Policy Makers In Australia Research Articles

The market risk premium in Australia: Forward‐looking evidence from the options market

AbstractThis paper analyses forward‐looking estimates of the expected market return in Australian. By utilising option prices, we compute a lower bound for the capital gain and dividend components of the expected return. Over a 17‐year period, the average 1‐month expected return lower bound is found to be 8.6% per annum, compared with an average realised return of 10.9% per annum. Our option‐based estimates demonstrate significant predictive power beyond historical averages and enable direct measurement of the expected return term structure. This approach complements traditional measures of expected returns and offers valuable insights for practitioners, academics, and policymakers in Australia.

Aboriginal plant foods policy in Australia: a critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT The Australian continent has over 6500 edible endemic plant species, fourteen of which have been certified for commercial consumption. This paper seeks to critically analyze select Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to these Aboriginal plant foods. The aim is to purposefully examine the positioning of non-Indigenous people in Aboriginal plant foods policy discourse and reveal tacit settler colonial power relations. This is in response to a call to action from Indigenous scholars to examine how settler colonialism manifests in regulatory mechanisms, such as government policy. This paper offers a theoretically informed critical discourse analysis methodology for examining Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Analysis comprised an explanation of the socio-political context of Aboriginal policymaking in Australia, textual analysis of policy texts related to Aboriginal plant foods and an interpretation of discourse practice to reveal how policy discourse tacitly promotes ideological agendas. This analysis revealed that Australian Commonwealth Government Aboriginal plant foods policy is framed according to settler terms and upholds neoliberal interests. Considerable rethinking is required about how power is exercised in Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal plant foods to ensure it does not replicate and perpetuate unjust settler colonial power relations.

The best medicine: Lessons from health for policy randomistas

The Australian Government has established the Australian Centre for Evaluation, with a mandate to conduct rigorous evaluations, including randomised trials. This approach draws heavily on the transformation of medicine. During the 20th century, medicine evolved into a discipline that is largely driven by evidence from clinical trials. Drawing appropriate lessons from health has the potential to substantially improve the equity and effectiveness of policymaking in Australia.

#NavigatingHealth - Building a Global Movement Empowering Patients to Navigate Health Systems

Background: Whilst health reports talk about health systems shifts from reactive “one size fits all” to proactive personalised health care, the current reality is that health systems are challenging for patients and carers to navigate. Patients frequently experience gaps and barriers in healthcare. We talk about patient-centred care, but we do not have patient centred systems. The challenges are not new and patient navigation was extensively research by Professor Harold Freeman in the US over 30 years ago. 
 Audience: This presentation is for a multidisciplinary audience of patients, health professionals, policy managers and politicians focused on enabling patient-centred at a systems level. 
 Who did you involve and engage with? What was the approach and process undertaken? 
 Patients, professionals and policy makers in Australia and globally have been involved in what started as a national Community of Practice in Australia “Mind the Gap: #NavigatingHealth”. 
 The approach was tested for audience interest with a series of two webinars in September 2021 to set the scene of navigating health across a life journey of patient and provider experiences with a solutions focused approach on how to tackle the many challenges.
 Following the success and interest of the webinars and as part of a focused advocacy and change management approach we developed a bimonthly Community of Practice. This is open to all those in Australia. Our focus in the first year was to make visible the many solutions being developed to support patients and to develop an engaged participatory community and build connection. 
 Further to the success in the first year, we have now expanded the approach at a global level running our first global webinar in November 2022 with speakers from Australia, the United States of America, Canada and the United Kingdom providing a connected approach across a life journey. This included lived experience of patients as well as presentations from non-governmental, medical and government organisations interweaving micro, meso and macro approaches (for example included American Cancer Society, NHS England). 
 What is the learning for the international audience? Problems that patients face navigating health systems in countries are common and consistent. Collaborating across disease and functional areas both within and across countries allows the opportunity to take a “big-picture” view to take a systems focused approach. This allows the solutions being developed to be coalesced at a systems level, remove duplication and leverage resources to benefit both patients, providers and policy makers to focus on a person-centred value-based healthcare approach across a life journey. 
 What are the next steps? Our next steps are to consolidate the learnings and scale. Whilst our initial focus has been high income countries we will be expanding the approach in 2023 to low and middle income countries using the same methodology.

How tobacco companies use the revolving door between government and industry to influence policymaking: an Australian case study.

