We were recently fortunate to speak to former deputy premier of Victoria John Thwaites.
After starting in local government, he became an advisor to state ministers Jim Kennan and Andrew McCutcheon.
Following a hotly contested preselection battle, John, an independent without the backing of a powerful Labor Party faction, was preselected for the seat of Albert Park. He was their local member from 1992, and became deputy premier in 1999 when Steve Bracks had his remarkable victory over Jeff Kennett.
After retiring from parliament in 2007, John went on to several esteemed roles, including his current roles as chair of Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Climate Works Centre and the McKinnon Institute for Political Leadership.
We have been researching bipartisanship in Australian politics — when and why it happens and how to make lasting policy reforms. Our thesis is that we need more bipartisanship and multi-partisanship to solve the wicked policy problems of our time.
John shared his insights on bipartisanship and making good public policy.
His parliamentary calling
I got involved in local government and found that the occupation that I was most interested in was politics. I was interested in planning, heritage and the environment. As a politician, you could do more than you could as a lawyer or an academic or in most other roles. Basically, it comes down to power. In politics, you’ve got the power to make decisions and no other job has the level of power to do that.
I had had lots of jobs. My first graduate job was as a computer programmer for BHP. At uni I did science but I also did law. Then I decided to give law a go and worked for a solicitor’s office and then became a barrister. In a way, my career was partly crystallized because as a solicitor, I was offered a partnership in the firm but it was a condition that I give up my involvement in politics. At that stage, I was on the local council. Giving up wasn’t an option.
A fairer Victoria
The thing that I’m most proud of was the policy ‘A Fairer Victoria’, which was a social justice strategy for Victoria that made a big impact. A lot of the things that came out of that initiative continued to have an impact long afterwards.
Where did A Fairer Victoria come from? We’d been in government for a term and won the next election. We then did a stocktake of how Victoria was going. Jane Francis Kelly did it for the cabinet. She had done a similar stocktake for Tony Blair and the UK government.
The stocktake looked at all of the indicators for Victoria — economic, social and environmental — how were we going? It compared us to other states and other places around the world. Essentially it showed that we were doing pretty well, but there was one glaring area where we were not doing particularly well, which was tackling disadvantage.
The stocktake referred to some of the statistics, like the hundreds of thousands of Victorian kids living in homes with a parent without a job. Essentially their life was being decided very early on. And a whole lot of barriers were being put up against their future.
An important part of policy is it needs to be informed by robust evidence and data. Governments need to do critical stocktakes of how they’re going and how their state or country is going — and then use that evidence to guide major policy decisions.
That’s in contrast to the way things normally happen, which is that a crisis comes up and everyone starts responding to that. So now it’s the cost of living, before that it was COVID-19. As well as responding to those issues which you have to do, a good government has a helicopter view and looks in an holistic way at long-term policy needs.
The work of cabinet committees in our government was the next thing that led to A Fairer Victoria. I’m proud that in our government we had good cabinet committees and a good committee structure. And once again, I think that’s critical to making good policy. Because what happens in some governments is it’s done much more on the basis of either what the leader wants, or just in an ad hoc way in response to things that happen. Whereas cabinet committees are platforms where all the key ministers can discuss and debate these longer-term issues.
The third thing that led to A Fairer Victoria was the Budget process. Budgets were all decided by the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC), and the normal process of ERC was that each individual minister would go up and put their bid in, and try to fight for their bid, and the ERC would decide.
I saw the problem that so many of the social issues were connected, that if you just had individual ministers trying to get their program up you weren’t solving these more complex social issues that had multiple components. They had aspects of Community Services, of Health and of Education, and it was necessary for those ministers, in my view, to get together and work out joint programs that broke down the silos — if we were going to overcome disadvantage.
That also led Treasury, and John Brumby as treasurer at the time, to fund things because you had more than one minister arguing for something — and they were prepared to give up something of their own to get the new ‘joined up’ initiative up.
One of the biggest focus areas was early childhood development. Now it is mainstream, but back then it was a relatively new thing. Putting substantial funds into early childhood development was something that multiple ministers supported. And the concept of family hubs in the suburbs complemented this.
While A Fairer Victoria is no longer in place as a policy, a number of the programs have stuck, like early childhood development, because they work. They make people’s lives better.
What makes reform stick?
Governments should have consistent data monitoring (like Jane Francis Kelly did 20 years ago) to influence government policies and priorities — but they don’t. In fact, quite the opposite.
There are a couple of reasons. One is because every new politician wants to save the world themselves. They don’t want the last politician’s solution. Two, politics and political processes don’t encourage accountability — unless it’s forced on them — because it’s painful. Three, I don’t think we have enough respect for data and evidence in our policy processes generally. We would make much better policy — and, importantly, implement policies better if we had greater respect for evidence and data. And planning and monitoring implementation is critical because that’s the side that is so often ignored. We would do much better if we had much more robust reporting, evaluating and adapting.
I would add that longevity should not be the only criterion when evaluating reforms. Some really important reforms that were good policies and had a positive impact were nevertheless ditched for political reasons.
Victorian Energy Efficiency Target (VEET)
If you’re asking what makes policies stick over a long period of time, there are a number of factors. One is that they work. That’s where the focus on implementation is critical. I’ll give you one example which is VEET, the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target, now called the Victorian Energy Upgrades Target. This requires electricity retailers to deliver a certain amount of energy efficiency in homes and businesses through a ‘white certificate’ scheme. We developed it almost 20 years ago and it was promised in the 2006 Victorian election. And why is it still there? Well, one reason is because it has worked. Two, there was quite a bit of thought that went into implementation. Three, there is reporting on implementation because you’ve got a Target. That’s the whole point, a clear target and you can see if the target is being met.
