Towards a New Vision for Australian Politics

Australian politics is often characterized as derivative, pragmatic, and utilitarian—as insufficiently interesting or important to devote much time to. This Handbook challenges that contention, arguing it reflects a narrow, colonial perspective and ignores the richness and diversity of the deep-time history of the Australian continent and the unique inheritance the blending of Australia’s many histories and traditions has produced. Australian political studies encompasses a broad family of research disciplines, whose diverse and methodologically plural efforts have transformed our understanding of Aboriginal cultures and of European settlement. This volume’s thematic approach captures the politics, policies, and societies that have evolved in Australia’s many different landscapes and places. Its chapters present a theoretically rigorous, empirically informed, and historically nuanced account of what is distinctive about Australian politics, its capacity for democratic innovation and what accounts (its many shortcomings notwithstanding), for the resilience of its political traditions and Australia’s relative success.

Teaching Australian Politics: Thirty Years of Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia

A citizen’s understanding about their nation’s system of politics and government is crucial for how they engage with and participate in the political system. This chapter discusses the political, institutional, and pedagogical changes to teaching young people about Australian politics over the last thirty years, examining how successive Australian national governments have sought to enhance students’ political knowledge and how the constitutional limitations of the federal system have impacted their approaches. It also explores how political factors have impacted government actions on civics and citizenship education as well as the pedagogical debates which have shaped the curriculum. The chapter concludes by assessing the efficacy of these reforms and what steps can be taken to strengthen teaching and learning approaches in the future.

Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Emotions

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. This chapter examines ensuing debates, focusing closely on how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and responded to in relation to the spatial and emotional dynamics that prevail in Australian society and politics. Specifically, the chapter examines how the issue of asylum is intimately connected to and influenced by highly emotional images circulating in the national media. To do this, the authors first discuss the history of refugees at Australia’s borders. In doing so, the authors underline the key role that political and media representations play in shaping refugee debates and policy. The chapter then undertakes an empirical investigation of two crucial recent periods when refugee debates proliferated in both the media and in politics: August to December 2001 and October 2009 to September 2011. By conducting a content analysis of front-page coverage in The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the authors focus on the particular visual framing that has been used to depict asylum seekers and its emotional and political consequences, highlighting how recurring frames have been used to dehumanize and further displace asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian context. The authors then argue that these visual media depictions associate refugees not with humanitarian challenges and responsibilities, but instead with threats to sovereignty and security.

Political Psychology and Experimentation

Political psychology has much to say about, for example, the role of emotion in shaping political attitudes and behaviours, intergroup conflict, and individual and group decision-making. This chapter defines what is meant by the term ‘political psychology’ and then traces the roots of political psychology in Australia, concentrating on the contributions of A. F. Davies and Graham Little. This chapter also highlights developments in political psychology, the most notable of which has been the rise in the use of experiments in the last few decades. The chapter concludes by outlining the growing field of behavioural insights—which draws heavily on political psychology—that has been taken up by government and other public organizations, and by pointing to the strengths and deficits in Australian political psychology.

Integrity and Accountability in Australian Government and Politics

The integrity and accountability research agenda in Australia has been primarily concerned with the problem of corruption in public life. This chapter provides an overview of this scholarship, including its central concepts and motivations, and develops the argument that the anti-corruption research agenda has been heavily influenced by public debates about corruption. Therefore, as the problem of corruption (and, just as importantly, the perceptions of this problem) has changed in form, so too has the focus of anti-corruption research. The chapter tracks the development of this literature against the backdrop of the practical history of corruption in Australia. The author argues that in recent years there has been a significant shift towards a more politicized and less bureaucratic understanding of corruption. This break from the past has serious implications for how corruption might be effectively confronted in the future.

Disrupting Media and Politics

This chapter explores how, as the traditional media has become weaker due to digital disruption, falling profitability, and audience fragmentation, the political ecosystem in Australia has also eroded. Significant job losses have reduced the scale of public interest journalism, and the frantic attention-seeking of the 24-hour news cycle has contributed to a perception of chaos in politics. This is manifest in frequent changes of prime minister outside the electoral cycle, and in polarization of opinion and comment online and in traditional media designed to increase impact. Commercial media has long embraced a quasi-institutional role and been happy to use this stature, but has resisted external regulation. Self-regulation of the press and institutional oversight of broadcasting self-regulation are relatively weak; social media and online platforms are not regulated; and the implied right to freedom of political speech, the bedrock of the media’s unique political role, was only ‘found’ by the High Court in 1997. This chapter argues that effective regulation, which addresses the needs of citizens as well as consumers, and other interventions including strengthening public broadcasting and securing legislative (even constitutional) recognition of the democratic value of media freedom are required to invigorate a robust political ecosystem.

The Field and Study of Deliberative Democracy in Australia

Australia is recognized globally as an important hub for the study and practice of deliberative democracy. Both a normative and practical project, the field of deliberative democracy aims to improve the quality and inclusivity of public reasoning in collective decision-making. This chapter explores deliberative democracy in Australia from two angles. First, it discusses how a nation typically characterized by its adversarial and more majoritarian democratic system has become a significant international hotspot for scholars and practitioners of deliberative democracy. Second, the chapter examines how deliberative democracy has been applied as a lens to empirically study aspects of Australian politics. There is, the author argues, much more work for deliberative democrats to undertake in the Australian context, particularly in assessing and strengthening the deliberative capacity of the nation’s key political institutions.

Innovating the Public Sector in Australia

Innovation has become an increasingly important public policy and public sector reform trend in Australia and in other nations as governments search for new ways to tackle challenging societal problems. Innovation follows on from other reform trends that have been argued about, implemented, and constantly updated (most notably the New Public Management) since the 1970s, but also has distinct attributes. This chapter examines the meaning of public sector innovation and explores how it differs to other approaches to public sector reform. It describes Australian innovation policy at the national level and examines two main varieties of it: innovation as technology, and innovation as culture. Australia’s approach to innovation policy has sometimes focused on individuals (public servants), and at other times on public sector organizations and systems. Innovation labs/units, as one aspect of Australian public sector innovation policy, demonstrate Australia’s general alignment with international trends in this area of public policy.

Performance in the Public Sector

Big claims have been made about the application of performance management in the public sector. In addition to improving accountability, performance management has been widely promoted as a useful managerial tool that is capable of improving organizational performance. This chapter reviews the literature on performance management in the public sector, paying particular attention to empirical research on its implementation in the Australian public sector. The review findings suggest that the promise of the performance-enhancing effects of performance management in the public sector is likely to remain an illusion until public managers are able to effectively address the various challenges associated with its implementation, particularly around non-technical issues.

Policy Learning in the Australian Public Service

This chapter discusses the ways in which the Australian Public Service (APS) learns about public policy. The chapter has four sections. First, it presents a typology of policy-learning that can be used to organize research into the policy-learning capacities of a national bureaucracy. Second, it outlines a range of policy-learning successes that can be attributed to the APS and characterizes them using the typology. Third, the chapter examines several long-running criticisms of the APS that seem to be apposite to its capacity to learn lessons in the future. These are also characterized in relation to the typology. Finally, evidence of the APS’s strengths and weaknesses is weighed up in a conclusion, which culminates with an argument that the service’s key strength is its capacity to effectively produce large amounts of ‘single-loop’ and ‘instrumental’ types of policy-learning.