Introduction

This chapter will examine the rise of niche policy analysis organisations in response to the demand for specialised advice that is both external to government and independent of formal organised interest groups. The recent proliferation of think tanks is outlined, factors underlying this growth are considered and the spectrum of think tanks is described. The increasing reliance by government agencies on the reports of consultancy firms, for both policy advice and programme review, is documented and assessed.

Think tanks and consultants have become important channels by which research and policy expertise are brought into the policy process. With the advent of New Public Management philosophies, and despite efficiency dividends, there has been a concomitant hollowing out of policy ideas and knowledge within the public sector (Hood, 1991; Tiernan, 2012). This has left space for the emergence and consolidation of new providers of policy ideas and advice that government often choose to engage with. There are contested definitions in the policy analysis literature internationally, but it is generally agreed that think tanks are nongovernment organisations that combine strategic research with policy advocacy. An analysis of policymaking that prioritises network governance, and horizontal decision-making among a variety of cross-sector political actors (Rhodes, 1997), suggests that think tanks which bundle together experts with advocacy for new ideas and policy directions are enabled by these new aspects of policy governance. Consultants, on the other hand, are private sector actors who specialise in research evaluation and policy advice services, which are increasingly contracted-out by government agencies that, under New Public Management, no longer house the required level of expertise within their ranks. This suggests that think tanks and consultants both serve the different expert advice needs of governments, but do not provide the same function or act in the same way.

The chapter highlights the increasing diversity of Australian think tanks and the rise of consultants as government contractors in order to demonstrate how we can more comprehensively understand their policy role. Yet, it also highlights the difficulties in studying policy influence, which would need a more sophisticated and nuanced view. Think-tank influence is not always seen directly in policy outcomes, but there is evidence of involvement in other stages of the policy process, particularly through contributions to policy debates within both traditional and new digital media.

This chapter argues that the ways in which individual citizens engage with politics are changing. It is different to the three previous chapters in this section, as it focuses on individual and thus behavioural change (see Chapter 3), not on how institutions mediate the relationship between the state and society. The chapter argues that broadening our understanding of democracy (see Chapter 1) to focus on both individuals and social movements helps us to engage critically with how politics can be more responsive to the political views and experiences of citizens. As in the last chapter, critical theorists might ask whether this shift results in fundamental socio-economic changes (Chapter 4). To the extent that this broadening of participation might also be the result of, or produce, new discourses of politics, it will be of interest to discourse theorists and post-structuralists (Chapter 5).

Australian politics is part of the curriculum of almost all political science courses in Australian universities. It is sometimes seen by students as something that they have to get out of the way in first year before they can move on to more interesting, theoretical and controversial material throughout the rest of their degrees. Some students even think that they have learnt all there is to know about Australian politics already in high school history, social science or civics classes.

The broadest aim of this book is to challenge such prejudices. Researching and studying Australian politics are not atheoretical, descriptive or uncontroversial tasks. This book promotes an understanding of Australian politics as contested ground. While the chapters in this book provide some introductory material on Australian political institutions and practices, they also introduce readers to a range of current academic theories and controversies surrounding aspects of Australian politics. Debate, scepticism and uncertainty are kept to the fore throughout. In some ways, this book may be seen as domestically oriented complement to Richard Devetak, Anthony Burke and Jim George’s An Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives (2007), also published by Cambridge University Press.

Fully appreciating the nature of a political system requires understanding the theories (Part I), political culture (Part II), institutions (Part III), processes and practices of participation (Part IV), as well as the major political institutions (Part V) that are expressed and reflected in that system. But to understand that system fully requires seeing it in action. For the role of political systems is to produce collective responses to issues that confront, and usually divide, members of society, and to do so in ways that do not result in social breakdown. To do this, we move to discussions of various issues addressed, or not addressed, through and by the Australian political system.

