Overcoming indigenous disadvantage: key indicators 2009

Source: Productivity Commission
"In 2002, Australian governments committed themselves collectively to overcoming the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians. As part of this commitment, governments agreed to a regular public report on progress — the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators report. This is the fourth edition of that report. This report is more than a collection of data. It draws on extensive evidence to identify the areas where government policies will have the greatest impact. Over time, the report measures the effects of those policies — and reveals where more effort is required. This was recognised in the updated terms of reference for this report, provided this year by the Prime Minister on behalf of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG)."

Interacting with Government: Australians' use and satisfaction with e-government

Source: Dept. of Finance and Deregulation
"Interacting with Government explores Australians’ use and satisfaction with e‑government services provided through the internet and telephone. It investigates:

how people contact government by internet, telephone, in-person or mail; satisfaction with these means of contacting government, including reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction; reasons why people choose to use or not use e‑government services; preferences for future delivery of government services."

Improving access to government through better use of the web

Source: World Wide Web Consortium
"Recognizing that governments throughout the World need assistance and guidance in achieving the promises of electronic government through technology and the Web, this document seeks to define and call forth, but not yet solve, the variety of issues and challenges faced by governments. The use cases, documentation, and explanation are focused on the available or needed technical standards but additionally provide context to note and describe the additional challenges and issues which exist before success can be realized. eGovernment refers to the use of the Web or other information technologies by governing bodies (local, state, federal, multi-national) to interact with their citizenry, between departments and divisions, and between governments themselves."

Sea change: advancing Australia's ocean interests

source: Australian Strategic Policy Institute
"Australia claims jurisdiction over more of the earth than any other country—around 27.2 million square kilometres or 5% of the planet, ahead of Russia and the US. Of this, our maritime domain is around 4% of the planet’s oceans. This Strategy, authored by Sam Bateman and Anthony Bergin, is a new assessment of Australia’s ocean interests. Australia should be an oceanic superpower but currently we are neither a great maritime nation nor a great maritime power: we have neglected the importance of the oceans to our national prosperity and security."

Marine nation: national framework for marine research and innovation

Source: Oceans Policy Science Advisory Group
"This strategy sets the direction for research in this critical area through a new commitment to national co-ordination by agencies involved in Australia’s marine science, technology and innovation effort. The Framework also highlights the need for greatly expanded investment in marine R&D."

Informing decisions in a changing climate

Source: National Academies Press
"Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate provides a framework and a set of strategies and methods for organizing and evaluating decision support activities related to climate change. Based on basic knowledge of decision making; past experiences in other fields; experience with early efforts in the climate arena; and input from a range of decision makers, the book identifies six principles of effective decision support and recommends a strategy for implementing them in a national initiative to inform climate-related decisions."

Critically classifying: UK e-government website benchmarking and recasting the citizen as customer

Source:Information Systems Journal, Mar 2009
"In recent years, discussion of the provision of government services has paid particular attention to notions of customer choice and improved service delivery. However, there appears to be marked shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state moving from government being responsive to the needs of citizens to viewing citizens explicitly as customers. This paper argues that this change is being accelerated by government use of techniques like benchmarking, which have been widely used in the private sector. To illustrate this point, the paper focuses on the adoption of website benchmarking techniques by the public sector."

Evidenced-based policy-making: what is it, and how do we get it?

Source: Productivity Commission
"The concept of ‘evidence-based policy-making’, while not new, has recently become elevated in public discussion. Like motherhood, it has universal appeal, at least in principle. The need for it is manifest in the complexity of the policy challenges confronting Australia, both in the short term (the ‘meltdown’) and the long term (greenhouse, population ageing). But what exactly does evidence-based policy-making entail? How can it contribute to achieving better policy outcomes? What is needed to put it into wider practice? In a speech for the Australia New Zealand School of Government, Gary Banks, Chariman of the Productivity Commission, addresses each of these questions, drawing some insights and lessons from the experience of the Productivity Commission and its predecessors over the years."

Collaborative governance: a new era of public policy in Australia

Source: ANU E-Press
"Collaboration has emerged as a central concept in public policy circles in Australia and a panacea to the complex challenges facing Australia. But is this really the cure-all it seems to be? In this edited collection we present scholarly and practitioner perspectives on the drivers, challenges, prospects and promise of collaboration. The papers, first presented at the 2007 ANZSOG Conference, draw on the extensive experience of the contributors in either trying to enact collaboration, or studying the processes of this phenomenon. Together the collection provides important insights into the potential of collaboration, but also the fiercely stubborn barriers to adopting more collaborative approaches to policy and implementation."

Making research matter

Source: National Centre for Vocational Education Research
"Delivered as a keynote address at SEAMEO Vocational Training and Education Research and Networking Conference in Bali, July 2008, this paper considers the role of evidence in public policy and how research can contribute to better policies and innovations in practice. It argues that the right institutional and cultural settings need to be in place before research can play its proper role in policy-making."