Mixed-methods including non-experimental descriptive and exploratory case studies. To build a picture of tobacco lobbying through the revolving door in Australia, data was triangulated from multiple publicly available sources: 1) Australian federal, state and territory government lobbyist registers, 2) the online social networking platform, LinkedIn; and 3) Australian news media reports. Tobacco companies lobby the Australian government using 'in-house' employees, lobbyists working in firms acting on their behalf, and third-party allies with common interests. Almost half (48%) of internal tobacco company lobbyists had held positions in the Australian government (state, territory and/or federal) before or after working in the tobacco industry. Likewise, 55% of lobbyists acting on behalf of tobacco companies had held government positions before or after working as a lobbyist. In-house tobacco industry lobbyists, as well as those working on behalf of tobacco companies within lobbying firms, were found to have held senior governmental positions, such as a Member of Parliament (MP) or Senator, chief or deputy chief of staff, or senior advisor in a ministerial office, and many had moved into or out of government within 1 year of working for a tobacco company (56%) or as a lobbyist (48%). Tobacco companies are strategically using the revolving door between the government and the tobacco industry as a key political lobbying mechanism to try to influence public health policy in Australia.

How sensitive are catchment runoff estimates to on-farm storages under current and future climates?

Storage of water in farm dams is important to support irrigation, stock requirements and domestic uses when reticulated water is unavailable. Farm dams that fill by intercepting landscape runoff change the total volume and seasonality of catchment streamflow, potentially impacting water policy outcomes. While numerous studies have quantified how climate change and farm dams independently change streamflow characteristics, few studies have investigated their interactions. This study investigates the interactions between farm dams and climate change in the Murray-Darling Basin of southern and eastern Australia. We use hydrological modelling that explicitly represent farm dams and remotely sensed data describing historical farm dam development to assess the impacts of farm dams for 112 catchments on catchment runoff under current and future climates. Our analysis compares current and future runoff estimates to those derived without explicitly incorporating farm dam impacts to better understand the importance of farm dams in water resources assessments.We find that modelling farm dams in these catchments improves the performance of the hydrological model relative to a traditional rainfall-runoff model ignoring the effects of farm dams. The current level of farm dam development in the Murray-Darling Basin is estimated to reduce annual catchment runoff by 13% (in the range of 8%–19%) under the historical climate across the 112 catchments investigated here. We find that explicitly modelling farm dams increases the sensitivity of simulated streamflow to climate by approximately 10%. This is primarily because farm dams introduce additional catchment storage and water extractions that do not directly follow processes represented in traditional rainfall-runoff models.Our analysis offers important information for water policymakers in Australia and globally. Firstly, explicit modelling of farm dams is critical to understanding the future availability of water resources. Secondly, explicit modelling of farm dams allows their impacts on catchment runoff to be explored under current and future climates, and for policies to manage the impacts of dams to be investigated.

The role of policy in supporting alternative marine farming methods: A case study of seafloor ranching in Australia

Recent attention to the ecosystem service-generating potential of marine aquaculture (mariculture) indicates that there is substantial opportunity for marine farming to optimise practices that benefit both production and nature. One strategy for augmenting sustainability within the mariculture industry is to develop more diverse farming practices and culture species that can operate within existing ocean space constraints, contribute to ecological and conservation objectives, and assuage negative public sentiment towards mariculture. While this strategy has the potential to expand mariculture's sustainability, the implementation of these alternative culture approaches will likely depend on whether the management frameworks that regulate the industry have the authority and the capacity to enable farming innovations and encourage investment in diverse mariculture systems. Using Australia and seafloor ranching of molluscs as a case study, we explore the suitability of existing policy and legislation to support novel farming methods. We find that the policy frameworks differ across States in terms of their applicability (both implicit and explicit) to seafloor ranching activities, with substantial gaps regarding the siting and building of farming infrastructure. In the context of these results, we discuss potential strategies for leveraging existing policy and management frameworks to meet the needs of seafloor ranching and identify operational stages where new, targeted policy could be particularly impactful. Our case study offers practical insights to policymakers in Australia and other countries and regions seeking to support innovations in culture methods with a greater potential for sustainability.

Post COVID-19 Transformation in the Frequency and Location of Traffic Crashes Involving Older Adults

Although numerous studies have been conducted to discover the spatial patterns of road crashes, relatively few have focused on the patterns of road crashes suffered by socially disadvantaged groups, while simultaneously accounting for urban environmental features. This study used advanced econometric (negative binomial regression) and spatial (geographically weighted Poisson regression) approaches to capture latent geographical diversity in crash patterns. The police-reported crash data for the over-65 population in metropolitan Adelaide, Australia, were investigated for two periods: before and after COVID-19. Using both spatial and nonspatial models, the effects of land use mix, population density, road network design, distance to the central business district, and accessibility of public transit on crash frequency, and location at the neighborhood level were investigated. The findings revealed that, in addition to sociodemographic factors, the aforementioned components had nonlinear effects in varied geographical contexts. Although the number of crashes fell by 20% during the periods studied, the fundamental reasons for such incidents did not change. The results of the study could assist academics and policy makers in Australia to better understand the multidimensional implications of the built environment on the road safety of the elderly—a vulnerable group in society who were disproportionately affected by the global pandemic. The hybrid technique presented in this research has the potential to be useful in other scenarios experiencing varying crash patterns.

