A Politic Approach to Policy (Week 10)
'Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.' - Abraham Lincoln
Our political leaders form public policy in order to fulfill the core functions of government, from providing services to creating public value.* As Adam Graycar noted, the relationship between politicians and the public servants who help craft policy is sometimes strained. There is also tension between the political imperatives of our elected leaders and the jurisprudence of the courts. Nonetheless, politicians can take lessons in policymaking from the contrast between the public policy and legal approaches. These lessons will be drawn out through a case study on mental health policy. Australia has taken an active stance towards mental health reform and would do well to replicate its successes in this field.
Politicians must balance three year electoral cycles with long term policy priorities. Public policy theory manages short and long term goals by dividing policy into three classes: operational, responsive and strategic.** A good mental health policy would respond to immediate community needs while also developing a strategy to reduce mental illness in the long term. The federal government has gone a long way towards such a well-rounded policy and is soon to announce a Ten Year Roadmap for Mental Health Reform.
Politicians must balance three year electoral cycles with long term policy priorities. Public policy theory manages short and long term goals by dividing policy into three classes: operational, responsive and strategic.** A good mental health policy would respond to immediate community needs while also developing a strategy to reduce mental illness in the long term. The federal government has gone a long way towards such a well-rounded policy and is soon to announce a Ten Year Roadmap for Mental Health Reform.
In contrast, the legal method is ill-equipped for the formulation of strategy. The judicial system is designed to enliven the law through the arbitration of specific matters between adversarial parties. The day-to-day legal approach to mental health would entail mostly responsive policy. It could well address only the acute care needs of those in crisis. The High Court does turn its attention to developing sound jurisprudence but can struggle to control the case-by-case burgeoning of principle. Only on occasion can judges change the strategic tack of a given doctrine, as with the dramatic victory for Indigenous rights in Mabo.*** Similarly, Australia’s mental health reforms have often sought to increase the agency of individuals within the health system.
Considerable judicial effort is required to reform the direction of the law because the legal system is inherently conservative. The lawyer suffers from the reverse industrial flaw of the historian, who judges the past by the present. While the law cannot look beyond the present to address its future needs, its interpretation of the present is lodged in the past. The Janus-faced doctrine of precedent requires judges to decide cases by principles which were considered relevant in past cases. However, our conceptions of many social problems change significantly over time. The legal method would stymie expansive policy approaches to mental health. The focus of past policies on hospital care would have excluded support of the mentally ill through accommodation services, occupational therapy and the like.
Policymaking entails no such formal restrictions on the means which may be adopted to achieve a given end. Stephen Dovers in Week 11 gave a very detailed policy menu which was still not exhaustive. However, Graycar acknowledged that governments are policy fashion-conscious and tend to commit to trends of policy approaches. I would have liked to ask Graycar whether there was a role for imaginative creativity in policymaking analogous to the foresighting technique. The existence of policy fashions appears to parallel the broader political and historiographical preference for traditional narrative arcs. Governments may assume certainty in an uncertain policy climate by replicating past approaches on the expectation of similar results.
Politicians would often be wise to act more flexibly than their judicial counterparts. However, the legal system can recommend to politicians its principled adherence to process in the making of decisions. The courts promote rigorous judicial process in order to increase certainty and to uphold higher principles such as the rule of law. In theory, public policy should follow a neat cyclical process akin to the scientific method.**** In practice, the tutorial game based on European Union deliberations demonstrated that it is crucial to make the principles guiding a given policy very clear in order to prevent confusion. Moreover, politicians need to resist the temptation to subvert policy processes lest they end up with unprincipled approaches to complex problems.
* Mark Moore, Creating Public Value: strategic management in government, Harvard University Press, 2005.
** Karen Baehler and Claudia Scott, Adding Value to Policy Analysis and Advice, University of New South Wales Press, 2010: 14.
*** Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.
**** Catherine Altaus, Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis, The Australian Policy Handbook, Allen and Unwin, 2007.
** Karen Baehler and Claudia Scott, Adding Value to Policy Analysis and Advice, University of New South Wales Press, 2010: 14.
*** Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.
**** Catherine Altaus, Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis, The Australian Policy Handbook, Allen and Unwin, 2007.