Weekend Reading & Selected Links
Happy holidays! Here are some links to things I've been reading or watching that you might also enjoy:
- My new podcast conversation, with Glyn Davis and Terry Moran. At the bottom of this email, I've included five excerpts.
- Frontier breakthroughs in 2025, by Gavin Leech, Lauren Gilbert, and my friend Ulkar Aghayeva.
- 'Industrial Policy: When Is Business the Government's Business?'.
- Phoebe Arslanagic-Little on South Korea's fertility bust.
- A podcast series on the 2005 Bali bombings, by my old high school debating coach (and Bali bombings survivor) Joe Frost.
- 'The Best Treatment for the Most Painful Medical Condition Is Illegal', Peter Singer.
- America's new National Security Strategy.
- The Digitalist Papers, Volume 2.
- 'Staring into the abyss as a core life skill', Ben Kuhn.
- 'Pax Silica'.
- 'The Chaos Theorem and Republican Division', Sandro Sharashenidze.
- Gavin Leech's stock-take on AI progress in 2025.
- 'Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease'.
- 'Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance', via Tyler Cowen.
- Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen's call for an aesthetic for the 21st century.
Thanks, and best wishes for the year ahead,
Joe
Five excerpts from my podcast with Glyn Davis & Terry Moran
1. Have prime ministers been getting more powerful?
JOSEPH WALKER: Have prime ministers been getting more powerful in Australia?
GLYN DAVIS: There's a very interesting Canadian study by Professor [Peter] Aucoin, 30 years old now, but it basically says the core executive — the centre of government — reconfigures around each prime minister.
That the prime minister is such an important part of the system that the system actually adjusts around them. So some prime ministers are more dominant than others; some are more interventionist than others. But in a sense, their preferred style comes to dominate the process.
That's a really interesting observation. It tells you that the core institutions are relatively malleable; that is, they can change quite quickly in response to personalities. But it also probably tells you that you can't leave a lasting mark — that you can change the dynamics while you're the prime minister, but when you go, the system will reconfigure around the next person.
So some prime ministers are more powerful than others. I can't see a trend.
2. The reality of collective decision making
JOSEPH WALKER: Say I'm a minister who wants to come fully informed to Cabinet meetings and contribute to the collective debate, even on a line portfolio that doesn't directly impinge on my own — and I know not every minister is like this, and not every minister has time to read every Cabinet submission, but hypothetically I'm a minister who does. On average, how many hours would I spend reading Cabinet submissions? (And assume I don't read the attachments.)
TERRY MORAN: Oh, well, paper’s that thick or thicker [gestures].
GLYN DAVIS: So once you get disciplined about doing it, you know how to do it and you know what you're looking for. In a sense, you're reading the material in the early pages of the submission.
WALKER: The executive summary.
DAVIS: To see if it raises concerns. There might be a point at which you say, "I'm pretty comfortable with this; it makes sense," and move on.
I still think you're up for a couple of hours of solid reading.
WALKER: And that's just picking and choosing.
DAVIS: And that's just not diving deeper than you need to. If you want to read everything, including all the attachments, you'd better put a day aside, or whatever it is.
MORAN: Glyn's right. Well-crafted Cabinet submissions at the Commonwealth level and at the state level are very brief at the beginning part, but able to cover all the relevant points. Therefore, a minister might want to go further if they had a particular interest in a particular point, or they were the Treasurer or Finance Minister and were really worried about the proposal to spend a lot of extra money; they needed to find some way to either justify or block it. And so it all depends where you're coming from.
DAVIS: The Secretary of PM&C would spend several hours every week going through Cabinet submissions, not just this week's and next week's, but pipeline things. They would have multiple meetings with those shadow teams during the week just to review where we're up to on submissions, including a significant one a couple of days out from the Cabinet papers being distributed to ministers, to finalise how we're going to brief on a submission. So for us, that would take a whole day’s of work in that.
So a minister who wants to be completely thorough is looking at a fairly similar time commitment.
MORAN: In the two Secretary roles that I had, I tried to make sure that there was at least one Deputy Secretary who was really on top of the range of policy issues of concern to the government. It was his or her job to really go through it.
And if they missed anything, they copped it. [laughs] But they tended not to, so that's just a sign that, yes, there's a sieving process.
DAVIS: When I worked in Queensland, Premier Goss would make us sit in front of him for an hour before the Cabinet meeting, and he would practise by interrogating us on the Cabinet agenda. He would always find the paragraph you hadn't read and ask you the probing question, and you just dreaded that sort of thing. [laughs] So we'd spend much of the weekend reading the Cabinet books and hope to get through this meeting on Monday morning.
We enjoyed it when he travelled. [laughs]
MORAN: Well, I worked for three premiers in Victoria and two prime ministers, and none of them did that to me.