An insight into the asymmetric effect of economic globalization on renewable energy in Australia: Evidence from the nonlinear ARDL approach and wavelet coherence

Boosting energy consumption, ensuring energy supply security, and mitigating emissions are critical global concerns, especially during the surge in energy prices, continuous expansion in income level and persistent economic integration with other countries, and climate change. The existing evidence on the determinant of renewable energy is still in its early stages; however, there is currently limited empirical evidence regarding the determinant of renewable energy in Australia. Therefore, this study probed into the effect of the asymmetric effect of economic globalization on renewable energy usage in Australia, which prior studies in the literature have neglected. The study employed carbon emissions, economic growth, and oil price as other regressors. The dataset for the period spanning from 1970 to 2018 was analyzed using the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag. Evidence from the empirical analysis reported that the positive variation in economic globalization has a positive and significant effect on renewable energy, thus the rise in economic globalization promotes renewable energy. Meanwhile, the negative variation in economic globalization has a neutral impact on renewable energy. Furthermore, economic growth and oil price positively and significantly affect the usage of renewable energy in Australia. Moreover, carbon emissions have a negative and significant effect on renewable energy. Furthermore, the wavelets coherence was also for the robustness test, which reports positive co-movement between all regressors and renewable energy, except for CO2 emissions (negative co-movement). Economic globalization, economic growth, and CO2 emissions drive renewable energy, while renewable energy leads to oil prices in Australia. This study offers significant and crucial suggestions to policymakers in Australia, emphasizing the need to prioritize environmental sustainability and promote economic globalization to foster the growth of the clean and efficient energy sector.

Cultural policy between television and digital platforms: the case of SVOD regulation in Australia

ABSTRACT As subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services enter new markets, they become subject to national laws and regulations. This incorporation into national governance is driven by various priorities that include cultural diversity, censorship, and local protectionism. In this article, we provide a critical analysis of the attempted process of SVOD policy-making in Australia, where the entry of services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ has prompted much concern about the future of local content production and distribution. Focusing on the years 2017 to 2022, under the former centre-right Liberal/National coalition government, we excavate the origins and outcomes of a protracted ‘harmonisation’ process that ultimately prioritised the interests of national commercial broadcasters. We also show how SVOD production incentives came to be preferenced over catalog quotas as a mechanism for cultural policy. In this way, our analysis explores how one mid-sized, English-speaking nation initially grappled with the challenges inherent in regulating global platforms, amidst a charged public debate about the future of local screen content.

The choice: violence or poverty

ABSTRACT How to reduce the incidence of domestic violence continues to challenge policymakers in Australia. This article draws upon a Keynote Address delivered at a University of Technology Sydney Symposium on gender equality, domestic violence and work. Through presenting ground-breaking data on domestic violence in Australia, I show the stark situation many women face in Australia – to stay with violent partners or leave a violent relationship and risk poverty. Domestic violence often has immediate and longer-term consequences for employment with as many as 50% of women facing lower incomes and cash flow problems. Existing government policy is inadequate, with a phenomenon of ‘policy-induced poverty’ arising for many women who leave violent relationships. Further research and policy development is required to not only understand the work and employment consequences for women experiencing domestic violence, but examine ways in which policy can be improved to support victims of violence.

Cancer Survivors' Long-Term Health Service Costs in Queensland, Australia: Results of a Population-Level Data Linkage Study (Cos-Q).

Worldwide, the number of cancer survivors is rapidly increasing. The aim of this study was to quantify long-term health service costs of cancer survivorship on a population level. The study cohort comprised residents of Queensland, Australia, diagnosed with a first primary malignancy between 1997 and 2015. Administrative databases were linked with cancer registry records to capture all health service utilization. Health service costs between 2013–2016 were analyzed using a bottom-up costing approach. The cumulative mean annual healthcare expenditure (2013–2016) for the cohort of N = 230,380 individuals was AU$3.66 billion. The highest costs were incurred by patients with a history of prostate (AU$538 m), breast (AU$496 m) or colorectal (AU$476 m) cancers. Costs by time since diagnosis were typically highest in the first year after diagnosis and decreased over time. Overall mean annual healthcare costs per person (2013–2016) were AU$15,889 (SD: AU$25,065) and highest costs per individual were for myeloma (AU$45,951), brain (AU$30,264) or liver cancer (AU$29,619) patients. Our results inform policy makers in Australia of the long-term health service costs of cancer survivors, provide data for economic evaluations and reinforce the benefits of investing in cancer prevention.

