Marsh, Ian
Description
Responding to a leaked Cabinet submission on possible future funding arrangements for higher education, Prime Minister Howard commented: ‘We have got to have a capacity in this country to have a sensible discussion about long-term policy issues without everything being distorted and blown out of the water by misrepresentation’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 16th October 1999, p. 49). This paper, in endorsing the Prime Minister’s observation, advances three propositions. First, this gap has emerged in...[Show more] the past couple of decades and ultimately reflects profound changes in the character of the Australian community. Second, it limits the effectiveness of the entire policy making system and is thus a significant impediment to state capacity. And third, the renewal of state policy-making capacity involves a transfer of tasks from the executive to the legislature. A threshold issue concerns the distinctive contribution of a strategic phase to broader policy making capabilities. Recent management literature offers guidance. ‘Learning organisations’ are in vogue. These are distinguished by their capacity to sustain activity in two modes termed respectively first and second order organisational learning. In the former mode, organisations focus on current operations. Information systems are designed to monitor such factors as product quality, customer experience, production technologies and so forth. Second order learning by contrast, introduces a distinctive, strategic, phase involving outreach and scanning to identify wholly new activities or exigencies. This covers such factors as new technologies, new customer needs, new conceptions of the business system. Further, the task is not merely to identify and document these factors, but to embed the knowledge in organisational routines and practices. Knowledge is thus linked to organisational action. ‘Second order learning’ at the political level offers a vastly more complex (and more significant) challenge than in a single purpose organisation. Does an existing major program need to be reconfigured? Does a new program need to be initiated? The funding of higher education and the introduction of the GST illustrate the former. Emissions requirements or the admission of gay people to the military might be examples of the latter. ‘Second order learning’ is both a prolonged and contested process. At a prudential level, uncertainties are usually large, evidence may be ambiguous and overlaps can be significant. The definition of the issue and the criteria appropriate to narrowing the range of feasible remedies are all likely unclear. Further, at a political level, interests which are immediately affected negatively will doubtless have strong positions, but others who stand to gain, or who are more distantly connected, or who may not recognise their stakes, may not be mobilised. Indeed, it is typically unclear which interests are stakeholders – since the definition of an issue itself largely determines this outcome. The mobilisation of interests is implicated in the process of choice. Public opinion is the medium in which these transactions occur. But public opinion is not a ‘given’, or indeed a unidimensional, artifact. Although open to a variety of influences, political institutions remain the most significant intermediary. They are perhaps the biggest single influence on both the structure of (and ‘moments’ in) opinion formation, and its substantive content. There is no ‘right’ approach to designing the intersection between political institutions and opinion formation. Institutional design is a contingent, path dependent process. At the level of the political system, the administration, the legislature, independent state agencies and political parties might variously share aspects of the task. In the sections that follow, the reciprocal links between public opinion and political institutions are first explored. Then, the means by which this activity has been mediated in the classic two party system are sketched. The third section reviews developments that have undermined this system’s strategic policy making capacity. The fourth section explores factors conditioning the present need for strategic capacity. A final section discusses means by which strategic policy-making capacity might be renewed.
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