Introduction

Any investigation of public policy necessarily canvasses questions of what governments do, why they do it and what difference it makes. This means examining not only who and what influences government activities, but also who devises policies and on what evidence. It means asking how we (collectively) decide which problems are worth worrying about and which to ignore. There is, inevitably, a great deal of uncertainty in judgements about which policies will be the most effective in producing desired outcomes and which policies will appeal to and be accepted by voters. In reality, most policies are really large-scale field experiments conducted without much in the way of supportive evidence and often without follow-up to check whether they worked.

It is certainly clear that this process is not one of seamless cooperation between researchers and public service policy specialists responding to coherent requests from elected representatives who are alert to the needs of their communities. Rather, policy emerges from a messy struggle about ideas, values and interests, often following sustained agenda-setting by self-interested parties. Or, it may emerge from moral panics stoked (perhaps even engineered) by politicians or the media (Lawrence, 2006). The idealised model of meticulous, evidence-based policymaking driven by clearly enunciated values is the stuff of fiction.

In practice, the content of policies may derive from a wide variety of sources, including: analyses by government officials of what has happened in other jurisdictions (and seems to work) and what appears to have worked in the past; what social change advocates, partisan ‘think tanks’, consultants and paid lobbyists argue will work to solve identified problems (with varying degrees of evidence to back their claims); what the community appears to believe will be effective (as deduced from opinion polls and focus groups or the gut instincts of politicians); academic research; systematic analysis by policy specialists in the public service; the recommendations of commissions, parliamentary committees and specially convened inquiries; but as much as anything by what Davies et al (2000) have described as GOBSATT (Good Old Blokes Sitting Around Talking Turkey) – and, in most places, for much of the time, it has been blokes.