Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1)

reaffirms this Government’s commitment to evidence-based policy making;

(2)

notes that:

(a)

the Productivity Commission has highlighted the importance of rigorous evaluation in assessing the impact of social, educational, employment and economic programs; and

(b)

randomised policy trials are increasingly being used as an evaluation tool in developed and developing nations; and

(3)

supports measures to increase the quality of evaluations, and calls on the Government to consider whether randomised policy trials may be implemented to evaluate future Government policies.

No government has been more committed to evidence driven policy than ours. In areas from water reform to climate change, foreign aid to schools reform, and activity based health funding to fiscal stimulus, Labor has drawn on the best knowledge of experts in the field. What drives us on this side of the House is not a love of particular programs but a hope that our time in public life will help leave Australia more prosperous and more tolerant, with a cleaner environment and jobs for the future.

To achieve these goals we need to keep finding better ways to evaluate our policies. As a former economics professor, I can assure the House this is particularly hard in the case of social policies. Unlike scientific experiments, evaluations of social policies are particularly tricky. We do not always get the right answer from simple before-and-after evaluations, nor from comparisons of those who opted in with those who opted out. A great advantage of randomised trials is that participants are allocated to the treatment or control groups by the toss of a coin. The beauty of randomisation is with a sufficiently large sample the two groups are very likely to be identical, both on observable characteristics and unobservable characteristics. The only difference between the treatment group and the control group is the intervention itself, so if we observe statistically significant differences between the two groups we can be sure that they are due to the treatment and not some confounding factor.

In Australia our farmers have used randomised evaluations for over a century and our medical researchers have used randomised evaluations for over half a century, yet social policy randomised evaluations are much rarer. One exception is the New South Wales Drug Court trial conducted from 1999 to 2000. Offenders were referred to the Drug Court by local or district courts, underwent a detoxification program and were then dealt with by the Drug Court instead of a traditional judicial process. At the time it was established the number of places in detoxification was limited, so participants in the evaluation were randomly assigned either to the treatment group or the control group. They were then matched to court records in order to compare re-offending rates over the next year or more. The evaluation found that the Drug Court was effective in reducing the rate of recidivism and that while it was more expensive than the traditional judicial process it more than paid for itself.

In the case of the Drug Court, many of us probably had an expectation that the policy would reduce crime, but high-quality evaluations do not always produce the expected result. Staying for a minute with criminal justice interventions, take the example of Scared Straight, a program in which delinquent youth visit jails to be taught by prison staff and prisoners about life behind bars. The idea of the program, originally inspired from a 1978 Academy Award winning documentary of the same name, is to use exposure to prisons to frighten young people away from a life of crime. In the 1980s and 1990s several US states adopted Scared Straight programs. Low-quality evaluations of Scared Straight, which simply compared participants from a non-random control group, had concluded in the past that such programs worked, reducing crime by up to 50 per cent. Yet after a while some US states began carrying out a rigorous, randomised evaluations of Scared Straight. The startling finding was that Scared Straight actually increased crime, perhaps because youths discovered jail was not as bad as they thought. It was not until policymakers moved from second-rate evidence to first-rate evidence that they learned the program was harming the very people it was intended to help.

Being surprised by policy findings is perfectly healthy. Indeed, we should be deeply suspicious of anyone who claims that they know what works based only on theory or small-scale observation. As economist John Maynard Keynes once put it when asked why he had changed his position on monetary policy during the Great Depression: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

One common argument made against randomised trials is that they are unethical. Critics ask: when you have a program that you think is effective how can you toss a coin to decide who receives it? The simplest answer to this is that the reason we are doing the trial is precisely that we do not know whether the program works. The great benefit of a randomised trial is that it gives us solid evidence on effectiveness and allows us to shift resources from less effective to more effective social programs. We should not lightly dismiss ethical concerns about randomised trials but they are often over played.

Medical researchers, having now used randomised trials for several decades longer than social scientists, have grown relatively comfortable with the ethics of randomised trials. Certain medical protocols could be adapted in social policy—such as the principle that a trial should be stopped early if there is clear evidence of harm, or the common practice of testing new treatments against the best available alternative.

