For well over a decade, Australian policy-makers, journalists and commentators have been absorbed by the question of whether governments have the capacity for significant reform. Can they deliver the economic reforms necessary to tackle large social issues like intergenerational equality and a broken housing system?
The question assumes the various forms of incremental reform we have become accustomed to are inadequate — that it isn’t enough for governments to give businesses small carrots like instant asset write-offs to lift business investment, or rely on bracket creep to finance the budget demands of an ageing population.
Pick up the Financial Review on almost any day and you’ll find a piece arguing the need for “bold reform,” often with a nod to the grand era of economic change under the Hawke and Keating governments, a period that has also loomed large for Labor ever since. As former Treasury secretary Ken Henry recently reflected, there’s often a tendency to view the economic reforms of the 1980s as having somehow been easier. But people like Hawke and Keating expended significant political capital. Some would call this leadership.
The choices the government has today are not the same. You can’t float the dollar twice, or negotiate agreements like the government–union Accords, which were based on centralised wage fixation. And that’s before factoring in the geopolitical environment. But the government does have tax reform as a lever.
So it was with cautious optimism that the policy community received treasurer Jim Chalmers’s announcement last month that big reform was on the agenda. As Karen Middleton observed in Inside Story, two schools of thought had emerged following the government’s re-election in May. Despite its much-increased majority — according to the first view — the government was not setting an ambitious policy agenda, for which it had not sought a mandate. But if there was ever a time to go hard — according to the second — it was now. The treasurer all but confirmed the second view was prevailing when he told the National Press Club that the government aims to deliver on its election promises but is not limited by them. “There’s is an appetite to be bold and ambitious,” he said in response to one question.
Chalmers’s decision to convene a productivity roundtable of business, community and union leaders has brought tax reform to the fore. He accepts that tax has a role to play in a conversation primarily about lifting national productivity.
The real possibility of big economic reform makes the release of former Labor MP Jenny Macklin’s book, Making Progress: How Good Policy Happens, written with author and Labor speechwriter Joel Deane, particularly opportune. This is not a systematic study of the conditions for reform or an attempt to prescribe a formula for what Macklin calls a messy process. She wants to convey critical lessons about how to get policy reform done, especially reforms with a social purpose.
Making Progress begins as a first-person narrative of Macklin’s time in politics, the real-world experiences that shaped her values, her ambitions, and how she practised these in her twenty-three years as a federal MP. That parliamentary career included five years as deputy Labor leader and six heading the social policy portfolio.
Macklin tells us about growing up “just a country girl” in Wangaratta, Victoria. A school exchange during her late teens took her to Yanagawa, a small city of canals in Southern Japan, opening her eyes to the experience of being “the other,” outside the mainstream of society.
After graduating from Melbourne University, where she also felt an outsider among circles of old-money contemporaries, she made what she later saw as the pivotal decision to leave Melbourne to commence work in Canberra. There, as a research assistant at the Australian National University, her life “went into overdrive.” Outside work, she became heavily involved in the Canberra Women’s Liberation Group. She volunteered at the first women’s refuge in Canberra and was involved in establishing the Red Fems think tank, becoming close friends with one of its leading thinkers, Julia Ryan.
The importance of formative experiences like these is one of the book’s messages, as is the influence of mentors. Former deputy prime minister Brian Howe, a Labor social policy giant, was the newly elected member for Batman in 1978 when Macklin was an economist in Parliament House’s Legislative Research Service (now the Parliamentary Library). His path had begun in the radical Christian movement that swept through Melbourne University in the 1950s. But his political turning point came in the mid 1960s when he and his wife Renata moved to Chicago at around the time when Martin Luther King arrived there.
Macklin describes her relationship with Howe as her most enduring political friendship. She details the influence of Howe’s approach to being social policy minister, where he headed up an office that was the engine room of ideas. Bringing in academic experts like Bettina Cass and Meredith Edwards to run government inquiries, Howe combined academic expertise with evidence-based policymaking, something that later became much rarer as the public service grew more reliant on the big consultancy firms.
Howe also taught Macklin that social policy reformers should always be generating material to have ready on the top shelf for when the political opportunity presented. Having worked in federal parliament at the end of Macklin’s time there, I saw this play out. She, and her staff, were always working. They were taken seriously across the parliament as deep policy thinkers who were also politically savvy. Her advisers often had to remind her to eat, pushing the food across her desk along with briefings.
Working assiduously on policy and garnering coalitions of support is critical. Macklin reminds us that she and many other advocates chased paid parental leave for thirteen years from 1996 until its passage in 2009. But it’s not all kumbaya: she reminds us that policymaking is competitive and while different interests must come together, people must make trade-offs to advance ideas.
Making Progress, which Macklin describes as a policy memoir, makes no attempt to cover broader political developments. Its second part is made up of a set of ten “rules for good policy” and transcripts of a set of interviews with senior policymakers and commentators that Macklin describes as “policy conversations.” The pivot to this material jars a little and does a disservice to the first half of the book, which could have been expanded in parts and woven with Macklin’s rules and extracts from the conversations.
But, as Macklin says, the book is intended as an aid to those working in policy and those who care about its construction, with the aim of demystifying and teaching. This in itself is revealing of Macklin, who obviously wasn’t tempted to share inside stories of the carnage of the Rudd–Gillard years.
That’s not to say that the personal and familial cost of her life in politics isn’t evident. So, while this isn’t autobiography, the autobiographical sections are perhaps the most revealing part of Making Progress. For Macklin, it’s all got to be worth something beyond a factional promotion or a personal legacy, something to make society better.
Macklin gives relatively short shrift to significant social reform efforts that proved to be unsuccessful or fell short. She describes as her biggest policy grief the failure to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. She writes about the controversial decision to compulsorily acquire town camps in and around Alice Springs to try and fix the problems of homelessness, violence and death; after a fierce backlash, Macklin subsequently struck a compromise deal with the Tangentyere Council to lease the lands to the Commonwealth for forty years.
She makes no mention of the Gillard government’s decision to abolish grandfathering arrangements for the single parents’ payment in 2013. Around 65,000 parents lost the payment, nearly all of them moved onto Newstart. Perhaps Macklin felt that her earlier public admission that Labor got it wrong were sufficient. But narratives of policy failure are as instructive for students of reform as stories of success.
Other areas Macklin could have devoted more attention to include the role of vested interests and their intersection with the media landscape. This dovetails with the realities of a hollowed-out public service, an increased reliance on external consultants and growing numbers of political staffers in ministers’ offices. There’s also little discussion about the political make-up of the parliament, although mention of the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme in Macklin’s discussion with former Labor minister and ACTU secretary Greg Combet illustrates the importance of political timing for the longevity of reform.
Perhaps most interestingly, given Macklin’s belief that the first rule of good policy reform is knowing your history, the book doesn’t deal with the role of contingency. As she shows when she mentions how the superannuation guarantee legislation came to be in 1992, there was a particular magic in people like Bill Kelty and Paul Keating being where they were at the same time.
In her interview for the book, journalist Laura Tingle reflects that people’s idea of reform today is limited, not just that it is based on the golden glow of what happened in the 1980s. Making Progress argues that big reform — emerging from big thinking — is not only still possible, but also necessary. •
