The opinion–policy link in Australia

Whether or not policy is responsive to public opinion is central to questions of representation. Democracy by many accounts is premised on there being a strong correspondence between public opinion and policy. This link has not, however, been examined in detail in Australia. This article examines the policy–opinion link in a more robust way than that has previously been achieved in Australia, through the use of legislative data from the Australian Policy Agendas Project (APAP) and public opinion data from Roy Morgan. The article asks: is policy congruent with public opinion in Australia? In addressing this question, we examine to what extent policy accords with the preferences of the public. This in turn provides us with some answers about how representative Australian democracy is, as well as contributing to an international debate about the responsiveness of policy to public opinion.

政策是否要对舆论负责,这是代表制的核心问题。民主的前提往往就在于舆论和政策之间的息息相通。但在澳大利亚,人们并没有仔细地研究过二者间的关联。本文根据澳大利亚政策议题计划提供的立法资料以及罗伊摩根提供的舆情资料,对政策—舆论关联做了比以往充分多的研究。本文试问：政策与舆论在澳大利亚是否一致？我们考察了政策在多大程度上符合民意。这也为澳大利亚民主在多大程度上具有代表性的问题提供了答案,对于国际上争论政策对民意的回应问题也具有参考意义。。     

Establishing political priority for regulatory interventions in waste management in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper establishes a multi theory framework to help explain factors and conditions promoting a political priority for policy change. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through its application to a case study of waste management in Australia. A lack of political momentum to prioritise regulatory interventions has contributed to uncoordinated responses by the Australian federal and state governments resulting in unsustainable approaches to waste management. Lessons are derived from the analysis that provide insights into the potential for establishing political priority for policy change from uncoordinated voluntary schemes to more coordinated regulatory approaches.     

Potential Focusing Projects and Policy Change

Why do policies change dramatically? Most prominent theories and many empirical studies of policy change address that question with attention to external shocks to policy systems or focusing events. These shocks or events are usually described as unplanned, unpredicted jolts such as global crises or natural disasters. I assert a role for focusing projects. These planned activities continue traditional priorities in an issue but do so to a degree perceived as excessive by enough people to shatter seemingly stable policy systems. I then propose a theoretical framework to explain the varying impacts from such projects. The framework uses two dimensions: one that accounts for the mobilization of pro‐change forces and one that assesses policy learning by members of pro‐status quo coalitions. I examine this framework in the context of changes to dam‐building policies in four diverse political settings: United States, Australia, Canada, and China. I find intriguing similarities between the focusing projects in these different contexts but also considerable variation in the extent to which they produce policy change.     

Identifying Relevant Cases of Conversion and Drift Using the Comparative Agendas Project

One of the most important phases of case‐oriented research is identifying the relevant population of cases. The best practice scheme suggests first identifying the positive and then the negative cases, based on the assumption that the population is small and known. This scheme is inapplicable when the population is unknown, as is the case with many public administration and public policy outcomes, which are often less visible. However, most research either ignores this difficulty or recommends a single case study. This article suggests that when the population is unknown scholars can apply the possibility principle to identify the relevant population of cases. In order to do so, a large dataset is required. In policy studies, the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) can serve this aim. This article highlights CAP's applicability for case selection based on the possibility principle in two less visible policy outcomes: conversion and drift. In that, it not only addresses an overlooked challenge but also promotes both CAP as a useful tool for qualitative researchers and the expansion of comparative work on conversion and drift.     

Policy Agendas in Australian Politics: The Governor-General's Speeches, 1945–2008

The Policy Agendas Project collects and organises data from official documents to trace changes in the policy agenda and outputs of national, sub-national and supranational governments. In this paper we use the policy agendas method to analyse the changing contents of those Australian Governor-General's speeches delivered on behalf of incoming governments between 1945 and 2008. We suggest that these speeches provide an important insight into how the executive wishes to portray its policy agenda as it starts a new term of government. In mapping the changing agenda in this way we address four questions: which issues have risen or fallen in importance? When and in relation to what issues have there been policy ‘punctuations’? How stable is the Australian policy agenda? How fragmented is the policy agenda? We find evidence of a number of policy punctuations and one turning-point: the election of the Whitlam government.     

