Introduction

This chapter explores Australian federal government policymaking over the past century, analysing its development and tracing particular trends, patterns and distinctive approaches. The chapter begins by identifying the traditions of ‘limited government’ that marked the birth of the federal level of government (the Commonwealth) from 1901, including the constitutional provisions and constraints it operated under and the various ways in which it eventually attempted to circumvent these in order to undertake a broader national policymaking role. It then explores the institutional arrangements established to give expression to federal policy appetites, and the willingness of the federal level to engineer institutional adaptation as political, economic and social circumstances changed. Finally, the chapter explores the eclectic frames and theoretical underpinnings of these policy approaches, linking them to broader Australian political values and the scholarly/intellectual disciplinary fields that informed specific choices and forms of intervention. Australia's relatively belated encounter with formal policy analysis and evaluation methodologies has remained embryonic and largely perfunctory. The Commonwealth has struggled to take seriously the requirements of rigorous policy analysis and evaluation in its own spheres of responsibility, yet has been prepared to impose stringent top-down reporting requirements on the policy implementation of states and territories in the quest for performance results.

Constitutional restraints and evolving federal powers

At nationhood, the Commonwealth of Australia was established essentially from scratch by British statute as a new dominion government in January 1901. It commenced as a ‘virtual government’ without an explicit colonial lineage (and without any exclusive territory initially), but it inherited a range of colonial legacies, institutional-administrative conventions and operating procedures from its various state constituents, as well as some public agencies and official staff. For the first 30 to 40 years of the 20th century, the Commonwealth had relatively limited policymaking roles and appetites (perhaps, to a degree, even self-imposed) – complying with the logic of ‘coordinate federalism’ within a minimalist federal model espoused by the Founding Fathers. Australia's original cabinet and seven departments were miniscule, and over the first decades, they rarely strayed into policy activism (the largest agency was the postmaster's department, followed by the audit office, although the defence organisations gradually expanded).