Authors: Carolyn M. Hendriks, The Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU and Adrian Kay, The Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU Abstract: Many parliaments around the world are undergoing a ‘participatory makeover’. Legislative institutions are opening their doors to the public through open days and communicating the latest ‘parliamentary updates’ via websites and social media. Many...Continue reading
Obesity policy and how to respond is a challenging area for governments around the world. The current situation leads to billions of dollars in care costs borne by the state and its citizens, but efforts to change this rarely survive the test of the daily headlines. Food is at once something we all understand, and...Continue reading
The current state of politics in Australia – a glass half full or half empty perspective? Is Australia politically or culturally capable of dealing with the ‘wicked’ problems it is facing? Wicked problems – complex but intractable issues that get pushed aside for fear of their potential political damage; problems that must be resolved but...
Decisiveness; student governance in Bolivia; Segolene Royal’s notion of having 24 people oversight their MP’s behaviour; mini-publics in practice. The link between these diverse topics is that they are each the subject of ground-breaking research following the announcement of 2015 Research Grants from the New Democracy Foundation. The Foundation’s Research Committee has awarded funding to...Continue reading
As published on SMH on 25 August 2015 It has long been an axiom of government that the key to success is trust. As long ago as Confucius it was held that three things were needed for government – weapons, food and trust – but that if a ruler could not hang on to all three, they must guard trust to the...Continue reading
As published on SMH on 25 August 2015 Luca Belgiorno-Nettis It has long been an axiom of government that the key to success is trust. As long ago as Confucius it was held that three things were needed for government – weapons, food and trust – but that if a ruler could not hang on to all three, they must guard...Continue reading
Balancing competing needs in a growing community Penrith City Council is a large, iconic council area and like many local government authorities in New South Wales, it is growing and changing rapidly. That change brings with it both opportunities and pressures on services and finite resources. With nearly $300m of future infrastructure needs already identified...Continue reading
The parliamentary vote on same sex marriage is likely to be defeated, and the Prime Minister is advocating a range of options for what comes next. One is a national plebiscite on the issue at the next election. This would only be the third in Australia’s history.
By Michael Gordon, Political editor, The Age. What struck new MP Tim Watts most about question time when he took his seat in the Parliament after the last election was not the rancour, or the shallowness, or the pettiness or even the name-calling. It was the noise. So Watts downloaded a noise-meter on his iPad...Continue reading
Nicholas Ross Smith & Zbigniew Dumienski A report by Bernard Orsman published in the New Zealand Herald on the state of Auckland City Council found that 88 of the 99 positions in the council’s boardrooms and executive teams were filled by “white men from wealthy suburbs.” While nobody is suggesting that any of these individuals...Continue reading