One example, again from New South Wales, helps to illustrate this. Since 2005 an NRMA CareFlight team led by Alan Garner has been running the head injury retrieval trial—HIRT—which aims to answer two important questions: are victims of serious head injuries more likely to recover if we can get a trauma physician onto the scene instead of a paramedic; and can society justify the extra expense of sending out a physician or would the money be better spent in other parts of the health system? To answer these questions Garner’s team is running a randomised trial. In effect, when a Sydney 000 operator receives a report of a serious head injury a coin is tossed—heads you get an ambulance and a paramedic; tails you get a helicopter and a trauma physician. Once 500 head-injury patients have gone through the study the experiment will cease and the results will be analysed.

When writing a newspaper article about the trial I spoke with Alan Garner who told me that although he had spent a decade working on it even he does not know what to expect from the results. In a phone conversation, he told me:

We think this will work but so far we only have data from cohort studies.

Indeed he even said:

Like any medical intervention, there is even a possibility that sending a doctor will make things worse. I don’t think that’s the case, but—

until HIRT ends—

I don’t have good evidence either way.

What is striking about Garner is his willingness to run a rigorous randomised trial and listen to the evidence. Underlying HIRT is a passionate desire to help head injury patients, a firm commitment to the data and a modesty about the extent of our current knowledge. High-quality evaluations help drive out dogma As US judge Learned Hand famously said:

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.

Naturally, randomised trials have their limitations. Not all questions are amenable to randomisation. Like the kinds of pilot programs that we run all the time, randomised trials do not necessarily tell us how the program will work when it is scaled up, and they are not very good at measuring spill-over and displacement effects. Because of these limitations, it is unlikely that we would ever want 100 per cent of government evaluations to be randomised trials. Most likely, the marginal benefit of each new randomised trial is a little lower than that of the previous one. At some point, it is indeed theoretically possible that we could end up doing more randomised trials than is socially optimal.

However, this is unlikely to ever occur, at least in my lifetime. My best estimate is that less than one per cent of all government evaluations are randomised trials and that, excluding health and traffic evaluations, the proportion is probably less than 0.1 per cent. Another way to put this is that, to a first approximation, Australia currently does no randomised policy trials. Governments throughout Australia could safely embark on a massive expansion of randomised policy trials in Australia before we come close to the point where the costs exceed the benefits.

Finally, one way that we might expand randomised policy trials is to learn from the US, where federal legislation sometimes sets aside funding for states to conduct randomised evaluations. The Second Chance Act for rehabilitating prisoners, the No Child Left Behind school reform law and legislation to improve child development via home visits are just some of the US laws in which the federal government explicitly puts aside a portion of program funds for states to run random assignment evaluations.

What we need in Australian policy today is not more ideologues, convinced that their prescriptions are the answer, but modest reformers willing to try new solutions and discover whether they actually deliver results.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the member for Fraser’s motion:

That this House:

(1)

reaffirms this Government’s commitment to evidence-based policy making;

(2)

notes that:

(a)

the Productivity Commission has highlighted the importance of rigorous evaluation in assessing the impact of social, educational, employment and economic programs; and

(b)

randomised policy trials are increasingly being used as an evaluation tool in developed and developing nations; and

(3)

supports measures to increase the quality of evaluations, and calls on the Government to consider whether randomised policy trials may be implemented to evaluate future Government policies.

I expect that the member for Fraser did not intend to do so, but, in effect, he has used words that I am sure will be part of the motion of no confidence in the government that will surely ensue this week—because this motion highlights exactly the problem that has existed with the government over the last 3½ years. The policies and programs they have implemented have not only been a trial which has so badly failed; they have cost this country billions and billions of dollars along the way, they have resulted in massive mistakes and errors in public administration and they have resulted in the Australian public losing faith in the ability of this place to deliver reasonable programs for the future of our country. It all comes from the government’s inability to implement policy programs, whether they be via trials or in practice.