All but one of the issues discussed in this chapter have long been acknowledged and addressed through Australia’s political system. The exception is city policy, which Brendan Gleeson and Wendy Steele argue has never been dealt with adequately through the Australian political system (Chapter 28). This does not mean that the issues faced by cities have not confronted policy-makers in Australia; rather, these issues have not been approached in a consistent and systematic way. A lack of concerted interest on the part of successive Commonwealth governments has combined with an absence of processes that would allow urban policy issues to be dealt with consistently and systematically to produce a policy vacuum. A contemporary aspect of this is that now-dominant neo-liberal approaches to governing make a major contribution to maintaining this vacuum.

What happens in elections is arguably less important than what happens between elections when it comes to evaluating Australian claims to democratic politics and government. Periodic fair, free elections are part of the picture (see Part III). Nonetheless, democratic elections leave the potential for government by an ‘elective dictatorship’, to use Quintin Hogg’s famous expression (Hailsham, 1976), in which the duly elected government can use even a slim majority in the parliament as well as its control of other state institutions to act without regard to the range of community views.

One set of potential barriers to elective dictatorship in Australia lies in the operations of a range of formal state institutions, such as courts, public service departments and federalism (see Part V), which reduce the capacity of the government of the day simply to impose its will. Another set of potential barriers lies in mechanisms for public participation and representationbetween elections. At one end of the spectrum, these mechanisms include formally established processes initiated by government, such as government-initiated consultations with the public on policy issues, or the formal submissions to public service departments made by officially recognised interest groups. Such mechanisms are described, following an institutional approach, by Darren Halpin in Chapter 16 and Carolyn Hendriks in Chapter 17. At the other end of the spectrum, they include the informal and largely unregulated mechanisms, such as protests, discussed by Ariadne Vromen in Chapter 18.

Politics is often thought of as something engaged in by others – by the parliamentarians, Cabinet ministers, public servants and judges whose roles comprise the Australian state (see Part V), or perhaps more broadly by leaders of party organisations and pressure groups, lobbyists, pollsters and others who have direct daily contact with figures in formal positions within the state (see Part IV). Moreover, what we know about politics is brought to us by news media organisations dominated by elite opinion leaders and run as large businesses or public sector agencies. Politics is by and about them, not by and about us.

The view that politics is what a special group of others do has already been challenged by a number of the theories discussed in Part I of this book. Democratic theory ultimately rests on the idea that government responds to the views of the populace (Chapter 1). Behaviouralism stresses the connections between actors in the political system and the wider social system in which ordinary people participate (Chapter 3). Critical theories of politics, highlighting the unequal power relationships of class and gender, identify the sources of these inequalities in everyday sites such as workplaces and families (see Chapter 4). Post-structuralism points to the dispersed nature of power throughout societies (Chapter 5). The relationships between domestic and international politics outlined in Chapter 6 suggest an interconnectedness between the power relations found throughout societies and the power exercised between states and other international actors.

Sometimes the study of Australian politics is described as being atheoretical and unreflective about the approaches that underpin analysis (Crozier 2001, p. 17). In this book, we deliberately foreground some of the major theoretical traditions and approaches that exist in and underlie Australian political inquiry. We do this for two reasons: first, we believe that political theory has a rich history and presence in Australia (Stokes, cited in Crozier 2001); and second, by focusing on these approaches we can better understand the diversity and distinctness of Australian political science.

Elsewhere, Gerry Stoker and David Marsh (2010, p. 3) have surveyed the field to show how each different approach to political inquiry ‘combines a set of attitudes, understandings and practices that define a certain way of doing political science’. We have included four of their seven approaches here to foreground the variety of mainstream and critical political science found in Australian scholarship: institutionalism, behaviouralism, critical theories such as feminism and Marxism, and discourse approaches. These approaches can be heuristic devices for students of political science to see and understand how different approaches will often lead to different research topics and questions. For example, taking an institutional approach will produce a focus on political structures, while adopting behaviouralism will concentrate on the agency of political actors.