Australian Public Opinion on the Israel–Palestine Conflict: Implications in the Context of Arab Revolutions

This article examines the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy making in Australia by turning to the findings of a national survey of Australian public opinion on the Israel–Palestine conflict. The survey findings suggest that the Australian government's policy on the Israel–Palestine conflict is inconsistent with public opinion, and such disparity is explained here in terms of the lack of public attachment to the conflict, the limited media and the absence of any notable public advocacy for policy change. This explanation is informed by in-depth interviews conducted with current and former members of parliament and senior public servants. The article also explores the implications of the survey's findings in relation to the significant political changes taking place across the Middle East region. It suggests that these events may be creating an impetus for policy change that endorses Palestinian self-determination, for which there is significant support among the Australian public.     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

Australian aid after the ‘Golden Consensus’: from aid policy to development policy?

ABSTRACT

In the decade preceding the election of the Abbott Coalition Government in 2013, a so-called ‘golden consensus’ governed Australian aid policy. During this period Australia’s aid spending increased by over 80% in real terms. However, after winning government the 2013 Federal Election, the Abbott Government made a series of significant and unexpected aid policy decisions, cutting the aid budget three times in fifteen months and integrating AusAID, Australia’s aid agency, into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This article considers the future role of aid in Australia’s diplomacy primarily by engaging with a prior question: how was it possible for the golden consensus to be uprooted so easily? Conducting a post-mortem reveals that Australia’s development constituency bears some responsibility for the fragility of the consensus. This analysis also reveals the critical role the development constituency will play in determining the extent to which Australia is able to embrace the ‘beyond aid’ agenda. To meet this contemporary challenge, the development community must heed the lessons of the collapse of the golden consensus and, in particular, overcome its reticence to engage in broader foreign policy debates.     

Australian energy diplomacy

While Australia is considered an energy superpower, Australian foreign policy has often overlooked energy diplomacy. Given the transformations taking place in global energy markets, the time is ripe to begin a policy discussion in Australia on energy diplomacy. I argue that Australian diplomatic efforts should broaden beyond a historical focus on promoting fossil fuels and securing export markets, to driving global energy governance reforms through the G20. This will not only help to ensure that the international energy architecture is capable of achieving governance objectives around energy security, energy access and climate change, but significantly, it will also help Australia to achieve broader foreign policy goals, such as ensuring emerging economies become responsible stakeholders within the international system.     

Building the Reservoir to Nowhere: The Role of Agencies in Advocacy Coalitions

The purpose of the advocacy coalition framework is to explain policy change over time through an examination of the stability of advocacy coalitions within policy subsystems. Recently, scholars have confirmed that advocacy coalitions are held together by shared belief systems, specifically in distributive policy arenas. We contend that federal agencies, in distributive policy arenas, provide both the anchors and support systems for the development and maintenance of belief systems. This anchoring helps provide adequate resources, access to political institutions, ability to control administrative process, and/or the capacity to deliver public goods and services. We conducted an analysis of the policy changes that occurred during the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act for the construction of the Bureau of Reclamation's Animas‐La Plata project. This is an example where administrators, through the management of information, were able to control the policy process. The analysis provides a needed replication of previous findings regarding policy change and offers new insights into how institutions are critical to subsystem stability over time.     

Path dependence,policy learning and Australian manufacturing since the 1970s

The impending demise of passenger motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia provides a good opportunity to view the trajectory of industry policy since the Whitlam government commenced the process of tariff cuts in 1973. It is argued that industry policy over this period demonstrates the effects of path dependence and a lack of policy learning. In the industry policy context, the path dependence perspective suggests three key factors in explaining policy effects: the importance of initial conditions; the role of cumulative causation in the interaction between policy settings, actors and firms; and the shaping role of networks. While political or electoral factors could, on occasion, generate support for threatened industries, overall, neo-liberal policy ideas guided decision-making. An examination of Australian defence industry, and a comparison of the Australian and New Zealand dairy and milk processing industries reinforces the importance of institutionally shaped path dependency.     