DAVIS: [laughs] You're very fortunate.
3. How does the PM find time for deep thinking?
WALKER: Paint me a picture of what the PM's diary would look like. Are they just staggering from meeting to meeting, or what does a typical day look like in Canberra?
DAVIS: Well, it depends greatly on whether Parliament is sitting, because it's a completely different world when Parliament is sitting. So let's start there.
When Parliament is sitting, the tactics meetings will start very early.
WALKER: Like 7:00 am?
DAVIS: 7:00 am or earlier. The PM may or may not float in and out of that meeting. It's normally led by the Leader of the House rather than the PM, but nonetheless the PM's staff will be there because you're deciding tactics for the day. But you're also deciding what legislation you're bringing forward and priorities, and trying to game the way the day's likely to play out, with an eye to the media and an eye to your programme.
Meanwhile, the PM will start the day either there or in meetings with her or his own office, where they do some of that briefing we've just talked about — what's going on, what's important, what are we going to get across today. There'll be a tricky negotiation with the secretaries who manage the diary about who's going to get in and who's not and how we're going to do that. The number of people wanting to get in is always vastly over the [capacity].
...
So, you know, we're only up to 8:00 or something, and already you've got a plethora of meetings. There'll be a series of ministers hanging around outside hoping to get five minutes. There'll be the media adviser who just wants one minute to discuss an issue, and there'll be lots of those. Then there'll be formal meetings through the day — diplomats and other significant people.
If Parliament's sitting, that's when all the big delegations turn up: the business councils, the unions, the people who want attention from the government. So you've got to deal with all of those; they all sit in your diary.
Meanwhile, all the cabinet meetings still happen. Committee meetings in particular still happen, particularly if you're in the middle of a budget process. So it's not uncommon for the bells to ring in the middle of a committee meeting, and if it’s the Reps — all the members [of the House of Representatives] having to stand up and walk out of the meeting, including the Prime Minister, to go and vote on a resolution, and then come back and pick up the meeting.
MORAN: Oh, the poultry.
DAVIS: [laughs] Yes. And so everybody's watching the clock, which has the red and the green lights on it, because inside the Cabinet Room it's silent; you can't hear the bells, but you can see the lights.
...
But just to finish, that pattern of rushing into the House — and then, of course, you have to be briefed for question time. You then have to do question time if you're the prime minister, which is a very significant commitment. All the time there are people trying to get in to see you.
It's hard to convey just how demanding it is, whoever you are, if you're the prime minister — and how someone like John Howard did the job for [11.5] years without falling over is a singular achievement, I have to say. You can see the exhaustion on their faces quite quickly. It is the most demanding of roles, and not just for the prime minister, for the treasurer and lots of senior ministers as well.
Parliament House reinforces this because it's never-ending; there's no escape, in a sense. If you're the prime minister, you are the centre of attention the whole time, wherever you go. And, you know, just how do you get any off time? How do you get [inaudible]? Which is why The Lodge makes sense as a place that you can escape to behind a wall.
...
WALKER: Is there anything else interesting to say on what an average non-sitting day looks like? Or is it just kind of much the same but without—
DAVIS: Just the same without having to go into parliament, into the chamber, to vote. They're full days. But of course, prime ministers also travel a lot domestically.
So a prime minister, when parliament's not sitting, would be much more likely to schedule meetings interstate to go and do openings and do all of those things, many of which are programmed a long way out, so you're sort of committed to the programme.
It gets very difficult if something arises that changes the dynamics, which only intensifies the time pressure, because often you're under pressure to do it anyway, but you've had to divert to some other, more immediate issue. And so you're constantly trying to make up the lost time. It is demanding, exhausting, and it requires a degree of good grace from everyone involved to recognise what's being asked of an individual...
One of the reasons for some of the travel is that it just gives you thinking time. Sitting on a plane for two hours to Adelaide or Brisbane is two hours you can actually talk to people on the plane, think, work through issues. It actually matters, because otherwise there's very little reflection time.
4. What great book remains to be written on government in Australia?
WALKER: What do you think is a great book that remains to be written about either an underrated individual in the history of Australian government or just the mechanics of government?
...
DAVIS: It’s a great question. Having somebody interview a series of prime ministers after they’ve left — to do the compare and contrast: how they understood the role, what they were trying to do, how it worked.
PMs all write their autobiography — and so they should — and that’s a useful thing to read. But having a Pat Weller go in and ask, [and do] the same interviews, so that we get a sense of how the role looks when you sit in it —because it’s so fast; it happens so quickly while you’re there that you must come out of it at the other end slightly shell-shocked by all of it.
