20th Year Anniversary
Edition #46
This issue:
- red tape and improving regulation
- trends shaping education
- preparedness won’t stop the next pandemic
- making democracy work
- report on government services
Plus what I’m reading.
Since the 1970s, successive Australian governments have consistently expressed a desire to reduce regulatory burdens. Yet regulation continues to grow, often in response to community demand. A paper in the Australian Journal of Public Administration examines the role of regulation and the challenges of regulatory reform and initiatives to reduce ‘red tape’. It argues a new approach to reform is needed to deliver better societal, economic and democratic outcomes from regulation.
Got something you want to tell us? Reader feedback plays a big part in shaping The Bridge, so if there’s a research paper, journal article or report you’d like to add to my reading pile, or a topic you’d like to see explored in The Bridge, just let me know. If you’ve got any other suggestions or feedback, please send them to me at M.Katsonis@anzsog.edu.au
This is a triennial report from the OECD examining major economic, political, social and technological trends affecting education.
The trends in 2022
1. Growth: Economic growth has lifted many out of poverty and raised living
standards. Despite increasing affluence, socio-economic inequalities are widening. Education has traditionally benefited economic growth by enabling social mobility and cultivating the competencies individuals need to participate in the economy.
2. Living and working: There has been a rise in flexible work and telework. At home, family structures continue evolving, with slow steps towards gender equality. Education can help forge communities where all members are cared for, providing support that might not be found elsewhere. Robust lifelong learning systems can build the adaptability and resilience required for the future of work.
3. Knowledge and power: Digital technologies provide new and powerful means to make decisions and solve problems. Yet new issues have emerged such as fake information. With greater information comes greater uncertainty and a compelling need to govern knowledge effectively.
4. Identity and belonging: In a global and digital world, individualisation and choice increasingly define our lives. The virtual world facilitates the exploration of identities in new ways, giving individuals and groups greater voice and allowing new forms of belonging. Education can help socialise students into common norms and values while supporting the agency needed to pursue learning and well-being.
5. Our changing nature: Intertwined societal and environmental processes are shaping human well-being. Advances in physical, cognitive and emotional enhancement raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Education is key to helping us think through emerging social and ethical challenges.
The COVID-19 pandemic has confounded the world’s expectations at every turn. An essay in the Boston Review by Sheila Jasanoff, pleads for humility as a practice of reasoning and policy, one that accepts uncertainty as its foundation and harm mitigation as its goal.
To do better next time, the article asks:
- how should we diagnose what went wrong in the preparations the world had for so long been cultivating?
- how should we plan more effectively for the next crisis that will surely come?
The role of humility
The answer cannot be just to embrace a policy of preparedness toward every possible hazard. To be prepared implies one is ready for all contingencies and also confident of one’s ability to meet and overcome. Preparedness is a heroic posture which denies the possibility of defeat.
By contrast, humility admits that defeat is possible. It occupies the zone between preparedness and precaution by considering how we should act as we cannot know the full consequences of our actions.
Humility implements precaution through what the paper terms “technologies of humility”. These incorporate memory, experience, and concerns for justice into governance and public policy. It is a proactive, analytically robust method that asks:
- not just what we can do but who might get hurt
- what happened when we tried before
- whose perceptions were systematically ignored
- what protections are in place if we again guess wrong.
This Demos paper argues while there is such a thing as society, it doesn’t happen by accident. The state needs to take a leading role in building and shaping it. An alternative approach to government and policy making can help rebuild society and empower citizens. The paper calls this a “gravitational state”.
The purpose of policy
A fundamental question is how to build the conditions for consensus and the resolution of conflicts that prevent solving collective problems. This means:
- strengthening the relationships and trust between individuals and between divergent groups.
- bringing together the interests of divergent groups closer together under a cohesive identity.
- building the skills of citizenship
- generating a sense of economic and procedural justice.
Everyday democracy
There are two elements to the reform agenda:
1. Community devolution: Taking decisions away from people absolves them of responsibility for managing trade-offs and complexity. The community level is where there is leverage for human relationships, voluntary networks and community infrastructure. This can be far more effective, often for less money. While the state can be mobilised at the national level to meet demand, only a strong social system can actively reduce demand.
2. Participative policy making: One tool is not enough for democracy. A range of tools and decision-making processes need to be deployed, from online deliberation and citizens’ assemblies to better voting systems and processes of consultation.
The Productivity Commission’s annual Report on Government Services provides information on the equity, effectiveness and efficiency of government services in Australia. It looks at a range of indicators relating to services covering education, justice, community services, health, emergency management, housing and homelessness.
At a glance
- Total Australian, State and Territory government recurrent expenditure on community services was $57.6 billion in 2020‑21, around 19.1 per cent of total expenditure on services covered in the report. The largest contributor was expenditure under the National Disability Agreement and government contributions to the National Disability Insurance Scheme ($25.4 billion).
- Total recurrent expenditure on health was $122.2 billion, around 40.6 per cent of total government expenditure. Public hospitals were the largest contributor ($76.7 billion), followed by primary and community health ($41.1 billion) and ambulance services ($4.4 billion).
- Total government expenditure for justice services in 2020-21 was almost $20.9 billion, an increase of 4.5 per cent from the previous year. Police services were the largest contributor (64.8 per cent), followed by corrective services (26.1 per cent) and courts (9.2 per cent).
What I'm reading
1. How to run a meeting
This is a timeless article from the 1976 Harvard Business Review which is equally applicable today. While meetings perform essential organisational functions, they can also be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions. The article discusses the critical points at which most meetings go wrong and ways of putting them right.
Fun fact: The article’s author is Antony Jay who also co-wrote the British political TV satires, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister
Read More
2. What’s our capacity to Innovate?
A blog post from the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation presents an Innovation Capacity Systemic Framework. This seeks to make innovation an integral part of policy making. The framework considers how innovation fits into and builds on existing systems, can be leveraged by actors and be used to establish new rules, practices and norms. OPSI is seeking feedback about the framework on their public engagement platform.
Read More
‘Til the next issue
Maria Katsonis
Maria curates The Bridge. She is a Public Policy Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a former senior Victorian public servant with 20 years’ experience. She has a deep understanding of public policy and public management and brings a practitioner’s perspective to the academic.
We acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Peoples of Australia and Māori as tangata whenua and Treaty of Waitangi partners in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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