Beyond the Policy Cycle: The Policy Process in Australia by H. K. Colebatch

Author:H. K. Colebatch [Colebatch, H. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367717568
Google: q706zgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57087672
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

In 2002 a Senate Select Committee investigated ‘a certain maritime incident’ that centred on claims made during the 2001 federal election that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard from the boats in which they were attempting to enter Australian territory (Senate 2002). The Committee’s initial focus was the accountability of ministers for what they knew and said, or did not say, about the incident. However, its deliberations soon focused attention on the role of ministerial advisers in continuing to promote the claims that children had been thrown into the sea despite mounting evidence that this was not true. This attention was far from complimentary.

Media reports spoke of a requirement for a ‘suspension of disbelief’ among advisers, who appeared to have been given a licence by the government to ‘throw their weight around’ the public service (Grattan 2002; Walker 2002). Patrick Weller took these criticisms further in his account of the events the Committee investigated and suggested that some advisers were now the ‘junk yard attack dogs’ of the political system and, as a group, they were in the constitutional sense ‘out of control’ (Weller 2002: 73, 93). Importantly, the events being investigated, and the investigation itself, brought the discussion of the role of ministerial staff out from the shadows of academic publications to the full glare of public and parliamentary attention.

The Committee’s Report spawned a further Senate investigation of the adequacy and appropriateness of existing frameworks for their employment, management and accountability (Senate 2003). But it also marked a degree of semi-official recognition, at least in a parliamentary sense that the role of ministerial staff had significantly changed. The Committee, for example, found that ministerial staff were increasingly wielding executive power in their own right. They were also ‘inserting themselves’ into the management of agencies, well beyond the level of senior management, even so far as to corrupt the proper channels of administration and chain of command (Senate 2002: xxxvii). While the Committee’s main concern was the issue of accountability, their findings mirrored, or perhaps more correctly caught up with academic research conducted over a number of years (Walter 1986; Dunn 1995). For example, there had already been suggestions that ministerial staff were the ‘most prominent additions to the executive branch over the past two decades’ (Halligan and John 1992: 81) and, as a recent study concluded, they could no longer be viewed as peripheral actors in policy-making (Maley 2000b: 468).

The reasons that ministerial staff have become key participants in the policy process is a combination of the consequences of the managerial program on public service administration, and the impact of the mass media in modern politics. The role of the media is critical: the centrality of the media in modern politics means that all advisers, not just those charged with media management, must ensure that their ministers keep in step with its demands.

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