The first rule for making good policy is know your history.
Former deputy prime minister Brian Howe taught me that, if you want to succeed in a policy area, you must take the time to understand what has and hasn’t worked in the past. For example, in the early days of the development of the idea that became the National Disability Insurance Scheme, it was essential to know the history of past reform attempts going back to the Whitlam government, and to understand why the welfare approach to disability support wasn’t working.
The second rule covers a subject former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty speaks about with great passion: know your values. Politics is all about compromise. That’s not a bad thing; after all, you can’t build national consensus unless people are prepared to give ground, but it’s easy to lose your way – and public support – if you don’t stick by your beliefs. Take the Rudd government, for example. As PM, Kevin Rudd said that climate change was the defining issue of our time. Rudd was right, but some people doubted his commitment to climate change policy after our first attempt to legislate a carbon price was blocked in the Senate. You could say that it was unfair to doubt Rudd; ultimately, though, what’s fair or unfair doesn’t matter. You must know and stay true to your values – real and perceived.
The third rule for making good policy happen is all about purpose and persistence. Take paid parental leave, for example. Paid parental leave was the policy I chased for 13 years, from my first election in 1996 to the passage of the Paid Parental Leave Bill in 2009. I wasn’t the first person to champion the issue. The ACTU had won important test cases in 1979 and 1990. I wasn’t on my own, either – I had the support of a coalition of female leaders such as Sharan Burrow, Heather Ridout, Elizabeth Broderick, Pru Goward, Marie Coleman, Katie Lahey, and Natasha Stott Despoja. And, yet, even with that collective purpose, the fight to secure paid parental leave was an uphill battle. The outcome was never a foregone conclusion.
The fourth rule for making good policy happen is that you need a plan of attack. Remember, policy development is competitive. Every Budget has a limited amount of new spending and every minister sitting around the Cabinet table has a laundry list of policy ideas. They will knock off your policy if it helps their policy move up the list. Waiting your turn won’t work. Neither will good intentions, believing you’re right, nor complaining about what is fair or unfair. You must fight for your policy. You must be ruthless, otherwise your policies won’t make it past a Cabinet subcommittee. In politics, nothing is given away. Every gain must be earned.
The better your plan, the greater the chances your policy will survive
When I was a minister in the Rudd-Gillard government, my office took a very strategic approach to portfolio Budget submissions. This wasn’t a typical approach. Some ministerial offices let their departments write their submissions. We didn’t. We worked very hard to sharpen the pitch for our policy because we knew that Treasury, the Department of Finance, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet used the portfolio submissions as the source document for their own briefs to the PM or treasurer. Those central agency briefs set the tone and the agenda of the meetings that decide whether your policy lives or dies. The better your plan, the greater the chances your policy will survive.
The fifth rule for good policy outcomes is to harness intellectual weight. One of my first official acts when I was elected as a minister was to ask the Productivity Commission to investigate the feasibility of a paid parental leave scheme. A few years later I asked them to investigate the feasibility of the NDIS. In both cases, the intellectual weight carried by the Commission’s rigorous research and analysis helped our policy to survive the internal competition of government and the brickbats of public debate. Remember, the best way for your research and analysis to be believed is for it to be independent. This can be confronting – it’s natural to want to protect your policy idea –but, sooner or later, your policy needs to stand on its own feet.
The sixth rule for good policy is the one that requires shoe leather: build support. Developing a policy is wonkish and introverted – you gather research and information to identify a problem or opportunity, then, at some point, lock yourself in a room and come up with a solution. Selling that policy is extroverted – you must get out there and meet and listen to people. In my time in politics, Greg Combet’s work as climate change minister is one of the best examples of building support I saw.
The seventh rule for making good policy happen is to build trust and respect. Paul Keating comes to mind when discussing the importance of trust and respect. As treasurer, he held epic media conferences where he answered any, and all, questions on the economy. Behind closed doors, he also went to great lengths to explain his reforms to the Labor caucus, as well as business and union leaders. Of course, Keating wasn’t on his own. He had the advantage of having the ACTU’s Kelty by his side and the social policy backing of Howe, not to mention Bob Hawke as prime minister.
The eighth rule for good policy is to look for windows of opportunity. This is where pragmatism comes in. It’s important to understand there are windows of opportunity for every policy idea and some windows are fleeting. With that in mind, you must make hard decisions about the timing of your policy ideas. That might mean pushing a policy idea when it has the best chance to succeed, holding it back to keep it alive for a more opportune time, or going back and doing more work if your idea isn’t quite ready to withstand the competitive furnace of a Cabinet submission.
I’m not saying policymakers should park ambition. Be ambitious. Push for progress. But don’t hold out for everything and end up with nothing. Bank the policy gains that are possible, implement and refine those changes, then push for another round of progressive changes.
The ninth rule for good policy goes back to something former treasurer Wayne Swan told me: dig a well deep enough to survive a change of government. In politics, there are three kinds of policies: those that fail to get off the ground; those that die with a change of government; and those that survive a change of government. Some great policies—such as Combet’s carbon price mechanism – don’t survive the democratic churn. Why, then, did the NDIS, which was launched around the same time as the carbon pricing scheme, survive the change of government? In short, the well was deep enough.
Be ambitious. Push for progress. But don’t hold out for everything and end up with nothing
My tenth rule for making good policy happen is one of the hardest to master: timing. The best way to develop, prosecute, then implement an idea will change, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes you need patience, sometimes you need urgency. The implementation of the NDIS was an exercise in urgency. It’s no secret that the Gillard government rushed the start of the scheme.
We knew that the Gillard government was likely to lose the 2013 election. Gillard maintained that the best chance the NDIS had to survive a change of government was to ensure its rollout started before the 2013 election. And, yes, the implementation was messy, but it was much better than the alternative – nothing. People with disabilities didn’t deserve that.
If you believe in your policy, you have a responsibility to maximise its chance of surviving long enough to be implemented.
As Indigenous leader Pat Turner says: achieving change requires you to be relentless – relentless in your reading, your homework, your relationships, the knowledge and experiences you need to gain, but also relentless in the face of naysayers, criticism and obstacles.
Never give in.
An extract from Making Progress: How Good Policy Happens by Jenny Macklin, Melbourne University Publishing
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