Robyn Hollander

Changing Policy Mindsets: ESD and NCP Compared

National Competition Policy (NCP) and Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) share a number of common characteristics. They are both meta policies, broad in their scope and sweeping in their ambitions. Both emerged in the early 1990s and both depended on high levels of political commitment and co-ordination for their success. However, while NCP prospered, ESD stalled. This article examines the changing fortunes of the two policy initiatives by looking for differences in policy scope, monitoring, incentives and funding arrangements. These differences, attributable in part to levels of political and policy commitment, help to explain ESD s relatively weaker outcomes vis-a-vis NCP.

Elections, Policy and the Media: Tasmania's Forests and the 2004 Federal Election

Much of the academic literature holds the media responsible for the proliferation of the game frame as a way of reporting on elections. This paper challenges that view through an examination of media coverage of forest policy in the 2004 federal election. The study of articles published in three major broadsheets finds that the majority of stories were set within the game frame, which depicts elections as sporting contests, and that far fewer articles focused on the issue. The lack of interest in policy is characteristic of election reporting but, in this case, can be attributed to the way in which the major parties managed their campaigns. Not only did they drive the game frame but, as policy makers, they also determined the frame within which the limited media consideration of policy substance was set. The article concludes that political actors must take at least some responsibility for the domination of the game frame in election reporting.

The Greening of the Grey: National Competition Policy and the Environment

Concern for environmental degradation is now widespread, and has penetrated key policy institutions such as the National Competition Council (NCC) - the body overseeing National Competition Policy. While the NCCs primary focus is on promoting competition, it acknowledges the importance of environmental considerations. Such a body thus represents the contemporary Ecological Modernsiation approach to environmental policy-making. Ecological Modernisation posits that there can be a reconciliation and synthesis between economic and ecological goals. This paper investigates this claim by exploring the relationship between competition and the environment in the three areas of electricity, regulatory review and rural water.

25 years of Ecologically Sustainable Development in Australia: paradigm shift or business as usual?

The term sustainable development (SD) emerged officially on the world stage in 1987 with the release of the World Commission on Environment and Development’s Report – Our Common Future – authored by committee chair Gro Harlem Brundtland (WCED 1987). The report provided one of the first official statements on SD, identified some of its core goals and principles and urged the world to respond. The WCED definition of SD is still widely used: SD is development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987, p. 263). Arguing that the world could no longer ignore the impacts of unsustainability on both ecology and society, it sought to embed the notion of SD as a permanent feature in global conversations about economic futures. Global endorsement by many governments and political leaders across the world soon followed, including in Australia. This endorsement responded to the World Commission’s identification of political commitment as critical to the SD enterprise; indeed, as the report observed, ‘in the final analysis, sustainable development must rest on political will’, since the ‘bodies whose policy actions degrade the environment’ need to be made ‘responsible ... to prevent that degradation’ (WCED 1987, p. 263). As a meta-policy SD provided the overarching normative and political architecture of sustainability; it was up to the different governments to action it. Sustainable development, or its abbreviation ‘sustainability’, is now one of today’s major buzzwords. It is as familiar a part of the vernacular in Australia today as it is in a host of other countries across the globe. In Australia, the notion of sustainability was introduced in earnest 25 years ago through the prism of ecologically sustainable development (ESD). ESD represented a significant development in the Australian environmental management story. As a meta-policy, ESD was more than a suite of policy proposals designed to address specific environmental issues; importantly, it also represented a new way of thinking about, and a new decision-making approach to, the particularity of the Australian environmental challenge. The addition of the ‘E’ – ‘ecologically’ sustainable development – into Australia’s version of SD, also indicated a determination to tighten the term’s generality by giving it a stronger environmental focus. As a new policy ‘mindset’ ESD sought to usher in broad ranging changes to Australia’s institutional and decision-making culture – considered critical to embedding the changes necessary to achieving SD (see Curran & Hollander 2002). In response to then Prime Minister Hawke’s discussion paper ‘Our Country, Our Future’ (Hawke 1989), a collaborative forum made up of a diverse range of stakeholders was established in 1989 Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 1, 2–6, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14486563.2014.999728

Subsidiarity in the Australian Public Sector: Finding Pragmatism in the Principle

The principle of subsidiarity, commonly understood as the view that authority should be exercised by the lowest level of government competent to do so, is a key concept in understanding and reforming Australian federalism. In this article, we explore the way in which citizens with experience working in government react to the principle, and highlight that those with experience at different levels of government approach and value subsidiarity differently. Based on mixed-methods evidence, we propose that a pragmatic, problem-oriented approach to federalism and subsidiarity may cut through these differences, and allow policymakers to come together under a unified understanding of subsidiarity.