We do not need to look far for the list of complete disasters and policy failures that have been implemented by the government since they were elected. We start with the failure to address the serious issue of ensuring our borders are protected. The changes that have been made were driven by ideology. I heard the member for Fraser say at the end of his speech that we do not need more ideologues; we need more policy based on modest reform. On the issue of border protection, the government have for many years alleged that the opposition has been playing so-called dog-whistle politics, when they should realise instead that the changes put in place by the Howard government addressed the issues related to people smuggling in our region. The changes that the current government have made have led to such a massive increase in unauthorised boat arrivals in the northern parts of our country that we see at this time a complete lack of faith by the community in the government’s ability to manage Australia’s borders.

In 2007, the government promised 2,650 trade training centres. Since then, we have seen the delivery of 22. Before the 2007 election, the then Rudd opposition—which has become the Gillard government—promised one million computers in schools. Computers were promised for every student in years 9 to 12 in Australia by December 2011. As at 21 October last year, just over 300,000 new computers were on students’ desks and the program has blown out by $1.2 billion. Of course, $1.2 billion pales into insignificance when you look at the waste and mismanagement in the Building the Education Revolution program.

We have sat in this place during questions without notice time after time and been lectured by the Treasurer about how he knows best. I suspect that the member for Fraser would have a better grasp of how to manage the Australian economy than the Treasurer of the country. I must say, that would not be all that hard, but people I respect in this place do claim that the member for Fraser has a great deal of ability, and I am sure we will see that.

I think this motion is a cry from the back bench of the Labor Party—a desperate plea to the executive of the government—to take seriously the need to implement policy on the basis of evidence, not because of some poll driven party hack that they have brought in from Sussex Street in New South Wales telling them how to manage their government. It did not work all that well in New South Wales and it is not working well at the moment. In New South Wales they are trying to see whether a major party in this country can get itself under 20 per cent of the primary vote at a state election, which is a tough challenge. The New South Wales Labor Party state primary vote is like a limbo competition—they are trying to get as far under the bar as they possibly can compared to what should be expected from a major party. But the same people have been brought here to implement policy in this place. The outcome is billions and billions of dollars of waste—not evidence based policy but policy by Sussex Street in New South Wales.

Last week we saw the worst case of policy by Sussex Street when the Prime Minister broke the most rolled-gold election promise of all time—the ‘I shall not implement a carbon tax’ promise. She said, ‘Under my government there will never be a carbon tax.’ It is interesting. Some research came into my hands this morning in the form of previous speeches that the now Prime Minister made in this place, when she was a mere opposition spokesperson, in relation to truth in government. The reading is not good for the Prime Minister. During the second reading debate on the Health Insurance Amendment (Medicare Safety-nets) Bill 2005, she said:

The question of truth in government is not a game—and it is not my game; it is about the essence of our democratic institutions and it is about what a government should do and say to the Australian people when it is seeking their trust and their mandate at an election. Anybody in the Australian community, if asked, would say without any hesitation that what they want to know before the election is just the simple truth.

Just the simple truth—that is all they want to know. They want to know whether or not you are going to implement a carbon tax. When you say you will not implement a carbon tax and you turn around and do so just after the election, they think that is a breach of trust.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member should remember to address his remarks through the chair.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That will hang over this government for the rest of their term. I know the members of the Labor Party backbench here during this speech are thinking, ‘How am I going to explain that this was evidence based policy?’ The evidence prior to the election was that we would not have a carbon tax, but after the election the evidence is that we will have a carbon tax. No matter what she says, you cannot trust this Prime Minister. You cannot trust this Labor Party; you cannot trust that they will implement policy on the basis of evidence based policy, which of course is what this motion is about.

This is an area of the Labor Party that is purely and utterly ideological driven, because they are driven by funding from the trade union movement and by former bosses of the trade union movement. I see one sitting in front of me at the moment. He may be a good man but that does not negate his past. They are driven wholly and solely, on labour market reform, by their pay masters. No matter what the evidence based policy is in this area, they will refuse point blank to look at it, to address it or to touch it. In fact, they will implement policy which will make the economy harder to manage and put pressure on inflation, which will put pressure on interest rates in the coming months and years ahead.