The non-normativity of the Global South and the normativity of the Global North: The languaging as the normativity of diversity

Drawing on social media context such as Facebook of international students from the Global South – Mongolia – in Australia, this article indicates that the diversity of “languaging” practices of migrants who come to settle in Australia from the Global South are better understood from the perspective of the “normativity of diversity”. The notion of “languaging” is vital in capturing the current complexity of mixed and hybrid language practices fundamentally produced by the amalgamation of linguistic and cultural resources intersecting with Global South and North social, cultural and political landscapes. However, these languaging practices in Australia are neither non-normal nor substandard linguistic productions as mostly imagined in the local monolingual ideology. Instead, languaging practices of the migrants from the Global South in Australia should be understood as part of the new settlers’ normative daily linguistic practices that cut across both online and offline settings. Consequently, it is crucial for language educators and language policy-makers in Australia to reconsider migrants’ linguistic diversity in globalisation through the eyes of the “normativity of diversity”.

Retrospective identification of latent subgroups of emergency department patients: A machine learning approach.

This research aims to (i) identify latent subgroups of ED presentations in Australian public EDs using a data-driven approach and (ii) compare clinical, socio-demographic and time-related characteristics of ED presentations broadly using the subgroups. We examined presentations to four public hospital EDs in Queensland from 2009 to 2014. An unsupervised machine learning algorithm, Clustering Large Applications, was used to cluster ED presentations. There were six subgroups common across the EDs, primarily distinguishable by age, and subsequently by triage category, ED length of stay, arrival mode, departure status and several time-related attributes. Around 10% to 30% of the total presentations had high resource utilisation, with half of these from older patients (55+ years). ED resource utilisation per population was highest among the oldest cohort (75+ years). Children and young adults more frequently presented to the ED outside general-practitioner hours, mostly on Sundays. Older persons were more likely to present at any time, rather than specific hours, days or seasons. ED service performance measured against commonly used access-target indicators were rarely satisfied for older people and frequently satisfied for children. Clustering Large Applications is effective in finding latent groups in large-scale mixed-type data, as demonstrated in the present study. Six types of ED presentations were identified and described using clinically relevant characteristics. The present study provides evidence for policy makers in Australia to develop alternative ED models of care tailored around the care needs of the differing groups of patients and thereby supports the sustainable delivery of acute healthcare.

Development and validation of the risk engine for an Australian Health Economics Model of Osteoporosis.

This study aimed to document and validate the risk engine of the Australian Health Economics Model of Osteoporosis (AusHEMO). AusHEMO is a state-transition microsimulation model. The fracture risks were simulated using fracture incidence rates from the Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study. The AusHEMO was validated regarding its face, internal and cross validities. Goodness-of-fit analysis was conducted and Lin's coefficient of agreement and mean absolute difference with 95% limits of agreement were reported. The development of AusHEMO followed general and osteoporosis-specific health economics guidelines. AusHEMO showed good face validity regarding the model's structure, evidence, problem formulation and results. In addition, the model has been proven good internal and cross validities in goodness-of-fit test. Lin's coefficient was 0.99, 1 and 0.94 for validation against the fracture incidence rates, Australian life expectancies and residual lifetime fracture risks, respectively. In summary, the development of the risk engine of AusHEMO followed the best practice for osteoporosis disease modelling and the model has been shown to have good face, internal and cross validities. The AusHEMO can be confidently used to predict long-term fracture-related outcomes and health economic evaluations when costs data are included. Health policy-makers in Australia can use the AusHEMO to select which osteoporosis interventions such as medications and public health interventions represent good value for money.

A first pass, using pre-history and contemporary history, at understanding why Australia and England have such different policies towards electronic nicotine delivery systems, 1970s-c. 2018.

