Political scientists tend to be much more attentive to what policy ought to be than to how we got the policy settings we have now, and in particular, what people (and which people) did to get us there.
Despite our academic obsession with the structure/agency relationship, we are actually not very good at analysing agency, particularly in its embodied form. There is a tendency for academics and practitioners alike to feel embarrassed when confronted with the truism that personality and passion and individual qualities matter. (Lowndes and McCaughie 2013: 545)
So it can be very valuable for political scientists, particularly those interested in policy, to pay attention to, and to learn from, accounts of the experience of those involved in the practice of policy, such as this biography of an Australian policy pioneer, Cecil Cook, who worked in WA, the Northern Territory and the federal sphere from the 1920s into the 1970s.
Cook was trained in tropical medicine, and when offered the position of Chief Protector of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory, insisted on combining it with the Chief Medical Officer role, and in his work, demonstrated that he saw the health of the Aboriginal people and reflecting not simply medical treatment, but also education, employment, housing, hygiene and the management of the self, showing an understanding of the social determinants of health long before the term was used. He saw his policy task in terms of the ‘big picture’: not ‘what welfare measures should we apply to this needy social category ?’ but ‘what is to be the place be the place of Aboriginal society in an Australia that was becoming (in Diamond’s terms) WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic), and are our present policies going to deliver this outcome ?’.
This did not endear him to his seniors, bureaucratic and political, who preferred to think in terms of process, with smaller questions and clearly-demarcated boundaries, rather than policy outcomes. For instance, when gold was discovered in the Warumungu Aboriginal Reserve near Tennant Creek, the consensus in government circles was that the gold-bearing area should be excised from the reserve to allow white prospectors to exploit it, with an area of land of no interest to the whites being added to the reserve in compensation. Cook argued that no decision could be made until the overall policy objective had been clarified: what was an Aboriginal reserve for, and how might ‘the mineral, pastoral and other wealth contained in [Aboriginal] reserves’ be used to contribute to Aboriginal people becoming full members of the Australian community ?
And Cook wanted this question to be resolved by a policy decision by the Minister, fully cognisant of the nature of the choice. He argued that the aim should be for ‘the aboriginal … to be lifted to the white standard of citizenship like the Maori of New Zealand’. The problem, as he saw it, was that the Commonwealth did not have a definite policy but that
Aboriginal protection has never been based on logical principles but has evolved as a sequence of expedients resorted to by Governments usually under pressure from sometimes one and sometimes another organisation interested in Aboriginal welfare.
Cook firmly believed in policy as the authoritative allocation of values (as Easton puts it), but the sort of questions that he was raising were not of much interest to federal Ministers for the Interior, and there were eight of these in seven years in Cook’s time. The mining area was excised from the reserve without Cook’s arguments even being put to the minister. Inany case, ministers were likely to find him prickly: John McEwen, in his first ministerial post, determined to replace Cook because some of his reports were ‘couched in the most
intemperate language’, showing that he did not have ‘those attributes which are essential’ in a departmental head.
Here, Cook was faithfully following the textbook account of policy as authoritative instrumental choice: ministers determine the objective, public servants give frank and fearless advice about how best to get there, but follow whatever course the ministers chose. But in practice, ministers seemed to be less concerned with the likely outcome of policy than with questions of process: the organisational structure, how it was done elsewhere, and (as here) observance of the etiquette of official discourse. This suggests that while the authoritative instrumental account of policy has its uses, it is not the best operational code, and experienced policy workers learn to be able to talk the language of authoritative decision when necessary, while seeing the policy task as more about ‘making sense together’ (Hoppe 1999). The readers may wonder whether Cook’s medical training made it harder for him to make this distinction: for him, there was a right answer, and it was his job to make clear what that right answer was. This seemed to be less of a problem in his later work with the NHMRC, where he was dealing with other professionals.
This book is a biography, not a policy text, but there is a lot that policy scholars can learn from it – about the long, stuttering prehistory of Commonwealth policy making on Aboriginal matters, about the early recognition of the social determinants of health, and above all, about the significance of commitment, and the tension felt by the committed professional confronting the organisational complexity and ambiguity of governing. Highly recommended.