Boundary spanning regimes and public policy change: the convergence of welfare and immigration policies

The concept of boundary spanning regimes has emerged to describe activity across policy subsystems that seek to manage ‘wicked’ public policy problems. This paper examines two existing public policy theories, namely those of exogenous shocks and the Advocacy Coalition Framework theories and assesses their capacity to explain why boundary spanning regimes emerge. It argues that broad structural conditions play an important role in shaping boundary spanning activity in the case studies discussed in this paper, indicating limitations in these theories which tend to overlook such conditions. The paper tests the explanations for policy change through original qualitative analysis of incremental convergence across the welfare and immigration policy fields in Australia from 1947 to 1996.     

Controversy,uncertainty and the diverse public in cultural diplomacy: Australia–China relations

In the past few years, foreign policy tensions between China and Australia have become especially fraught. In some cases, this political situation manifests in the very diplomatic initiatives that were funded to help ease relations. This article considers a case study of a theatrical collaboration in the context of contemporary Australia–China relations to interrogate the value of our understandings of and evaluation frameworks for public diplomacy. This article argues that theories of cultural diplomacy and assessments of initiatives need to consider the multiple and competing objectives, diverse publics and controversial receptions that may be the outcomes of cultural diplomatic initiatives. It demonstrates this complexity in relation to Australia–China relations. Taking a cultural diplomatic initiative that sought to increase positive association for Chinese culture in the Australian public as a case study, it illustrates the range of differences that can be found amongst stakeholders, and the different roles that may be ascribed to cultural diplomacy. These interests, including those of different artistic and political stakeholders, as well as differences in the publics involved, are best segmented not only according to nation but also to subculture.     

The Turnbull government’s ‘Post-multiculturalism’ multicultural policy

ABSTRACT

The Turnbull government presented Australia’s fifth national multicultural policy statement in March 2017. This article analyses the policy statement and argues that it represents the most significant change to Australian multicultural policy in four decades. Among other things, it abandons the language of government responsiveness to cultural diversity that previously defined Australian multiculturalism. The 2017 policy amounts to a new form of post-multiculturalism—different from earlier conservative, neoliberal and centre-left versions—in that it seeks to ‘mainstream’ multicultural policy on the grounds that Australian multiculturalism has succeeded in its intended task. While a mainstreaming strategy of this sort is, I argue, theoretically consistent with Australia’s liberal nationalist approach to cultural diversity, the institutional and attitudinal conditions that it presupposes are yet to be fully realised in Australia. More multicultural work needs to be done before this kind of post-multiculturalist approach is practicable.     

The Liberal National Coalition,Australian Labor Party and Africa: two decades of partisanship in Australia’s foreign policy

The issue of bipartisanship in Australian foreign policy is not often substantially addressed. The country’s relations with the world appear to exhibit strong continuity regardless of the political party in government. And yet, when it comes to engagement with African states and issues, the last two decades have seen highly prominent partisan differences in Australian foreign policy. This article utilises the example of Australia’s foreign policy engagement with Africa to argue that there may be two levels of understanding bipartisanship in Australian foreign policy. On the one hand, aimed at relationships and issues perceived to be of primal and significant security and economic well-being for the country, Australian foreign policy does indeed appear to be bipartisan. However, aimed at relationships and issues that have traditionally been perceived as holding minimal security and economic interest and importance for the country, Australian foreign policy does exhibit partisanship.     

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

ABSTRACT

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.     

Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: a conceptual review and application

This article adapts the theoretical construct of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ in political science to an analysis of one important initiative in policy‐making in Australia between 1992 and 1994, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS). Originally an initiative of the Queensland Government, NALSAS sought to advance the teaching of Asian languages and studies of Asia in Australian schools. The then Director General of the Queensland Office of the Cabinet, Mr Kevin Rudd, was its key protagonist. The article identifies and analyses Rudd's adroit policy entrepreneurship that was needed to overcome significant resistance and deliver the subsequent policy outcomes. It does this by carrying out a two‐level analysis that considers individual and contextual factors and concludes that, even though Rudd displayed many of the individual characteristics of a policy entrepreneur, his actions were heavily mediated by contextual factors. The article also demonstrates how a concept developed elsewhere, in this case North America, can be applied in other contexts, and calls for more scholarship on policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Australia.     

Who Are Your Neighbors? The Role of Ideology and Decline of Geographic Proximity in the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.