Policy on trial

Source: Policy, Spring 2008
"Evidence-based policy is all the rage in Canberra, yet policymakers are not testing their ideas to see if they will work before rolling them out, unproven, at taxpayers’ expense. This author argues that randomised trials are the epitome of rational inquiry: they can establish whether a causal effect has occurred and thus prove whether government action is effective or not. Government policies that would be good candidates for randomised trials include the responses to the 2020 Summit and testing whether the provision of high-speed internet access to schools will benefit students and increase their grades. Yet, randomised trials are politically unattractive. Stating a hypothesis can be problematic for policymakers, forcing them to move from vague statements of intent to a specific measurable outcome they wish to achieve. On top of this, making a real difference is hard and randomised trials can show that government intervention makes no real difference."

Public participation in environmental assessment and decision-making

source: National Academies Press
"The term “public participation,” as used in this study, includes organized processes adopted by elected officials, government agencies, or other public- or private-sector organizations to engage the public in environmental assessment, planning, decision making, management, monitoring, and evaluation. These processes supplement traditional forms of public participation (voting, forming interest groups, demonstrating, lobbying) by directly involving the public in executive functions that, when they are conducted in government, are traditionally delegated to administrative agencies. The goal of participation is to improve the quality, legitimacy, and capacity of environmental assessments and decisions."

Industry policy for a productive Australia

Source: Productivity Commission
"Productivity Commission chair Gary Banks has questioned emissions intensive industries' claims they should be compensated for the impact of the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS). In an August 6 speech at the Uni of Qld, Banks led a wide-ranging discussion of policy rationales for industry support. He said there may be genuine reasons to consider compensation for unexpected govt policy measures that "lead to a loss of pre-existing 'property rights'".

Negative learning

Source: Climatic Change, vol.89,nos.1-2 (July 2008)
"New technical information may lead to scientific beliefs that diverge over time from the a posteriori right answer. We call this phenomenon, which is particularly problematic in the global change arena, negative learning. Negative learning may have affected policy in important cases, including stratospheric ozone depletion, dynamics of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and population and energy projections. We simulate negative learning in the context of climate change with a formal model that embeds the concept within the Bayesian framework, illustrating that it may lead to errant decisions and large welfare losses to society. Based on these cases, we suggest approaches to scientific assessment and decision making that could mitigate the problem. Application of the tools of science history to the study of learning in global change, including critical examination of the assessment process to understand how judgments are made, could provide important insights on how to improve the flow of information to policy makers."

2008 State of the Future report: executive summary

Source: Millennium Project
"This “Report Card on the Future” distills the collective intelligence of over 2,500 leading scientists, futurists, scholars, & policy advisors who work for governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and international organizations."

Economic growth or the environment?: when cornered, Americans believe economic growth more important

Source: Harris Interactive
"As economic conditions worsen, people who are asked to make a decision between protecting the environment or economic growth and development have moved even more strongly into the economic growth column." - results of Harris Poll

Public service independence and responsiveness: striking a balance

Source: The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
"The issue of public service responsiveness to ministers has been described as a ‘hardy perennial’ of public service ethics. Too much responsiveness implies a public service that has become compliant to the point of subordinating its professional integrity to the political needs of ministers. Too little, implies a public service that ignores its duty to serve ministers in favour of pursuing its own interests. A roundtable in March 2008, brought together academics, public servants (both senior and up-and-coming), ministerial advisers and former politicians to share insights and identify issues in an environment that was both supportive and challenging."

Extending Australia's digital divide policy: an examination of the value of social inclusion and social capital policy frameworks

Source: Dept. of Family, Housing, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs
"Digital divide policies have been historically rooted within the information society / knowledge economy credo and as such they have been largely motivated by the anticipated value of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) diffusion. In Australia, a range of government policies have attempted to address inequalities in ICT access and use since the late 1990s. Despite these attempts, key determinants of internet access such as age, income, educational attainment and Indigenous status are proving to be persistent, while more complicated and nuanced factors are likely to be determining the way people use the internet. In order to examine how the social benefits of internet access and use can be understood and harnessed in Australia, this paper explores the implications of adding two concepts to policy deliberations: social inclusion and social capital."

Whatever happened to frank and fearless?: the impact of new public management on the Australian Public Service

Source: ANU E-Press
"In this evidence-based and closely argued work, Kathy MacDermott plots the changes in the culture of the Australian Public Service that have led many contemporary commentators to lament the purported loss of traditional public service values of impartiality, intellectual rigour and — most importantly — the willingness of public servants at all levels to offer frank and fearless advice to their superiors and their ministers."

Public policies against global warming: a supply side approach

""The countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol have pledged to limit global warming by reducing the demand for fossil fuels. But what about supply? If suppliers do not react, demand reductions by a subset of countries are ineffective. They simply depress the world price of carbon and induce the environmental sinners to consume what the Kyoto countries have economized on. Even worse, if suppliers feel threatened by a gradual greening of economic policies in the Kyoto countries that would damage their future prices; they will extract their stocks more rapidly, thus accelerating global warming. The paper discusses the remaining policy options against global warming from an intertemporal supply-side perspective. ", in International Tax and Public Finance, vol.15,no.4 (2008)