Welcome

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.