{"id":24148,"date":"2016-01-12T06:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T19:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=24148"},"modified":"2016-01-11T11:09:40","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T00:09:40","slug":"martin-parkinsons-policy-dilemmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/martin-parkinsons-policy-dilemmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Parkinson’s policy dilemmas"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n Dr Martin Parkinson will soon begin his role as the new Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, succeeding Michael Thawley. Both are highly capable individuals and both have suffered from the lottery of Australian Public Service (APS) changes that follow political leadership coups. One side benefit to Martin Parkinson’s shift from Treasury Secretary in 2015 was that he had the rare chance to think away from the Canberra churn by spending some time at Princeton University’s Griswold Centre for Economic Policy Studies. Through two working papers<\/a> published in September 2015, we have a chance to see Parkinson’s view of the policy problems facing Australia.<\/p>\n Malcolm Turnbull will set the agenda and tone of Government policy, but it falls to the Secretary of PM&C to mobilise the APS behind that agenda and to provide some discreet steerage to government. There are two key tasks: making the APS machinery work and developing the right policy content. Overall, Parkinson’s assessment is that Australia isn’t well placed to respond to the pace of strategic, demographic, economic and technological change taking place around the world. Australia, he says, suffers from a ‘current bout of complacency’ where ‘our political discourse is failing to provide the public with an explanation of global or national developments, or a roadmap for the future.’<\/p>\n Parkinson offers an important insight when he diagnoses why Australia is in this lacklustre malaise:<\/p>\n \u2018\u2026very few countries could be said to do \u201cjoined\u2013up\u201d government at all well as there is a recurring lack of coordination between the strategic, military and economic institutions across nations. While it may be hard for any country to achieve this outcome, and perhaps harder still for democracies, history suggests that those which do can have a disproportionate influence at key times in history.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Spot on, Martin! The risks of economists and strategists talking past each other and failing to find a way to engage with each other’s priorities has been at the heart of some serious Australian policy failings in recent years. Let two examples suffice: first, the Asian Century White Paper<\/em> presented by the Gillard Government in 2012 as the solution to Australia’s long term economic prosperity. All that was needed was to hitch ourselves to the economies of China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India — that and some Little Engine That Could ‘I think I can’ effort<\/a> \u00a0would keep the wheels of growth turning for a generation.<\/p>\n