This week we'll be posting the audio and graphic recordings from last month's Power to Persuade symposium held at ANU in Canberra. Jessamy Gee from Think in Colour attended the symposium and produced wonderful visual representations of each session. The keynote speaker for the day was Professor Gillian Triggs, whose presentation featured in various national media publications. Listen to Prof Triggs and see her graphic recording here!
Read MoreLast week’s Power to Persuade symposium led to fascinating discussion about how evidence feeds into public policy and the impact of post-truth political culture. Stephen Easton writes that policymakers have always seen multiple truths, and not everyone believes the widely-understood term describes a genuinely new phenomenon. This article originally appeared in The Mandarin.
Read MoreWould you, and should you trust autonomous systems? How should artificial intelligence process and act on information that could have ethical ramifications? RMIT's James Harland explains that ethics should be a key consideration in AI research. This article was originally posted on The Conversation.
Read MoreThe Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet would like to see more women work in cyber security, but it seems a cultural barrier is impeding them from entering this space. UNSW Canberra's Public Service Research Group and the Australian Centre for Cyber Security have looked into the barriers to entry for women in the cyber security industry and what steps may be taken to reduce these barriers over time. This article is a repost from The Mandarin.
Read MoreBetween 1907 and 2005, Australian deaths by infectious disease declined markedly. Now, chronic and ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity-related disease, and chronic respiratory conditions are dominant and account for as much as 90% of all deaths in Australia. Geoff Browne explores health equity as a collective choice.
Read MoreIt’s still true that the higher you go in the public service, the fewer women there are. Progress is not happening fast enough for many, so IPAA Victoria has made the decision to advocate for change. Article by David Donaldson.
Read MoreUsing actuarial modelling of future costs as the key measure of the welfare safety net’s effectiveness is a “deeply flawed” idea imported from New Zealand, according to Michael Fletcher, former public servant turned academic.
Read MoreResearch engagement and impact. Everyone’s talking about it. The United Kingdom’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework included it. As announced in the National Innovation and Science Agenda, the Australian Government now wants to see it. Dr Pauline Zardo with the Queensland University of Technology explores the implications for practice.
Read MoreLearning by our mistakes is an accepted wisdom, yet how does this apply in the sphere of public policy. In this re-post from The Mandarin, Catherine Althaus and David Threlfall examine the conditions needed to support innovation in public policy
Read MoreIn today’s blog Dr Fiona Buick and Dr Gemma Carey from the Public Service Research Group at UNSW, Canberra outline key steps in managing cultural change based on research conducted on a restructure of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Read MoreAt a time when governments around the world are increasingly turning their attention to addressing healthcare related harm, Dr Bernadette Eather, the Director Patient Safety at the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission , challenges us to think about a broader definition of harm and the nurses role in patient advocacy to improve safety.
Read MoreThis week on Power to Persuade, we are focusing on 'Impact'—how can academic research make a contribution to society? How can it influence the development of policy, practice or service provision? In today's post, Paul Cairney and Richard Kwiatkowski explore the importance of using insights from psychological science to effectively communicate research to policymakers. A modified version of this post originally appeared on Paul's blog.
Read More'Impact' is a fickle concept. We talk about it a lot, but what does it really mean? What form does it take in practice? And what can we do, as researchers and policymakers, to support its emergence? Impact is our theme this week on Power to Persuade. To kick us off, today's post by University of Stirling Senior Lecturer Dr Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) reports on new research from the United Kingdom that explores how academics perceive barriers to achieving impact. This post originally appeared on Peter's blog and has been edited for length.
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The Women’s Policy Action Tank recently published a special issue of the Good Policy newsletter, exploring three areas of policy with a gender lens: women and the criminal justice system, Indigenous women, and women’s experience of employment. Each topic is explored using a dialectical approach, in which two authors approach a topic from a different angles. We will be publishing the paired articles on our blog over the coming three weeks. This week we publish the last two articles, exploring women and work. This article is a companion piece to Productivity and Pressure: Social Services get an Unhealthy Squeeze, by Fiona MacDonald.
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In the UK in particular, but also in Australia, debate about mental health and mental illness are increasingly appearing on political agendas and appearing in the mainstream media. Whilst there is a concerted effort to reduce the stigma attached to mental illness, mental health and illness remain largely located in health focused policy debates. In the post below, Dr Sarah-Jane Fenton looks at why mental health is a topic pertinent to all contemporary public policy, and uses highlights from recent blog posts to show how embedding understanding of mental health issues should be central to all policy maker’s agendas.
Read MoreIs inequality rising or falling? The answer, if recent public debate is anything to go by, may appear at first to depend on who you ask. Peter Whiteford Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University explores in this re-post from the Conversation.
Read MoreNHS statistics released this week documented that eating disorders in men have increased by 70% in the UK, finding that these illnesses are rising at the same rate in young men as they are in young women. The media has been inundated with headlines discussing this rise in male eating disorders pointing towards causes such as social media and rise of body image pressures on men and boys within modern society as a way to understand this phenomenon. While there is no doubt that such issues may have an influence on such a sharp rise in men experiencing such illnesses, male eating disorders are not a new phenomenon, simply one that has been “underdiagnosed, undertreated, and misunderstood” (Strother, Lemberg & Tuberville, 2012). A study in 2007 estimated that up to 25% of individuals with eating disorders were male, with underdiagnoses being debated due to the low number of men within services.
Research into the reasons why people develop these illnesses have developed steadily in recent years with evidence suggesting that the similarities outweigh the differences between genders with regards to the core features and psychology of eating disorders. With treatment outcomes reported as equally successful for men as for women, Dr Una Foye asks the question remains why this “sudden” increase?
Read MoreState and Federal Energy Ministers get together a few times a year at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Energy Council to decide (or not, as the case may be) on a collaborative approach to national energy policy.
As a consumer representative in the energy policy process, Dean Lombard attends the Stakeholder Roundtables held before each meeting so lobbyists and advocates can ask questions of or make suggestions to the Ministers and bureaucrats.
In this post, he looks at what has short-circuited good energy policy process in Australia and what needs to be done – by social policy researchers and analysts and citizens and voters – to find a way forward.
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