Policy Analysis In Australia

Policy Analysis in Australia offers a distinctly Australian interpretation of policy scholarship with eighteen chapters strongly reflecting the outstanding contributions of Australian scholars to the field of public policy. It provides a coherent overview of the strengths and opportunities for policy analysis in Australia. It recognises that government agencies are no longer regarded as the sole source of sound policy analysis, and takes a broad view of policy analysis capacity, both within institutions at all levels of government, and beyond government in the media, political parties, business, and non-government associations. It provides a valuable contribution to Australian scholarship about policy analysis in academic, professional, teaching and learning contexts, and is a key addition to research and teaching in comparative policy analysis and policy studies more generally.

High-quality policy analysis and advice is crucial for governments as they wrestle with complex and intractable issues that they can neither manage nor solve on their own. This book explores ways of adding value to policy analysis and advice in Australia and New Zealand, drawing on contributions from individuals and organisations both inside and outside the formal policymaking system. The authors critique and expand upon the available models, methods and approaches to policy analysis and advising, and propose a systems perspective and a crafting approach to policy design. They examine strategies for improving the quality, capability and performance of the policy advisory system, and the complementary roles of advisers, analysts, managers and others.

This updated and revised 5th edition of the highly successful book Health Care and Public Policy: An Australian Analysis, provides a comprehensive analysis of health care and public policy in Australia. It explains what governments have done and what they can do about shaping Australia’s health care system, and considers the political, economic, social and epidemiological contexts within which health policies develop, and the forces that promote and oppose change. This new edition revises all relevant data and provides a thorough analysis of the major policy shifts and changes since 2010. Recent changes include the commitment of the Commonwealth government to undertake major reforms to the funding and organisation of health services in Australia which were incorporated in the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA) and accepted by all States and Territories in 2011. Health Care and Public Policy is an invaluable text for students in health administration, health planning, social work and social administration as well as students in all health-related courses and those working in health care, either in policy or service delivery.

This book offers a novel approach to thinking about public policy and a distinctive methodology for analysing policy. It introduces a set of six questions that probe how ‘problems’ are represented in policies, followed by an injunction to apply the questions to one’s own policy proposals. This form of analysis, it suggests, is crucial to understanding how policy works, how we are governed, and how the practice of policy-making implicitly constitutes us as subjects. The book mounts a challenge to the problem-solving paradigm currently dominating the intellectual and policy landscape, a paradigm manifest in ‘evidence-based policy’. Arguing that such a paradigm denies the shaping that goes on in the process of problematisation, it offers a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to policy analysis as a counter-discourse. In this view critical thinking involves putting ‘problems’ into question rather than learning how to ‘solve’ them. Bacchi’s approach to policy analysis offers exciting insights in a wide array of policy areas, including welfare, drugs/alcohol and gambling, criminal justice, health, education, immigration and population, media and research policy. Invaluable to those involved in policy studies and public administration, it will also appeal to students and academics in sociology, social work, anthropology, cultural studies and human geography.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which the policy analysis movement has been conducted, and to what effect, in Canadian governments and, for the first time, in business associations, labour unions, universities, and other non-governmental organizations.

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.