Course Title: Australian Public Policy

Part A: Course Overview

Course Title: Australian Public Policy

Credit Points: 12

Course Coordinator: Kate Driscoll

Course Coordinator Phone: +(61 3) 9925 8287

Course Coordinator Email:kate.driscoll@rmit.edu.au

Course Coordinator Location: 37.2.15

Course Coordinator Availability: By appointment

Pre-requisite Courses and Assumed Knowledge and Capabilities

None

Course Description

This course provides a foundation for the study of public policy, providing a critical introduction to the broad history, features and developments in Australian national policy and the particular policy project of the Rudd government. The course will introduce you to ways of thinking about the roles and functions of the Australian state and national public policy in a globalising world, and the play of ideas and political power shaping Australian policy regimes. The course will provide you with a framework for interpreting and analyzing what governments do and how national policy is made.

Policy making involves developing political responses to a diverse range of often enduring and difficult, some say “wicked” social, economic, environmental and cultural problems and issues. This gives national policy extraordinary breadth, from raising revenue through taxation, building a knowledge economy, responding to climate change, supporting peace keeping forces, negotiating land rights and much more besides. National public policy has extraordinary reach which means public policy is not removed and abstract from our personal lives and professional work, but is a central presence in daily life, naming and creating ideas and categories about people and their lived experiences.

The course is concerned with political decision making or what we might call the “political practice” of national public policy. Understanding and engaging with Australian public policy involves exploring the history and circumstances, and policy interventions and responses which have been developed, since Federation, to issues and problems. This history demonstrates that public policy is not a co-ordinated and objective set of practices, but is a series of disconnected, sometimes ad hoc and discursive sites of power.

As future researchers, social workers, policy activists and practitioners you will intervene in other people’s lives, as ‘engineers’ of advanced liberalism . Your mandate for doing so will usually be public policy.
It is therefore critically important that you recognize and understand the power of national public policy, its reach, its dangers, its failures, its possibilities and the very real responsibilities attached to its use. This means you will need skills to critique and assess the impact and intent of public policies, know something of national policy direction and the values which underpin particular policy regimes, as well as understanding the variety of roles and functions of the state.

Three themes will shape our work for the semester:

• Investigating the public policy context, functions and tensions for liberal nation states in the 21st century;
• Reviewing the direction and impact of Federal Government policies; and
• Understanding and applying tools for making sense of, interpreting and analyzing public policy.

Objectives/Learning Outcomes/Capability Development

Capability development for this course means that students will be: -

1. More able to engage in effective written, organisational and public communication.
   
2. More able to use some of the key methods involved in policy analysis and understand something of the various approaches to policy making. They can identify key elements in the history of Australian social and public policy and are able to engage critically in key interpretative issues in that history. They understand something of the interplay between social, economic, political, global and cultural trends and the development of the problems and solutions addressed by contemporary social policy-makers.

Upon completing this course students will be able to:

• Identify the public policy contexts, functions and tensions for liberal nation states in the 21st century;
• Understand and explain the history and trends of Australian national public policy;
• Critically analyse and discuss the policy project of the Rudd government;
• Use policy analysis tools to make sense of, interpret and analyze public policy interventions; and
• Confidently write about, present and discuss key national policy issues, developments, and interventions.

Overview of Learning Activities

We want you to attend weekly lectures and tutorials. More than, this we expect you to attend weekly lectures and tutorials. These sessions provide a sequential learning framework for the course and they are our points of connection and engagement with you.

The lectures will open up key ideas and developments, and provide an overview of relevant research and literature for each topic. Guest lecturers will contribute to classes where appropriate. The tutorials provide an opportunity for a fuller engagement with the topic and assessment requirements, through workshop activities and student discussion.

Overview of Learning Resources

There is no text for this course. A course reading pack is available from the RMIT bookshop. A range of books, newspapers and other media, journals and websites should be used throughout the course and in preparing assessment tasks.

Overview of Assessment

There are three assessment components for this course.

• Participation (20%)
  
• Rudd Report Card Student Presentation (30%)
  
• National public policy issues paper (50%)