February 17, 2023

Why reports matter

19 minutes

This episode of Shorewalker On Reports looks at a foundational question: why do we bother to create public reports at all? With Gary Banks, Saul Eslake, Nick Gruen and Peter Martin.

Transcript

Presenter: In this episode we mostly talk about policy

reports. These reports assemble facts and evidence to help readers understand

complex issues and to form a response. These reports might be on a narrow

field, like, say, how to make a particular defense

purchase, or how to change some educational qualification. Or they might be

very broad, looking at issues like reform of Australia’s entire tax system. They might

aim to be neutral, taking no specific position on the issue; or they might aim

to persuade readers in a particular direction.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room right

away. Not every report really gets written to help the public, or to make

government work better. Many reports do get written to deepen public

understanding of tough issues. But some reports get written for other reasons.

Saul Eslake knows this. He’s a consulting economist, and

he’s well-known in Australia. He has been chief economist for finance groups

such as the ANZ Bank, and he’s now an expert advisor

to organisations including the federal Parliamentary Budget Office. Back in the

1990s he led the writing of a landmark report into Victoria’s government

finances and management. Here’s Saul Eslake.

Saul Eslake: In the British sitcom, Yes,

Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the senior public

servant, would routinely advise Jim Hacker as Minister for Administrative

Affairs and subsequently Prime Minister that you never call an inquiry until

you know what it's going to say.

And there are often reports commissioned by government with

terms of reference that make it very clear what the inquiry is expected to find

or to recommend, and usually staffed by people whom the government can trust to

give it the answers that it wants to hear.

Presenter: Saul Eslake has a list of these examples.

Saul Eslake: Another example was the inquiry which is still

afoot was the inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on

Revenue into housing affordability and homeownership, which has been given

terms of reference that clearly indicate that it is meant to find that the main

reason for deteriorating housing affordability and declining homeownership is a

want of housing supply – and oh, dear, that's mainly a state and local

government responsibility, so there's not much the Commonwealth can do about

it.

Presenter: So that’s a dark side of public reports. But

there’s also a brighter side, where reports really do help people understand

what’s going on.

Saul Eslake: There can be other occasions when a report is

commissioned with a genuine intention of finding out facts – and when it's in

response to a disaster or scandal, usually to come up with recommendations that

will prevent the same sort of circumstances from happening again. And royal

commissions that have been called into bushfires, for example, by state

governments are good examples of that, as are the Royal Commission into

Responses to Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, and more recently, into the aged

care and disability care systems. I think those are inquiries that – perhaps

under enormous public pressure to do so – have given those inquiries pretty wide latitude to establish facts which are not

generally known in advance, or at least not widely agreed about in advance, and

to come up with recommendations that may well be challenging for governments as

to how to prevent those mistakes or those errors from being implemented. So a lot comes down to what the government of the day is

seeking to achieve and how much pressure it is under when it decides to

commission the carrying-out of an investigation and the writing of the

subsequent report

Presenter: Like Saul Eslake, Gary Banks is an economist by

training, and a prominent one. For 15 years up to 2012, he ran Australia’s

Productivity Commission. The Commission is a significant independent advisor to Australia’s federal government on economic, social and environmental issues, and it uses public reports

to deliver most of that advice. Governments don’t always follows

those public reports’ advice. But Australian policymakers do take them

seriously.

Gary Banks argues that if reports are done right, they’re an

important element of the public policy process. Indeed, he says, they may be

more important than ever – partly because they can confer credibility and

trust, in an era when many people think government is, well, a bit suss.

Gary Banks: There's probably less trust, less acceptance of

governments than they used to be. When they do surveys of trust in different

institutions, you know, politicians don't rate highly, generally. So I think,

if a politician says, I think this, this is the best way to go, trust me,

it's less likely to get currency and have an effect and influence than if he or

she says a report has been done by this eminent institution or person, which I'm

going to adopt, because I think it makes sense, and gives the arguments from

that. [So I think people –] even though experts themselves have come into fire

a little bit – I think, if a study has been well done, particularly if it's a

study that involves public engagement, and so on and had a draft report, then a

government is better able to, I think, prosecute a reform agenda or a policy

agenda than if they don't have something like that to use.

… You need to engage with the public so that they can be educated

to some extent about the trade-offs and be more likely to be supportive of the

outcome.

… Public reports are particularly important, I think, when

there's a contentious issue, right, because [you'll have,] the politics will be

tougher. Getting a preferred policy option through, by definition, will be

harder. So the more that the public has been brought

along with the process of reaching a policy conclusion and recommendation, the

better. And so I think that's a very important reason for having a public

report – in a sense, to bring people along and get get

a bit more of a meeting of minds that might otherwise have occurred.

… A second, part of the answer to that question relates to

the fact that, you know, undertaking a public report, or various kinds of

public study can be quite expensive, can be time consuming, can demand quite a

lot of the participants. And so you don't want to do it for things that aren't

significant. You want to do it for things that are ideally not only

contentious, but quite complex, and where that kind of engagement and process

will have a big payoff. Or to put it the other way: if you got the wrong answer,

you'd find that the costs were quite high.

Unfortunately, you know, we've seen over time, you know,

policy decisions made without that kind of process, which proves the point, you

know, that they have involved costs. Sometimes they've had to be policies that

have had to be withdrawn after a short period of time. I mean, you think about,

for example, the, the export ban on live cattle to Indonesia, right, which

happened after a Four Corners program. So within two days of that program, or

within three days, a decision was made to ban live cattle exports to Indonesia,

because it looked like they were being maltreated in the abattoirs in

Indonesia. That had to be reversed. And that wasn't based on anything other

than sentiment really, in the sense that it'd be good politics, but the costs

were very high. And in the end, they had to come to another way of dealing with

the problem. So I think the more significant the

issue, the more contentious, the more important it is to have that kind of, you

know, systematic approach.

