Australasian Political Studies Association Conference 2003
Hosted by the School of Government
University of Tasmania

Public Policy Stream

An Intimate and Partial History Of The End Of The Binary System In The Australian Capital Territory
[or "How great expectations of John Dawkins and the federal educational bureaucracy were dashed inside his own backyard”.]

Roger Scott
Emeritus Professor
School of Political Science and International Studies
University of Queensland

[With apologies to Pressman and Wildavsky, although I do not follow them by representing myself as a “sympathetic observer who seeks to build morals on a foundation of ruined hopes”.]

The reason for writing this study is to adjust the public record which provides a misleading representation of the causes and effects of a particular piece of public policy making in which the author played a leading role.

I aspire to a more substantial exercise in measuring the utility of explanations of public policy making in the general political science literature against these events, which were connected both to the Dawkins reforms of higher education and the contemporaneous emergence of an ACT government.

This first stage is both intimate and partial but it is intended to serve as a building block for an expanded, more accurate and more reliable analysis through a process of triangulation with other participants and observers.

Finally, and more tentatively, the study returns after a decade to an assessment of whether the "right" decision was taken, viewed from the perspective of the members of the organisation where the author was the foundation Vice-Chancellor.

This case study may have some relevance to the broader questions currently engaging policy makers and analysts in Australia about the appropriate conditions under which tertiary education institutions are grouped into an homogenous system which the Commonwealth seeks to “steer at a distance”.