combination of hard skills and soft skills, where content sits in its proper place alongside the real world of where we’re working and what it is that we’re trying to achieve.
Alistar Stark: Is there a pattern in your red writing?
Ben Gordon: I’ve been on the receiving end of a few red pens, but no. No.
What is “policy capacity”?
Alistar Stark: That’s great. Pragmatism, relational thinking, humility. Wonderful. I would like to focus a little bit more specifically on one phrase, one concept. Perhaps it’s a concept, perhaps it’s a phrase, perhaps it’s just a piece of discourse that we all use. Capacity. Again and again and again, it’s in the flyers for our event that IPAA Queensland circulated. It’s in the conversations I have with public servants all the time.
We say, policy capacity, how much have we got, how much do we want? We want as much as we can get. What materializes when we talk about capacity is that a lot of people have very different views about what it is, but also very different views about what we should be doing with it, how we should be getting more of it, and how we should live with what we’ve got.
I would like to have a conversation about what you think capacity is. How do you think about capacity? It’s more than simple human resource, obviously. What are the different dimensions? But then, what are some of the things that our audience should be thinking about in terms of building capacity for these contemporary challenges?
Sarah Ball: Differentiate capacity from capability.
It’s definitely the starting point. I think when we think about capacity, it can often feel like something we have absolutely no control over, compressed timeframes, the amount of people in our team or anything along those lines, whereas capability can be more the skills that we get, that content knowledge and all those sorts of things.
I think with capacity, we actually do have a little bit more room to move sometimes than we think we do. I think that actually comes back really beautifully to your comments about being relational.
When we feel time compressed, when we feel under pressure, we can go back to that head down, bottom up, just get it done. When, actually calling in expertise and knowledge from the people we know and the other people in our team and just using that time and space to really think, where is the absolutely urgent part of what we are doing and where is the space that we have to move, can be a really important skill to have.
The more friends we have, the more we feel that we can pick up the phone when we’re feeling a bit compressed.
The advice that I have given on this is, I used to deliver training for the Public Service Commission about delivering great policy. Usually the takeaway was, get some good friends and be as curious as you can.
But the interesting takeaway from that was people would say, “How many stakeholders is enough? How much evidence is enough?” And the reality is, perfect is the enemy of the good.
Doing the best you can with what you have, and really just focusing on being realistic about that, I think it’s just about being honest about the complexities of the policy space. Be kinder to yourselves, I guess, is the message there a little bit.
Alistar Stark: This is a tough question and as I ask it, I think, oh, you’re being a bit academic here. Is evidence a capability or a capacity? I’m not sure I know the answer to that. Do we have a view on that? We would call it anything we want because it’s a good thing?
Sarah Ball: I think you need both. I think you need capacity to generate evidence and you need the capability to generate evidence.
Alistar Stark: Mm, that’s a good answer. Thank you. Did someone record that? I’m stealing that.
Catherine Althaus: I think I’ll add to Sarah’s points, which I agree with. Obviously, today there’s a lot of focus on consultants. When the Policy Handbook was first written, as Peter reminded us with the history, it was in a different environment. It’s so much more contested now, in terms of the role of public services in this nation, in terms of policy advice but also policy delivery.
But one thing we know for sure is that consultants, for example, are not going to go away. We have to think carefully and creatively, I think, about how do we bring everybody across that policy architecture, in effective ways that they can add value and not detract or diminish accountability? I think there’s something both on the capability and capacity front, in terms of us thinking in a more clever way across Australia about how do we utilize that policy architecture as effectively as possible.
One of the things I’d add there is that being in the Australian context, we have this remarkable access to indigenous worldviews. We’ve started to introduce in the Policy Handbook, we included the Uluru Statement this edition, to start to try to encourage people to tap into the capacity and capability that indigenous worldviews bring. Because they offer this amazing set of wisdom that we have yet to tap.
It opens up new possibilities when it comes to evidence, it opened up new possibilities in terms of processes. Indigenous people have offered that very long term as a gift, which we’ve tended to ignore. And we ignore it at our peril. I think there’s huge opportunities in this space, and it’s exciting.
Alistar Stark: It’s interesting, and it might be accidental, but the executive summary mentions the problem with capacity here in Queensland, and then immediately goes to the consultants issue in the same sentence. There’s obviously a connection going on. I’d like to just dwell on that for a second. If we say that we have an untapped capacity and we can get to it through participatory mechanisms or participatory tools, that’s immediately speaking to my interests.
What tools might be available for us to tap in and really get that capacity working for everybody?
Catherine Althaus: Queensland Treasury Corporation have got an interesting model that they’ve used to try to leverage consultants in a different way. We’ve written that up. On the indigenous perspective, you’ve got indigenous processes of deep listening, indigenous approaches to evaluation, different discreet tools that might be used in different sectors like circle sentencing. We’ve got examples in the handbook.
There’s a whole scope of different options that will assist both on capability and capacity.
Alistar Stark: Excellent.
Peter Bridgman: We have in the audience a couple of leaders in these areas, whose job is to look at systemic issues around capacity and capability. We’ve got Public Sector Commissioner, David, and Linda, the Special Commissioner Professor Brian Head has been a leader both as a practitioner and as an academic in these areas.
The focus on these difficult questions about capacity and capability can’t be just individual, it can’t just be collective which is the organizational unit, it’s also got to be systemic. All three have to work together. We tend to invest in public policy. There’s a dreadful temptation that politicians have, which is to produce institutions in response to a problem we will… We don’t know what to do with the problem, but let’s institutionalize it. We’ll shove it into a box, which we call a department or a commission or whatever, and that will do its work.
