Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Making public policy
Almost every aspect of our lives is affected by policy; policy affects our birth,
the manner in which we are raised and educated, our access to health care, the
quality of our physical environment, how we conduct ourselves, whom we might
marry, our access to employment, our rights at work, our access to housing, how we
raise our children and even the quality of our deaths and what we are able to pass
on to the generations succeeding us.
In broad terms, policy can be said to represent preferred responses to problems.
For any given problem there might be a number of available responses. For
example, the statement ‘anyone who attempts to travel illegally by boat to Australia
will be turned back to their country of departure’ is a declaration of policy. It sets
out a preferred response under defined circumstances. To the extent that such a
statement sets out a preferred response, it also precludes other potential responses.
Policy provides a framework for what can and ought to occur in prescribed
situations. However, policy is also malleable and is subject to interpretation and
adjustment as circumstances change. Changing expectations, attitudes, beliefs, values
and behaviours often lead, eventually, to changes in government policy. Laws allowing
same-sex marriage, assisted dying or the recreational use of cannabis represent
policy responses to cultural changes. Similarly, technological change and environmental
changes – think of digital technology, automation or climate change –
have fuelled a demand for adaptive policy responses (as well as entrenching resistance
to change in some sections of the polity). Likewise, changes in the economy and in
our systems for production have driven adaptive changes in policies pertaining to
industry, consumer law, employment, education and finance (among others).
How does policy happen?
Public policy can be a messy business. The 19th-century American poet, John
Godfrey Saxe, is reported to have written ‘Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire
respectinproportionasweknowhowtheyaremade’. 3
Public policy is an expression of political intent and a framework for action.
Political parties or groupings, in and out of government, will have a set of policies
– a policy platform – covering a broad and diverse range of matters. Ideally, policy
platforms are internally consistent and represent a coherent narrative for
governance.Thisisnotalwaysthecase,andthehighlycontestednatureofpublic
policy sometimes means that governing parties bring contradictory positions to the
business of government.
3 Citing famous quotes can be messy too; a similar remark is frequently misattributed to the
19th-century German statesman, Otto von Bismarck.
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