Public ideas
Rules for reformers
Contributors to a new Australian media website present three case studies in successful policy reform.
The website founders aim to “disrupt Australian policy parochialism”. They believe in “an abundant Australia, where prosperity is expansive, inclusive, and continually growing”. They support “an Australia that makes its egalitarian aspirations a reality”. They value “depth and long-term thinking”.
That’s how the recently-launched Inflection Points describes itself on its website. It has a bias “towards publishing pieces that call for specific action”.
It has established a podcast series “Moving the needle”, launched with a story about how three people have achieved policy change (includes a transcript). Michael Brennan, Brendan Coates and Katie Roberts-Hull speak of their successes in achieving policy reforms in three different areas.
Brennan talks about abolishing non-compete clauses in employment contracts – an area where contract law and concerns for economic productivity can be in conflict. Coates addresses the need to ensure our skilled migration program achieves what it is supposed to achieve: it needs refining. And Roberts-Hull describes the struggle to re-establish phonics in school systems that had gone down the “whole language” route.
They all have points of advice, framed in different ways, but there are common themes. There must be clear thinking about the nature of the problem. Trade-offs between desirable policy outcomes must be acknowledged. Evidence must be gathered, analysed, fed into public debates, and made available in ways that are meaningful for policymakers. Above all the process must be rigorous and disciplined.
Reformers always have a long list of policy reforms to advance, and are always constrained for resources. Coates describes how the Grattan Institute effectively uses a triage system to allocate its staff. They pick big battles they think they can win, ideally when the policy window is open.
Keep a watch on Inflection Points, which has gotten off to a promising start in providing a platform for “long-form policy writing”.
A preview of the Boyer Lectures about Australia’s “radical experiment”
It’s easy to forget that Australia has been a world leader in democratic innovation. Does this history give us the resilience to stand up against world forces undermining democracy?
To date the ABC’s Boyer Lectures have been delivered by a well-known public intellectual. This year’s lectures, to commence later this month, will be delivered in a sequence by five Australians who have established strong credentials in their own fields, who will consider whether Australia’s “radical experiment” in democracy will continue to thrive.
Julia Baird gives us a preview of these lectures in her post Will Australia’s democracy survive global collapse?– a headline that is somewhat more dramatic than the richly descriptive tone of her article, which describes the unsung strengths of our democracy – the “radical experiment” we embarked on in the nineteenth century.
Another Australian radical experiment
She reminds us of Australia’s democratic innovations starting with the secret ballot in the 1850s – known worldwide as the “Australian ballot” at the time because it was so novel. Our colonial governments were innovative in moves such as female suffrage. Since Federation we have built on those innovations with compulsory voting, preferential voting, and an independent electoral commission.
The question Baird poses is about the robustness of our democracy. In this context she draws our attention to the manifest weaknesses of America’s democracy. Is our democracy strong enough, sufficiently embedded in our ways of thinking, to stand against the forces driving democratic backsliding? While she leaves this question open – that’s the assignment for our five Boyer lecturers – she hints that the way we go about our politics without too much fuss or bother could be one of our strengths.
A politics for a disintegrating world
Martyn Goddard describes how democracies have come under threat from within, and what we can do to avoid democratic collapse.
Martyn Goddard has an essay on his Policy Post A politics for a disintegrating world, that world being the prosperous “western” democracies.
He notes that in these countries the populist right has been able to mobilize support over immigration, particularly what people see as uncontrolled immigration.
He uses maps of economic disadvantage in the USA, Germany and the UK, matched with maps of voting patterns, to show that within these countries the people in the poorest and most neglected regions have been those most likely to turn to the MAGA movement in the USA, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and Farage’s Reform in the UK.
The general point is that the populist right needs two conditions to establish their power base – an issue, and a constituency of people who feel left behind by the elites.
That leads Goddard to look for the conditions that have resulted in economic division. He identifies widening gaps in income and wealth, loss of trust in government and public institutions, and a severance of social contracts and conventions, such as the obligation of the old and well-off to help the young develop their capacities.
He traces the rise of neoliberalism as the root cause of these divisions. There was an inflection point, marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980. Their small government movement “wound back the welfare state, decreased the shares of income and wealth going to wage-earners and increased the share going to the owners of capital”, setting their countries, and those that followed their examples, on the path to the social divisions we see today.
He concludes by drawing on Peter Turchin’s notion that there has been “elite overproduction” co-existing with “popular immiseration”. It’s one way of describing current discontent and social division, but it picks up the main idea that today’s young, ranging from the unschooled and unskilled through to underemployed university graduates, are discontent, and have good reason to be discontent.
Without detracting from Goddard’s main message, it’s worth pointing out that the common idea that the Thatcher and Reagan governments cut welfare spending needs qualification. The general pattern of neoliberal governments was to cut all government expenditure, including spending on education, public health, transport infrastructure and a host of other economic services. These cuts weakened the economy, giving rise to such wide inequities and poverty that the governments over time had to increase social security transfers, bleeding other public expenditure to finance that spending. That is why the UK, for example, has badly underfunded and poorly-performing public services, even though its public revenue is reasonably high for a “developed” country.
This vicious cycle is described in Miriam Lyons and my 2015 work Governomics: can we afford small government?. Countries that sustain the capacity of their governments to provide effective public services, particularly those that develop people’s capabilities, don’t have to spend as much on social security transfers as those that have weakened their economies with their “small government” policies.
Goddard believes that a traditional social-democratic program, focussing on returning economic and political power to the working people, can protect societies against collapse.
Australia does not get much mention in his essay. We have the fortune to be girt by sea, rather than having America’s porous southern border or Europe’s long land borders and narrow waterways – the Mediterranean and the English Channel. This means we can operate a highly-controlled immigration policy. Because of our high level of urbanization, and some wise decisions made around 1901, we are free of the severe regional disparities that are characteristic of the USA, Germany and the UK.
That doesn’t mean we are immunized against the far right: it is always present in fringe parties, in neo-Nazi and sovereign pockets of discontent, and in infiltrations in the Liberal and National Parties. A severe recession could see these groups mobilize into a powerful and unified movement.
Goddard’s advice to our policy makers is to embed a social-democratic program and to re-build government capacity.