Dilemmas of Federalism and the Dynamics of the Australian Case

This paper provides a synoptic account of the distinguishing features and broad tendencies of federal systems in general and the main characteristics and challenges of Australian federalism in particular. In doing so, it canvasses questions of purpose and rationale, constitutional design and evolution as well as fiscal federalism and intergovernmental relations. It highlights the obsolescence of the traditional division of powers around which Australian federalism was originally organised; the degree to which the system has become centralised; and the search for a new basis on which the two levels of government can most effectively and efficiently work together in todays world of concurrent responsibility. 本文对各国联邦制系统的不同特点和广泛趋势进行了概述，并特别介绍了澳大利亚联邦制的主要特点及其面临的挑战。为此，本文对各国联邦制的目的和原理、宪法设计和演变以及财政联邦制和政府间关系等问题进行了深入分析。本文强调，澳大利亚联邦制初建时的传统权力分配格局已经过时；联邦政府系统的集权化程度；以及需要寻找新的制度基础使两级政府能够在目前共同承担责任的环境下进行最高效的协同工作。

The Queensland Public Sector: Recent Developments in Employment Relations

With the incumbent Labor government embracing a recentralisation of industrial relations, public sector agencies in Queensland are experiencing a dramatic shift in the framework of employment relations. This paper discusses the approach of the previous Coalition government to managing the public sector workforce and the emerging approach of the Labor government. The comparison of contrasting governmental approaches to public sector employment relations throughout the 1990s suggests that successive governments have balanced very differently the three main pressures they have faced: political, managerialist and industrial relations.

Policy entrepreneurs searching for the open-minded skeptic: a new approach to engagement in difficult policy areas

Abstract The necessity for reducing the run-off of nitrogen from the sugar industry into Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef has been recognized by governments and scientists for decades. Governments have unsuccessfully attempted to address this problem through legislation, regulation, and educating stakeholders. Officials have also understood that farmers’ resistance was a problem because reform involved asking them to change the farming methods of a lifetime. This paper examines an innovative program, the Burdekin nitrogen trial (RP20) that significantly changed industry practices in an important sugar cane growing region in Australia. One of the key challenges to achieving success was the public servants – the policy entrepreneurs – and their ability to convert a farmer – an open minded skeptic – into a policy champion. Through the adoption of a risky and previously untried collaboration strategy between public servants and this open-minded skeptic, an entrenched and formally opposing group of stakeholders began working with government to implement RP20, an innovative plan to overcome farmer resistance and reduce nitrogen runoff. As RP20 unfolded we gain insight into how the bureaucrats shed old ways of doing business, and became effective agents of policy change. These public servants grasped the window of opportunity that opened unexpectedly, reframed the policy problem and replaced the cane farmers’ skepticism and resistance with high levels of trust and rapport.

Competitive federalism and workers’ compensation: do states race to the bottom?

ABSTRACT This article builds on the competitive federalism literature by examining the role federalism plays in determining policy trajectories with consequences for public welfare in individual jurisdictions. It examines the argument that federalism encourages a ‘race to the bottom’ using the case of workers’ compensation benefits for injured workers in Australia. It finds state systems have been characterised by a downward slide in the protections afforded injured workers since the late 1970s, and this has been associated with policy makers’ real or rhetorical concerns around interstate competition for business investment.

Local government in Australia: history, theory and public policy, by Bligh Grant and Joseph Drew, Singapore, Springer, 2017, 445 pp., £112 (eBook), ISBN 9789811038679

This is a timely contribution to the field of local government in Australia. Long regarded as the Cinderella of public institutions, local government is typically positioned as a minor player in Au...