It would be great if we could arrange for someone to walk them through it while they’re still with us and while the memories are still moderately fresh. Almost a process where, six months after you finish as prime minister, you go to the National Library or somewhere and somebody interviews you at length. And there’s a tradition of being frank, and maybe you don’t release it for 20 years or whatever, so people can say what they experienced. That is what I would like to read.
5. Where does Australia's talent for bureaucracy come from?
WALKER: Australia’s “talent for bureaucracy” — where does it come from?
...
MORAN: Well, it’s not so much what has been written as what some of the old hands say about the Victorian public service. In the late nineteenth century, following the release of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report in London, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report was picked up as a basis for how you would organise the Victorian colonial service or public service. This is before Federation.
When we federated, the basis of the Federation was in Victoria, and many Victorian public servants were transferred across to the new Commonwealth public service. They took with them an understanding of the Northcote–Trevelyan principles about merit-based recruitment and advancement on merit, and so on and so forth.
So a lot of the features of the public services in Australia, but particularly the Commonwealth and Victoria, come from historical accidents over a century ago. That wasn’t towards any ill result; it was just that we were greatly influenced by what the British were doing.
DAVIS: Yeah, that clearly does matter.
MORAN: Yeah.
DAVIS: It probably helps that we don’t have an aristocracy.
MORAN: It’s a pity, actually, isn’t it? They could go in the Senate. [laughs]
WALKER: Why does it help that we don’t have an aristocracy?
DAVIS: Because in the British civil service and the British Army you had to buy [positions].
MORAN: That was in the nineteenth century.
DAVIS: Yes, in the nineteenth century. But we never had any of that in the same way, so we didn’t have to overturn a set of cultural traditions that were so much more embedded.
Northcote–Trevelyan basically said, “It’s time to begin change.” But the change takes a long time, and they recommend, interestingly, that we learn from the Chinese and use civil service exams.
MORAN: And merit-based recruitment and advancement.
DAVIS: Yeah.
MORAN: And that was early in its introduction into the Victorian public service and spilled over into the Commonwealth public service after Federation.
DAVIS: Yeah.
MORAN: So it’s a bit of good luck, in my view.
DAVIS: Yeah, I think that’s a fair call. We’ve been very fortunate and well served by it.
MORAN: And so when you look at the States — you are not going to like this — but I used to go around talking about New South Wales as the home of the Rum Corps, which it sort of was. [laughs]
DAVIS: I think the New South Wales administration improved, though, over time. [laughs]
MORAN: There were some people we both know that I liked taunting with that remark. They never liked it. [laughs]
Anyway, the point is that Victoria was the state that, in the lead-up to Federation, had a chance to form a public service on the British model. And then, after Federation, it exported into the Commonwealth those people who knew that system when they were working in Victoria and were instructed in the principles of merit-based recruitment and all that sort of stuff.
DAVIS: If you were going to be a sceptic, though, you’d say the abiding Australian fault was the seniority system that we imposed. Certainly the criticism of state systems — perhaps less in Victoria, but certainly strongly in Queensland for a long time — was that it was a very seniority-based system.
WALKER: And sorry, that’s promotion based on length of time served?
DAVIS: Length of time served, as opposed to merit application.
MORAN: Well, when I first became associated with the Victorian system, there was a very strong merit system, including merit-based recruitment in the first place into the public service. And the Commonwealth used to do that.
Another bit of history is that, when Sir Robert Menzies was Prime Minister, he was despairing of the then Commonwealth public service. He was told that the only person who could fix it had to be forgiven for the things he’d done in the past that the Liberals didn’t like, and he should be brought back to Australia from Switzerland, where he was in a very comfortable appointment, to take over reform of the Australian public service. And that was Fred Wheeler.
DAVIS: Fred Wheeler, yes.
MORAN: So Fred came back and took up the position of Chairman of the Commonwealth Public Service Board and set about a whole series of merit-based enhancements of how the Commonwealth public service worked.
When Menzies was Prime Minister and dealing with the Liberal government in Victoria, the Commonwealth reforms in Canberra had gone so well that he sent somebody down to aid Lindsay Thompson, who was then the Premier, to look at why the Victorian public service was so hopeless.
Basically, the recommendations out of that led to recruitment of a new top level in the Victorian public service, including a new chair of the Public Service Board, who was Ron Cullen, you might remember. So the Commonwealth and Victorian public services advanced under the influence of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report, with its emphasis on merit both for recruitment and promotion.
It’s a fairly conventional view of what public services should do. We were lucky here, whereas the Rum Corps ruled the roost in Sydney.
WALKER: [laughs] It’s a really interesting point. I had never really realised that point about the Victorian public service playing such an important role.
Victoria, just generally — Melbourne in particular — feels like it’s had an outsized impact on Australia’s kind of Benthamite view of government, if you think about people like David Syme and Deakin. And Henry Higgins was from Melbourne, I think?
MORAN: Yeah, I think so.