It interesting that the motion quotes the Productivity Commission—and I will too. Gary Banks from the Productivity Commission just before Christmas said in relation to evidence based policy:

If we are to secure Australia’s productivity potential into the future, the regulation of labour markets cannot remain a no-go area for evidence-based policy making.

I am sure the member for Fraser in his quieter moments, away from some of his colleagues, would agree with that statement. I imagine he would quietly sit and reflect upon the challenges this country will have with inflation and interest rates and he would say, ‘What the chair of the Productivity Commission said is probably true, but just don’t let my mates hear that.’

It is evidence based policy. It is a reform which this government implemented and which will make this economy harder to manage, which will mean fewer people get opportunities at jobs, which will put pressure on ordinary Australians’ interest rates—all because the government is driven by the ideological backgrounds of their backbench, by their frontbench and by those who pay their bills.

This motion is a shot at the executive of the government by those on the backbench who are far more talented than what sits on the front bench at the moment. This government should be condemned for the lack of evidence based policy that it has implemented, and it has been highlighted by the member for Fraser.

Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start by welcoming the member for Mayo back and congratulating him on the new addition to his family. It is always a very exciting time. I know that he must have been up very long hours doing all those sorts of things that happen when a new child comes into the family. I would also like to suggest that perhaps he has returned to Canberra a little sleep deprived, because only that could explain the outbursts in his contribution here today, which, quite frankly, was an ideological ramble. If we ever wanted examples of areas where the previous government operated without any evidence based policy, the contribution from the member for Mayo just now highlighted those areas absolutely magnificently.

We have come to expect better from the member for Mayo. If ever there were someone on the backbench of the opposition who deserves a place down on the frontbench it is the member for Mayo. He must be sitting there wondering what he actually has to do to get on the frontbench when he looks at the dearth of talent sitting there in front of him. I am sure when he was back at home he would have been sitting there looking at the mess that the opposition frontbench makes in relation to almost every issue and he would have been saying to himself, ‘How is it that I am on the backbench and these people who are talking such nonsense are sitting there on the frontbench?’

Two of the examples he brought up were Work Choices and reforming the labour market. I do not think there has ever been a more ideologically driven piece of legislation than Work Choices. It lacked any evidence based research and was brought in purely on ideological terms. Pursuing that policy cost the former Howard government office. In some ways the contribution of the member for Mayo has been illuminating, because he has pointed out the sorts of policies that the opposition put forward when they were in government as reasons to have evidence based policy. They did not do it when they were in government, and look at the ideologically driven policies that they came forward with. Work Choices was one of those.

Of course border protection was probably their biggest ideologically driven policy. Border protection and immigration are areas that have been, from the opposition side, driven by the extremes of One Nation for many years now. The position of the opposition is purely ideological and one that I expected the member for Mayo to do a little better on. I welcome the comments he made when he was concentrating on his family. Away from this place and away from the influence of some of those around him, he was able to make some very sensible contributions—about the need to continue funding for Indonesian schools for example—and he should be congratulated for making that stand. But on his first day back here he is on some ideological rant about border protection and the need to re-regulate the labour market.

This motion talks about using evidence based policy and randomised trials, but how would we do that for border protection? The member for Fraser made the very good point that while it is optimal to use evidence based policies and randomised trials—which we have not yet done in this country—those things do not apply in every case. How would we operate on border protection? Would we say, ‘For the next three months, we are going to let everyone come in and see what effects that has—open up the borders’? The next month, would we turn boats away? Would we sink them? The use of those things is a ludicrous proposition for some policy areas, and the member for Mayo really does undermine his contribution by trying to make cheap political points through his use of the catchcries that we have heard from the opposition on border protection.

Evidence based policy decisions are an important thing for both government and opposition to look at in the formulation of their policies. It is something that we should be encouraging all legislators to look at. This is a good motion to make sure that evidence based policy suggestions are brought to attention of the House. I commend the motion to the House.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.