Fourth, it wasn’t a partisan issue. I wouldn’t say it’s bipartisan, but it has never become a particularly partisan issue. Fifth — this is an interesting one — is because the management of it has been fairly independent of politics and of the department, so it’s actually been the responsibility of the Essential Services Commission, which is an ongoing institution. So it just keeps rolling over. And I guess the other reason it has survived is because it doesn’t cost the budget anything, although it does cost consumers. So that’s quite a good example of a long-lasting policy initiative, which is quite important and quite effective.
Dealing with complex, long-term issues and setting policy
As well as the normal policy processes, you have to be really mindful of your political strategy and your community engagement and behaviour change strategy. I think we were pretty mindful of the political strategy in the Bracks Government, and that’s where issues of bipartisanship come in.
But this whole issue of community engagement and behaviour change is critical and is often underestimated and it’s why we so often get bad implementation. If something’s going to last, you’ve got to understand the community engagement and behaviour change aspects of it. Looking at the VEET, the reason it has worked where other energy efficiency programs relying on people’s behaviour change haven’t worked as well is because VEET reflects the critical thing in behaviour change, which is to make it as easy as possible. The reason VEET works is that someone else comes in and puts in the energy-efficient globes and appliances and does all of that to make it easy for consumers. If you tried to rely on individuals to do it and give them something, it wouldn’t happen.
On bipartisanship
And then on the political strategy, as I said, this is where the issue of bipartisanship comes in. For some issues, it is really important that you have bipartisanship if it’s going to be long-lasting. I think the Murray-Darling Basin is a good example. Because despite massive criticism of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, actually, it’s a lot better than it would have been if we didn’t have the Plan. More than 2000 billion litres of environmental water have been returned to the rivers and we have legislation that requires ongoing consideration of the environmental health of the Murray-Darling Basin. The counterfactual would be a lot worse.
And the reason it has been reasonable is there has been a level of bipartisanship on the Murray-Darling Basin and frankly, that’s only because Howard and Turnbull announced it. If Labor had announced it, it would have been dead. Completely dead. The Coalition would have killed it in government. Barnaby Joyce and others couldn’t completely kill it because Howard had announced it.
The Commonwealth Renewable Energy Target Scheme (RET) is another good example, which Howard introduced. And the safeguard mechanism, which the current Labor government has adapted from a policy introduced by the Coalition. That’s all just pure politics — but at times it’s what makes things last.
The obverse is the carbon price, which was good policy and really would have put Australia in a much stronger position. Now, because the Libs knocked it off, Labor can’t do it. So I think there is a real role for bipartisanship where it’s possible and if it’s not possible in a genuine sense at least in an artificial sense. Like a RET or the safeguard mechanism, which is essentially using the other side’s tool.
Also within the political strategy apart from bipartisanship, I think a critical factor is the politics of your own side and getting them on board. Policy reform regarding abortion is an example. A key part of that in Victoria was getting the numbers on the Labor side from different groups who were prepared to back it. Same with the assisted dying legislation.
Getting your own team together is critical. That’s partly the politicians but also the bureaucrats. I always found as an environment minister you would be up against it with Treasury. So my whole objective would be to get them onside. And to get the business portfolios onside also, which is what happened with VEET.
Policy making now vs 20 years ago
The science of evidence-based policy is definitely more advanced than it was 20 years ago. A classic example is modelling, which is a really useful way to assist in choosing the right policy. Modelling enables us to test different scenarios and how different policies will impact on those scenarios. It is beginning to be used much more commonly and the classic example was in COVID, where modelling significantly assisted decision-making.
We’ve got much better data analytics now, and tools that allow you to analyse data. When I talked about the Jane Francis Kelly stocktake, that was very simple data. It was basically just the statistics about finishing school and all those things. Whereas now there is incredibly sophisticated data you can use. The problem is that the political process doesn’t seem to have changed to be much more data-friendly or evidence-friendly.
You’ll hear people say that social media, conflict and polarization are the factors against good policy reform. But they don’t have to be. If you look at the way that the current federal government is dealing with the net zero transition, I think it’s pretty deliberate and evidence-driven. It shows you can do it.
At Melbourne Water, we undertook quite sophisticated community engagement, which then informed our capital plans and strategies. And we then had to demonstrate to the Essential Services Commission that we used community engagement in our decision-making. For example, if we wanted to spend more on looking after the rivers, we engaged with our community about that. So the questions were: does the community care about that? And are they prepared to pay for it? You ask them, and generally, they said yes, they were prepared to do more for the environment and stormwater management.
Emotion in policy-making
A really big issue — and it often derails policy — is the use of emotion in policy debates. There’s a really good book called ‘The Political Brain’ by Drew Westen, who is a Democrat. He highlighted how the Republicans are much better at using emotion than the Democrats. The Democrats — like Labor and social democratic parties around the world — have fallen into the trap of largely being wonks. Then the other side comes up and just rolls us with emotion. The classic case is refugees and boat people. The use of emotion overrides any sense of justice or evidence.
One issue I had to deal with was supervised injecting facilities to reduce deaths from heroin overdose. I tried to introduce them and failed. An emotional campaign was mounted against them. The opponents said they would lead to more drug use and we were rewarding drug addicts by giving them more heroin, that sort of thing. Another was drinking recycled water. When I was water minister, there was no way you could do that, even if scientifically it was safe. The emotional arguments against recycled water (drinking ‘poo’) were too strong. The carbon tax — calling it a tax and raising emotional objections to taxes — was another example of opponents using emotion.
Social democratic politicians need to be able to frame what they are doing with an emotional driver, not just a quantitative argument based on the business case or economic benefits.
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