Australian Government Policy

Chapter 2

What

What is policy?

commitment to a minimally interventionist and small state (monetarism)
- frame and shape the possibilities in the other areas of public policy.
More specifically, policy decisions in one area may have significant intended or unintended impacts in another. Take for example the case of
Australia when, in the late )980s in the face of high levels of youth unemployment, the federal government abolished unemployment benefits for sixteen and seventeen year olds which effectively raised the school leaving age.
Alternatively, government departments may work together to address particular issues. For example, in Queensland in the early 1990s the State

is policy?

.

Social policies, it becomes clear,
While judges are government appointed, there is a tradition of judicial independence, and while public service departments and the bureaucrats who work within them are supposedly there to enact government agendas, at the same time they are expected to provide independent advice to the government. This tension is nicely encapsulated in the TV series Yes, Minister, where we see the different and often conflicting interests of the politicians and senior bureaucrats.
It can clearly be seen, then, that the state is not a unitary entity to which can be ascribed purposeful action, nor is it a straightforward instrument of powerful groups external to it such as transnational corporations. Rather, the state can be conceptualised as a set of processes which collectively have particular outcomes. Furthermore, the state consists of a large number of entities - public service departments and statutory authorities of various kinds - which often have conflicting interests; for example, compare Treasury with Social Security. Indeed even within the same public service department there can be very real disagreements and struggles over policy directions. In the Australian policy
The state today is so large and complex that much policy has its gestation within the bureaucracy, rather than from a legislative framework or from a minister or political party. Thus politicians and bureaucrats both administer and formulate policy or, as

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What is policy?

What is policy?

Anderson puts it, 'Policy is being made as it is being administered and administered as it is being made' (1975: 98).
We have been discussing the role of policy bureaucrats working within central administrations. Lipsky (1980) has developed the concept of to streetlevel bureaucrats refer to other state workers - those at the 'coalface' who are responsible for the actual delivery of a policy into practice.
Street level bureaucrats develop strategies in order to cope with the myriad pressures they face in the work situation, which result in the adaptatioll of centrally imposed policies rather than their straightforward implementation. Clearly there are some parallels here with the position of teachers who are asked to implement policies emanating from head office at the' chalkface'.
Earlier, we noted Offe's suggestion that the state does not so much solve policy problems,