Presenter: So Gary Banks values

public reports on government policy because reports examine an issue

systematically and because they present ideas that have broad community

respect.

Nicholas Gruen is another economist who has served on the Productivity

Commission. He’s also worked for senior Australian federal government ministers

in the Hawke and Keating governments, chaired the 2009 Web 2.0 Task Force and

now runs an economics consultancy, Lateral Economics. In those roles and

others, he has helped to write quite a few reports. He’s also one of

Australia’s best-known innovation experts.

Like Gary Banks, Nick Gruen wants reports to reflect

community aspirations and concerns.

But Nick Gruen also emphasises something else: reports can

present ideas that may not command strong support on day 1, but which will

become more important over time.

Gruen points to the attitude of the economist Friedrich

Hayek, which Hayek expressed in a 1947 speech. Hayek’s formula was this: You

should set out the evidence for ideas that seem right today, but you should

also remember that those ideas may become more popular in the years ahead. That

worked for Hayek. He was a fringe figure in 1947, but 27 years later, he won a

Nobel Prize.

Here’s Nick Gruen talking about Friedrich Hayek’s influence:

Nick Gruen: He said: 'We must not constrain our vision to

what we can immediately sell to a politician. So we

must try to influence the thinking of the secondhand

peddlers of ideas.' And so that is what a good report will do. I mean, a good

report that may not be in a position to even want to

try and do that. It might be a very specific thing – how do we fix this particular problem, airport noise or whatever it is. But the

reports that matter, that do big work, are reports that … find a way to look

at a complex subject in a simple way that that will stand on the shelf for five

or 10 years, and that people will find themselves coming back to. So don't …

if people start harassing you and saying, well, the government simply won't

accept that, that's fine. That's something to think about. That means that you

might not want to serve up a concrete recommendation, which they feel obliged

to reject. But you need to stick with the analysis; you need to stick with

putting the case explaining its importance. And then you might start thinking

about: Well, let's fantasize about a decision-maker

in that position that we're writing for, who really wants to go in this

direction, but can't do it immediately? What would they like to see from us?

Would they like to see options? Yes, they would.

That was a perennial chestnut in the Productivity

Commission: If we provide options, then we give these politicians easy ways

out. Well, yes. Wakey wakey, you're not that

powerful as the Productivity Commission. You're offering advice. So try to be helpful to the people who want to do things.

Keep the arguments as clear as you can. And then, as far as recommendations are

concerned, you are probably not the expert about how ambitiously and how

speedily a particular agenda should be pursued. But you are trying to say:

This is the agenda. And I'm speaking, just a few days after a new Labour

Government has been elected. And it's times like that, that new things become

possible. But it's unlikely that … it's suddenly possible to move very fast

in a direction other than the one we were going. So … you try to remain alive

to possibilities, but not necessarily short-term possibilities.

Presenter: So Nick Gruen argues

that reports have a life beyond the moment when a government minister get

handed their findings.

The economics journalist Peter Martin makes this argument

too. Martin is a former Commonwealth Treasury official; he has reported on

economics for the ABC and for The Age newspaper. He is now Business and Economy

Editor of The Conversation website.

Take as an example the Asprey Review of taxation. It

published its report in 1975, but had most of its

effect a full decade later. Here’s Peter Martin, talking about the effect of

the Asprey Tax Review.

Peter Martin: Reports are not wasted if they're not acted

on. The most famous [example] was the tax review that preceded the Henry Tax

Review, preceded by 20 or so years. And it made a lot of recommendations that

were ignored at the time. These were recommendations for a capital gains tax,

for instance, these were recommendations for fringe benefits tax. Eventually,

someone – it was, it was treasurer of Paul Keating in the 1980s – eventually,

someone got out that old report that the Treasury there, so they have another

look at it produced their, their draft white paper,

and, and introduced them. The various climate change reports … even if ignored,

they can be used, particularly now things are on the internet, you'd be

surprised at how much at a later date … People sort of

go to them if if it's a good report, if it covers

things and sort of synthesizes something. It's the

same as the Henry Tax Review itself. A lot of that wasn't acted on. People can

go back to it. years later. We had a retirement income review, we had a banking

Royal Commission, not all of those recommendations

were acted on at the time, but they're still useful documents. Even if

something doesn't get into the media at the time, if you push it in front of

the right people, it's there.

… The provision of things on the internet, and the fact that

they stay there forever, has meant there actually is a way of settling

arguments, that there wasn't before. So I think on

balance, while people use it to go backwards and forwards, it can often settle

arguments. The provision of reports on the internet has also made life much

easier for the media, because it means you can do research without leaving your

seat, or without picking up the phone. And that's good.

Presenter: So reports will sometime

influence all sorts of people for a long time. If you’re helping to write a

report, this is important history to know. What goes into the report may have a

life beyond the enthusiasms of this month, or this year, or indeed this decade.

And that should often influence how you write your report.

How much it should influence your report will depend on both

the subject matter and the immediate environment. Groups like the Asprey

Committee wrote far-sighted, big-picture reports. And they did so in part

because they were given a license to do so by the politicians who ordered those

reports up.

Gary Banks makes an important point when he says that where

possible, reports should bring their audience along with them. The point that

people like Peter Martin and Nick Gruen are making is a little different: the

most influential reports have spoken not just to today’s audience, but to the

future audience as well.

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By Shorewalker DMS