Eric Windholz

Evaluating the Harmonisation of Australia's OHS Laws: Challenges and Opportunities

This article examines three significant and increasingly important public policy issues: OHS, harmonisation and evaluation. OHS is an issue on which comparatively little has been written in public administration, yet it is an issue from which much can be learned – especially about the intersection between social and economic policy. In this regard, the harmonisation of Australia’s OHS laws provides a valuable opportunity to evaluate and better understand the benefits and costs of the harmonisation of social regulation in the name of economic efficiency. Such an evaluation is inevitably challenging, with the already difficult job of evaluation complicated by a multiplicity of stakeholders and objectives. This article examines the challenges which these multiple objectives held by multiple stakeholders present for evaluation. In doing so, it demonstrates that far from being interpreted simply as difficulties to be overcome, they actually represent an opportunity to enhance both the legitimacy of the evaluation process and the utility of its outcomes.

NDIS beware: Pink batts below!

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will revolutionise the provision of services to persons with disabilities. Most discussion has focused on the demand side of the reform – the provision of choice and control for people with a disability. The supply side of the reform – quality assurance and provider oversight - has received comparatively little attention. Yet it is on the supply side that much of the NDIS’s risk exists. This article examines the NDIS supply side regime and draws parallels with the Commonwealth’s ill-fated home insulation (“pink batts”) program. The article concludes that it would behoove all governments and regulators involved in the NDIS to heed the “pink batt” lessons.

The Magic of Harmonisation: A Case Study of Occupational Health and Safety in Australia

Harmonisation is both a substantive policy reform and a political project. Using the lens of Pollitt and Hupe’s “magic concepts of government” and the harmonisation of Australia’s occupational health and safety laws as a case study, this article argues that as a political project harmonisation has a magical rhetorical quality that obscures traditional differences, eases the business of governing, and makes it almost irresistible as a policy solution. The article observes, however, that harmonisation’s magic is: illusory in that it obscures rather than resolves policy differences; seductive in that it entices stakeholders to overestimate its capacity to reconcile such differences; and time limited with reform outcomes eventually becoming vulnerable and fragile. The article concludes that harmonisation’s “magic” and its limitations need to be better acknowledged, with government use of harmonisation tools being approached with a healthy level of scepticism, and policy and regulatory review processes being designed to guard against its seductive qualities.