How do we make better laws?
Or put a slightly different way, how do we get better at making laws? Making
law is a process like any other. A process that, with a little self-reflection
and a lot of discipline, we can get better at. This blog is a modest
contribution to the project of getting better at making law.
Even more modestly, it
is a means for me – a public servant on sabbatical – to stem the atrophy of my
policy brain while I’m away. I’ve spent the past decade as a public servant and
the last eight years working in legislative policy, so I’ve seen enough laws
made to have an opinion on how it should be done.
It should go without
saying – but must be said all the same – that all views expressed on this blog
are mine only, and do not reflect the views of my agency or the Australian
Government. Given my job requires me to be apolitical, I will be especially
careful not comment of the substance of policy – at least not where it might be
politically controversial. Instead, I will focus of the craft of good policy
making, hence my emphasis on the process of legislative policy development. To extend
(and mangle) Bismarck’s simile comparing law-making to sausage-making, I’m concerned with the skill of the abattoir
workers, and not the individual sausages that they produce.
For the same reason, I
will also focus on a specific type of legislative policy making: that where the
driving force behind policy ideas is the bureaucracy, not political parties. The
fiery policy issues that make it onto the front page of the newspapers and onto
the platforms of political parties are largely not within this blog’s remit. To
simplify broadly (for those not familiar with the inner workings of government),
the big policy decisions are made by elected governments, not bureaucrats. But
beyond the big issues of the day, much policy (probably even the majority of
policy) is concerned with technical improvements or filling out the prosaic
details of the bigger policy decisions. This latter type of policy is
specialist work and tends to be driven by the public service (though it must
ultimately still be approved by the government and passed by parliament). This
is where my experience lies and where my blog will focus.
Nor should my blog’s
focus be taken to suggest that the Australian government, or my agency, is
particularly bad at doing policy. I happen to think we’re pretty good at it.
But complacency is the mother of failure. We could always be better, and this
blog is a small contribution to that project of continuous improvement.
What topics will my
blog discuss? I suspect there will be a number of themes: policy communication
and the art of persuasion; applying different methodologies (eg design thinking, or Agile methodology to legislative policy development); the
difficulties in applying evidence-based policy. However, I suspect that more
topics will emerge as the blog progresses (iteratively, to use a favoured piece
of public service terminology). Should this (admittedly rather specialist) blog
acquire any readers, I’m happy to take topic suggestions for future blog posts.
