Built to last? History shows us the art of reform that’s both bold and enduring

Reform, while never an easy task, is probably more difficult now than it used to be. Not only is declining trust a problem, belief in governments’ ability and willingness to affect real change is also in decline.

There’s also the tyranny of the election cycle. Often real reform takes much longer than the three-year terms, not to mention assessing whether any given policy decision was effective.

The attitudes of voters are also unpredictable: just ask the prime ministers who proposed the last eight referendums, all of which failed to win popular support.

So what does it take? Australian history shows lasting reform is about building coalitions, managing the stakeholders who can make or break your reforms, and having the somewhat magical ability to read the moment correctly.

Method 1: building it from scratch

First, there’s the hard way: start from first principles. This means reckoning with existential political questions: who do we represent? What vision of Australia do we want to manifest?

From there, you develop policy to fit the vision and communicate it with the public (ideally in a highly compelling way). The party wins in an election and implements the policy in government.

While the policy may be in place, you then have to win the public debate for keeping the policy long term, so your reforms are not immediately repealed when you lose power.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges. If you can do all of that, and that’s a big “if”, you can sit back and watch your legacy take shape. But of course, this method is contingent on a lot of things going very right. This doesn’t happen often and there are only a few arguable exceptions. Medibank, the Whitlam government’s universal insurance model of healthcare fits some of these criteria well. Whitlam’s unusually ambitious policy program for the 1972 federal election was based on the ideas of equality, serving ordinary Australians and an expansive attitude to what the government in Canberra should be able to do. Medibank and its insistence that universal healthcare was a federal responsibility was a key part of the success of the “It’s Time” campaign that won power for Labor after 23 years in opposition. The difficulties began in implementation, and the policy was blocked several times before being passed by parliament after a joint sitting in 1974. After Whitlam’s dismissal, the policy was modified heavily by the Fraser government, before the Hawke-era reforms which renamed the program “Medicare”. Despite this, Medicare is so embedded into Australian society that it’s almost impossible to imagine repealing it. But Medicare is a rare success story in a sea of grounded, sunk or scuttled policy proposals. Method 2: seizing the opportunities Then there’s the “easy” way: simply open the door for a policy whose time has come. Here, the skill is not so much in policy development, but in guessing which policies might have the best chance of long-term success. It relies more on political calculus, both within a party and in the community. Most lasting reforms fit this entrepreneurial description of policymaking more cleanly. Even Medibank itself was a policy program inspired by European programs implemented decades earlier and adapted to Australia for Whitlam by health researchers. In the case of superannuation, recent research makes the argument that the 1980s reforms that created today’s system were actually accidental, to a surprising extent.

The origins of the modern system had its roots not in pension reform, but in finding a work-around between the government and unions to enable wage increases without causing inflation. Workers could take the pay rise as deferred payment through superannuation schemes.

What turned this negotiation into a lasting policy reform was that politicians in Bob Hawke and Paul Keating recognised the opportunity the Prices and Incomes Accord represented.

Seizing the opportunity for real reform relies on the combination of opportunity and political expertise, during periods political historians call “critical junctures.” According to academic Emily Millane, modern superannuation occurred during one of these periods. The timing and sequence of events had to be just right, or little would have happened at all.

What not to do

When politicians sell the policies to the Australian public, they’re making a bet with history. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.

Most governments can pass legislation for any policy reform they like, provided they have the numbers.

But this cuts both ways: what is stopping the next administration from winding back your reforms? This is where the “shadow of the future” constrains politicians in the choices they make. Why spend your time on big reforms when you know they likely won’t survive?

One example of a policy that was developed, debated publicly, enacted, and then swiftly canned by a new administration is the Turnbull government’s reforms to the Australian Education Act, popularly known as Gonski 2.0.

Under this scheme, the Turnbull government made school funding allocations more needs-based and addressed long-standing inconsistencies in funding across each state. This included tackling controversial “special deals” for the Catholic and independent sectors.

Gonski 2.0 played by the book. Procedurally, the bill passed through the Senate without compromising its main intent.

But the reform’s fatal weakness was political: it failed to account for the organised stakeholders who stood to lose out.

From the outset, Catholic school bodies mounted a fierce campaign against the new arrangements, arguing they would be worse off relative to independent schools.