Most of us have been at home or nearby for over two months. We have been reading a torrent of information and analysis on COVID-19 and its epidemiology, the consequences of government action, and the impact on the world order and the balance of power. So finding something both new and worth saying is a challenge.

On public health, I am not an epidemiologist, not even of the armchair variety, and can suggest only that we reserve judgment for a year on which country made the best response. On implications for the world order and prospects for co-ordinated international action, I can’t go beyond Margaret Macmillan or Edward Luttwak in The Economist, Kevin Rudd or Richard Haas in Foreign Affairs, Edward Luce on the US in the FT, or, closer to home, to Richard Maude of the Asia Society on South-east Asia and Allan Gyngell and Heather Smith on the G20’s role.

But rather than dwell on the economic and strategic, I want to draw out the domestic policy implications for Australia of the slapdash and reckless COVID-19 responses of Britain and the United States. In the UK, we have seen a studied nonchalance and an arrogant flippancy, which, while amusing, don’t amount to leadership; similarly, weekly applause sessions for health workers are no substitute for having a strong and well prepared health system. And in the United States, infantile narcissism has substituted for leadership, and a fragmented and unfair medical system has produced a diversity, to put it kindly, of health outcomes.

These failures are a reminder of a neglected truth: that we should look beyond the US and the UK for models for Australian public policy. Otherwise we deny ourselves the benefit of learning from other approaches to knotty public policy questions, and the opportunity to strengthen the quality of our governance and our national resilience. By public policy, I mean laws, regulatory frameworks, government actions and funding decisions, and the structures adopted to implement these, ranging from health and social welfare, through education, infrastructure, telecommunications and beyond.

Australia has a good record in creative thinking on how to structure our political system and organise policy-making, starting in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with compulsory voting, preferential voting, the secret ballot and postal voting, all of which were uniquely Australian in genesis. And we drew sensibly on British models of public administration to create structures that were distinctly Australian.

But when we have looked out from Australia for other models against which to benchmark our thinking, our gaze has tended to reach only to Britain and the US. We haven’t stretched ourselves to examine other policy models in Asia or continental Europe. We have worked on the complacent assumption that the only models for good governance were to be found in the Anglosphere, with rarely a thought for whether, for example, Germany, Korea, France or Japan might have done it better. 

Our membership of the Five Eyes too has conditioned many parts of government and many ministers to look only toward its members. And we have in recent years drifted back to justifying changes in public administration in terms of US and UK models. Unhappily, the creation of a Department of Home Affairs in 2017 was justified because it was something like the British Home Office, and the Office of National Intelligence because it would perform functions akin to those of the US Director of National Intelligence.

We have been good enough at using the OECD, and other multilateral organisations, including the WHO, as an efficient short-cut to gain exposure to the policy thinking of others. Generations of government economists and social policy advisers have spent time at the OECD absorbing lessons on trade, tax, social welfare, poverty alleviation etc. and bringing them home. But the OECD has evolved away from defining best practice for the developed world, on which it now has less to say, to other preoccupations.

Beyond the OECD, I don’t see much evidence that Australia has tried to engage directly on policy thinking with many other comparable countries, beyond the US and Britain. Examples abound, but four from telecommunications, housing, health and education help demonstrate the point.

That the Republic of Korea might have something to teach us about telecommunications and the internet get little traction, despite Korea’s world beating infrastructure. Efforts 15 years to kick off a broadband dialogue foundered on apathy in Canberra. And it is telling that a review of the broadband network in 2014 consign international models to appendix G of volume II.

In examining causes and possible solutions to housing affordability, we have paid scant attention to European and Japanese models that give tenants long-term security and redress the second-class citizen “loser” status renters are accorded in Australia. Such policies would mean a greater percentage of the population might be happier to rent long-term and not buy.

We have had endless reviews of our vocational education system but how much thought have we given to the German model, which is world renowned for its effectiveness. 

The health systems of the Korea, Taiwan and Germany surely would repay a more than casual examination, given their world class performances. How many Australian doctors have spent time in the Taiwanese or Korean health systems, and are well connected there? They could be making a big difference now.

The thought that Japan, with the highest life expectancy in the world, might have something to teach us about public health, has never triggered much interest among our health policy professionals. That Japan’s COVD19 cases and deaths are still low, even under a fragmentary and partial lockdown, might suggest something about the resilience of their universal health system. 

None of this is to say that these policy models are necessarily suited to Australia but they are at least worth serious examination, alongside those of the UK and US, which shouldn’t always be the default. British financial sector regulation is best practice, but so are Dutch prudential standards, so we should look at both and more. In some areas, UK and US models should have continuing persuasive power: American models for regulating technology and market concentration should attract our notice; and in our legal system, which will continue to find precedents in the UK and US courts, as those courts have historically found in ours.

Those working in these various fields will have their reasons not to engage with policy ideas and regulatory models outside the familiar English speaking world. These come down to accessibility. It is more difficult to analyse different policy models when the language is different and the political system and culture alien. That, together with not being funded to look for new ideas, plus a general complacency and lazy comfort with the familiar, stymie dialogue. I admit it isn’t easy, and domestic policy makers in potential target countries aren’t themselves well able to engage internationally, often not having the language or the time.

Values matter too and in broadening our scope of inquiry, we must continue to have them at the heart of our analysis of different policy models. It would be reprehensible if we were to adopt the authoritarian approach of the Chinese, effective though that response to COVID19 belatedly was.

For decades, we have tried fitfully to lift the level of Asia literacy in government, in the professions and in the private sector. But after fifty years of banging this drum, we don’t have the widespread understanding of the East Asia region that we should and we don’t have enough people who can operate seamlessly outside the rarefied expatriate bubble.

Not many of us are able to operate effectively and comfortably even in France or Germany in areas of domestic policy focus. And most Australian postgraduate work still takes place in the UK or the US.

The New Colombo Plan, which kicked off in 2014, is cause for hope, as it encourages young people from varied professional backgrounds to study in the Indo-Pacific. It exposes future doctors, lawyers, business people, engineers and public servants to different ways of running a health system, putting together a telecommunications network or promoting high quality education outcomes.

Beyond the New Colombo Plan, and mobilising our extensive diaspora, more of Australia’s universities could find their way to doing policy relevant research on alternative models as an input to government. And network of embassies could do more to analyse and report best practice in domestic policy areas that matter to us, but would need to be funded better to do so.

I come back to where I started, sitting at home overwhelmed by the torrent of analysis on offer. Lockdown has meant many of us have turned inward and, at least for those of us over 40, cut us off from the contesting of ideas with colleagues and friends that flows from meeting physically, not just virtually. As individuals we should guard against turning in, but as a country too we must keep our eyes open, and alert to the risks and opportunities out there in the world, including lessons on how to run our country. We can’t be Fortress Australia indefinitely, as our prosperity and security depend on being engaged in the world, not burying our heads in the sand, or deriving false comfort from being in the “Anglosphere”.

AUTHOR

Bruce Miller AO, is the Chair of the Griffith Asia Institute Advisory Council. He was Australia’s former Ambassador to Japan