We know from bitter experience that merely engaging an institutional form, which is a way of looking at both capacity and capability, doesn’t necessarily give us an outcome. I think we do have to operate at those multiple levels. What is the individual’s capacity, capability, the work unit, the collective, and then the systemic sitting on top of that?
There’s no easy ride through this. It requires investment, it requires looking at… I think one of my bugbears, and those of you who couldn’t sleep and read my public employment report, decasualisation is a really big thing. Let’s embed that capability rather than have it as a transient feature, because public problems aren’t transient in character.
Alistar Stark: Where do you think that automatic institutionalising tendency comes from? Is it just generations of habit? That’s what we do? Is it as simple as that?
Peter Bridgman: We do.
Alistar Stark: Where there’s a problem, here’s something we know we can do, so it’s about movement and action.
Peter Bridgman: Maybe it’s part of the human condition, maybe it is. We do want to be able to bundle things up into neat packages and get around the complexity.
Every time we reduce complexity, we also reduce understanding.
But – there are big differences around the country as to how we do that institutionalization. We do it everywhere. We do it everywhere in Westminster style governments. It’s not uniquely Australian.
New South Wales has a habit of fragmenting its problems, so you’ve got hundreds of tiny institutional forms. Queensland, we tend to gross things up a bit more. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. But if we merely institutionalized, we’re not going to address the underlying question and we’re not necessarily producing the capability and the capacity that we need.
Ben Gordon: I agree, Catherine. Sorry, and I didn’t mean to say that it was… I don’t dispute that either. It’s probably more just that it’s the language of it. It’s quite easy to talk about policy capacity and a problem with it, or we haven’t got enough of it, and it quickly slides into a debate around other things.
Hollowing out?
Alistar Stark: I’d like to hear the other panel members. I get really annoyed at the hollowing out thesis. It’s very old and very specific and it’s become a bit hackneyed and overused. It feels like capacity is changing, capabilities are changing, the things we need to do are changing, but not necessarily hollowing out. Do we have any views on that?
Sarah Ball: I think it touches on some of what I was trying to capture with, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. There is always more that could be done, but actually what is done is strong and there is quite a bit of capability and capacity for a lot of public servants. I agree, the evidence for that hollowing out theory is sketchy at best. But, I think it also comes down to an increasingly complex space.
With new challenges emerging all the time, it is very hard to do everything you need to do. If this challenge is something like COVID, fantastic example, where it is almost impossible to have capacity and capability with something that is still evolving as you are trying to wrangle it. I think it’s a combination of factors that are all coming together. That one’s close to what you were saying as well.
Catherine Althaus: And I think that it is an opportunity for us not to be complacent. I think that’s an important message here as well. Whilst the evidence might be thin, there’s also lots of scandals happening across Australia. I’m not going to pull back from acknowledging that. We don’t have perfection, so we’ve got to think about how do we continually pay attention to improvement.
I think our focus on capability and capacity allows us an opportunity to not be complacent, and to continually point to those systemic factors that Peter mentioned. How do we really dig deeply beneath the surface to see whether our systems are still fit for purpose or not? And I think that’s really exciting in terms of where public services can step up actually a level from where we’ve been in the last 30 or so years, where I think we’ve been a bit more passive.
Public services are institutions of the fabric of our democracy. And I think there is a huge scope for us to step into that space more confidently, paying attention to not being complacent, but actually stay… We’ve got a role to play here, a really significant and important one, and let’s step into that. I think I’d just add that to our discussion here.
Ben Gordon: I agree, Catherine. Sorry, and I didn’t mean to say that it was… I don’t dispute that either. It’s probably more just that it’s the language of it. It’s quite easy to talk about policy capacity and a problem with it, or we haven’t got enough of it, and it quickly slides into a debate around other things.
Alistar Stark: There’s a defeatist component with the phrase, that’s what interests me. It’s about doing things, but we immediately fall into narratives which are, we don’t have enough, we don’t have… It’s all gone.
Catherine Althaus: It comes from a position of scarcity, whereas we can think about a position of abundance. We have enough. We have more than enough, if we choose to use it.
Peter Bridgman: If I might indulge myself here, I first started working in the Queensland Public Service in 1981. I was a research psychologist and was a pretty rare creature. But I started immediately doing work at national levels, supporting the then ministerial council for welfare ministers.
It really struck me that there was this incredible difference between how the commonwealth operated and how the states operated. Within the states there was a clear hierarchy where Victoria and New South Wales were way ahead of Queensland, and Queensland was way ahead of everywhere else. In the ensuing however many years that is…In the ensuing however many years that is, things have changed dramatically. And I’ve done a lot of work now with every government in Australia, both when I was still in the public sector and externally now as a micro consultant. Those differences no longer exist. The Commonwealth is no longer operating at a level above every other body politic from a public policy, public servant perspective. The differences between Victoria and New South Wales and the other states, everything’s flattened. We’ve had a big regression to the main… Queensland, I think, is still actually a pretty good public service that delivers and does a sterling job. And as Ben mentioned, we actually probably were out in front of the pack in our COVID response and a lot of credit to our now Governor, then Chief Health Officer.
So, to that extent, I think the hollowing out thesis is reflected in the real world in that those stellar capabilities that went back to the Frederick Wheelers and those well-known Commonwealth public sector leaders, doesn’t exist anymore. And it may be that the commitment of the current federal government and our colleague, the secretary of PM&C, to rebuilding those things will bear fruit and will lift everybody with it, the rising tides and ships and all that. But that’s not a counsel of despair. I don’t reflect on that and say, “Well, the Commonwealth isn’t stellar anymore. We’re all doomed.” But I do think we can make really positive differences with the right sort of investments, both personally, collectively, and systemically.
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