The United Kingdom and Australia have developed highly divergent policy responses to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). To understand the historical origins of these differences, we describe the history of tobacco control in each country and the key roles played in setting ENDS policy in its early stages by public health regulations and policy networks, anti-smoking organizations, 'vaper' activist networks and advocates of harm reduction policies towards injecting drug use. We analysed key government reports, policy statements from public health bodies and non-government organizations (e.g. cancer councils and medical organizations) on ENDS; submissions to an Australian parliamentary inquiry; media coverage of policy debates in medical journals; and the history of tobacco control policy in Australia and England. Key discourses about ENDS were identified for each country. These were compared across countries during a multi-day face-to-face meeting, where consensus was reached on the key commonalities and divergences in historical approaches to nicotine policy. This paper focuses on England, as different policy responses were apparent in constituent countries of the United Kingdom, and Scotland in particular. Policymakers in Australia and England differ markedly in the priority that they have given to using ENDS to promote smoking cessation or restricting smokers' access to prevent uptake among young people. In understanding the origins of these divergent responses, we identified the following key differences between the two countries' approaches to nicotine regulation: an influential scientific network that favoured nicotine harm reduction in the United Kingdom and the absence of such a network in Australia; the success of different types of health activism both in England and in Europe in opposing more restrictive policies; and the greater influence on policy in England of the field of illicit drug harm reduction. An understanding of the different policy responses to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) in England and Australia requires an appreciation of how actors within the different policy structures, scientific networks and activist organizations in each country and region have interpreted the evidence and the priority that policymakers have given to the competing goals of preventing adolescent uptake and encouraging smokers to use ENDS to quit smoking.

A survey of Australian public attitudes towards funding of high cost cancer medicines

BackgroundIn the past decade many novel, and in some cases transformative, cancer medicines have entered the market. Their prices and the amount spent on them by governments have increased rapidly, bringing to the forefront trade-offs that must be made. In this paper we explore the Australian public’s attitude towards the funding of high cost cancer medicines (HCCM) to inform reimbursement and health technology assessment (HTA) policy. MethodsA survey consisting of 49 questions about the funding of HCCMs was developed by the investigators. Recruitment was conducted via Qualtrics. 1039 Australian adults completed the survey. ResultsThe Australian public overwhelmingly supports funding of HCCMs (95.5 %) to enhance equity of access (97.8 %), and to respond to patients’ needs (98 %). When respondents were challenged to balance equity versus access in different contexts inconsistencies emerged. Different demographic factors were important in predicting support for various strategies. ConclusionOur results suggest that the Australian public strongly supports government funding of HCCMs and values both equity and access. Equally, however, the public is uncertain about how equity and access are to be balanced and achieved, and such ambivalence needs to be both further explored and accommodated in policy processes. Our results may be used by policymakers in Australia, and countries with similar systems and values, to further develop policies and processes for funding HCCMs.

Home Care Providers in Queensland: Exploratory Data Analysis Using My Aged Care Platform

AbstractThe My Aged Care website, established by the Australian Government, is the starting point for aged care consumers and carers to find information on aged care providers. Using information published on this platform, we compile a unique dataset of 588 approved home care providers in Queensland. This article presents a brief introduction to this dataset, including how they are extracted and what variables are available. We propose some current and future applications of this data with a focus on how it can contribute to evidence‐based policymaking in Australia.

Directors and Officers - Strategic Leadership or Bondage?

Scholarly empirical analyses provide guidance to policy makers in Australia’s ascent from the viral abyss to entrepreneurial sunlit uplands on which post-Covid prosperity might be built. These analyses provide regulatory options which can substantially diminish or lengthen the damage inflicted by the present crisis. They are policy choices only exercisable by the federal government. Damage reduction rests upon releasing the entrepreneurial spirits of directors, most of whom control SME’s of various corporate forms. Present regulatory policy and the posture adopted by the regulators is achieving the opposite ― being responses to demonstrated egregious behaviours of the past. In the present environment, this is akin to fighting the last war. Present policy initiatives focus on tax and economic policy rather than the removal of the dead-hand of spirit-crushing regulation. This paper proposes three options to facilitate entrepreneurship ― to increase business capital availability, consistency in definitions, and to address the insurability of directors and officers. Each are consistent with Hayne’s law simplification proposals and none re-open opportunities for a return to egregious behaviours.

Strategic environmental assessment of urban plans in Australia: the case study of Melbourne Urban Extension Plan

ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand the procedural effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) of urban planning in Australia. The SEA has been practiced in Australia over the last two decades under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act of 1999. After the reform of EPBC Act in 2006, the application of SEA in urban sector has been widened. By evaluating the procedural practice of SEA of Melbourne Urban Extension Plan using a set of evaluation criteria, the study shows that most of the procedural requirements were confirmed by the SEA of the plan. There were some shortcomings including, among others, inadequate consideration of cumulative impacts, socio-economic impacts and the analysis of alternatives at different stages of SEA. The possible reasons behind these shortcomings were explained based on the context of SEA in Australia. Furthermore, this study explored some key features of SEA system in Australia those may influence the SEA practice. The findings of the study can be useful to the application of SEA of urban planning in addition to practitioners, academics and policy makers in Australia or elsewhere.