The political elite make policy decisions in noisy environments and under time pressure, and so are prone to using heuristics. There are conflicting schools of thought as to whether it is appropriate for them to do so. Experienced decision-makers are thought to be more effective at using heuristics, so it is possible that for the political elite with experience in a particular context, heuristic decision-making is appropriate. Yet, many politicians are asked to make decisions on matters about which they are not experts. To add to the debate, we facilitated a discussion with a highly experienced cohort of 21 current and former senior politicians, former advisers, and current and former senior bureaucrats. When presented with a carefully considered and innovative new transport network pricing policy, we sought to identify whether and, if so, how they used heuristics to make a decision. We found that they used heuristics (1) to decide whether to engage with the issue at all and (2) how to act, having made the decision to engage. We describe how these heuristics were used and discuss the implications for theory and public administration practice.
Better use of evidence is at the centre of the ambitious Australian Public Sector Reform agenda, providing an authorising environment in which to test new ideas, tools, and approaches to bridge the research–practice gap. As the interlocutors between research and practice, knowledge brokers have a critical role to play in promoting the structural and behavioural changes necessary to build the knowledge networks and new capabilities that enable an evidence ecosystem. In particular, this article makes a case for harnessing the relational nature of knowledge brokering and trialling new mechanisms for research–practitioner collaboration and evidence innovation. It is hoped that this article can serve as the foundation for a future research and practice agenda examining how knowledge brokering operates and where university-produced research can best support evidence-based reform.
The notion of choice underpinning Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has its origin in neoliberal assumptions about the inherent value of market choice in human services reform and in the disability movement's advocacy for the right to self-determination. Little is known about how people in institutional settings experience choice in the NDIS context. Based on a critical ethnographic study, this article explores the choices made by 12 people with psychosocial disability living in two Victorian supported residential services (SRS). The study found that despite the goal of most participants being to move into independent accommodation, 2 years after the start of the roll-out of the NDIS, most participants were still living in SRS. Adopting a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, we show that the choices participants made were constrained by the institutional field in which they were living, their low capitals, and their relative powerlessness. This novel application of the concepts of field, habitus, and capitals in the NDIS context has implications for debates about the impact of marketisation and personalisation on individuals with limited agency. The findings have implications for policy and practice in other institutional settings and jurisdictions where public service delivery is framed around the notion of choice.
The Robodebt controversy in Australia has led to an investigation regarding bureaucratic practices, particularly concerning the dissemination of false or misleading information. While overt falsehoods may be relatively easy to spot, this paper delves into subtler forms of misleading discourse that often evade detection, perpetuating a culture of deliberate ambiguity within governmental institutions. By analysing bureaucratic manoeuvres like feigned ignorance, selective knowledge and silent silencing, this study elucidates how policymakers strategically incorporate uncertainty to shield themselves from blame. Drawing on empirical evidence from the handling of a 2016 state-wide blackout and the subsequent bureaucratic discourse, the paper highlights how routine bureaucratic interactions contribute to maintaining politically convenient narratives at the expense of transparency and democratic accountability. It proposes three key areas for policy organisations to address: engaging with what is being ignored, redefining objectivity to include diverse perspectives, and leaning into the tension between political desires and necessities.
This article tracks the proportion of Australian ministerial advisory staff over time who are drawn from the public service. Using a mix of parliamentary and employment data, biographical data and interviews (1984-2018), the paper tests if there has been a dramatic decline in the number of public servants in ministers' offices, and if the Australian ministerial office is evolving towards the cabinet ministeriel model found in Napoleonic countries, a concept known as cabinetisation. The paper shows that the proportion of Australian advisers who are public servants on leave is lower than in the past but has been consistently around 30% since 2010. The central argument advanced in the paper is that Australia's model of ministerial office has critical differences from Napoleonic ministerial cabinets and there is no evidence of cabinetisation. It argues that rather than bending towards European models, Australia's ministerial office is a response to peculiarly Westminster challenges and tensions, provoked by Washington aspirations. The paper shows that the institutional architecture of Australia's Westminster variant produces distinct and in some ways paradoxical dynamics: the separation designed to protect departments' impartiality threatens their marginalisation, leading to a push for greater presence in ministerial offices, despite the inherent frictions and risks of politicisation.
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