One of the characteristic features of modern western democracies is, as John Ralston Saul has pointed out, that it has focused on the development of narrow forms of expertise and then used reason to apply that narrow expertise to addressing specific social, cultural, economic and political issues. This is particularly true of the proliferating management elites produced by the also proliferating Business Schools in Universities across the West.

Those schools tend towards a focus on method, not on solutions. A good example is the Harvard Business School focus on the “case study”, which has been widely adopted in business schools across the West. It has been used as a way of training the managers needed by business and government to run organisations in accordance with an ideology. That ideology sets the general characteristics of the solution in advance and then develops methods to enable the logic that enables arrival at that pre-determined solution. No questioning of that pre-determined solution is allowed and hence the focus of the training is on the development and refinement of methods that will enable the application of reason to arrive at that solution.

These business schools resemble in that sense the work of Medieval Scholastics or Schoolmen who dominated European thought from the 9th right through until the 17th Century. They accepted the teachings of Roman Catholicism as fundamental truths and then sought to apply reason and logic to those fundamental truths to arrive at policies, both secular and ecclesiastical, that arose out of those “truths”. They were essentially in the service of the Roman Catholic Church and the divine right of Kings. They were the paid advisors to the Church and the various monarchies whose role was to demonstrate with logic and reason that the existing order of Church and monarchical authority were the natural order of things and were not subject to improvement or change.

The focus of both is in confirming the correctness of the current order and simply treats as beyond the pale any ideas that do not support that order. Both also therefore constrain the application of reason and logic, which were the gifts of Athenian democracy, to quite narrow fields of “knowledge”. This focus has led, in both cases, to narrowing the view of social, cultural, economic and political issues to the specific field of specialisation.

Western Democracies have decided, as the increasing complexity of their societies in the last couple of centuries has grown exponentially, that the machinery of government must be simplified to enable coherent management of the growing range of government activities. This led to the emergence of a whole series of fields that government needs to administer. This has led to a focus on structure , at the expense of outcomes. The proliferation of narrowly focused government departments has been the result. Concomitant with this proliferation of structures has gone the development of bureaucracies focused on a narrow area of policy. That is done in order to make sense of the world around them in terms of the reigning ideology. They then develop policies and advice to governments that treat everything that is not a direct part of their narrow specialisation as unimportant. It resembles the modern economic theories that exclude everything important in the real world from their theories in order to make those theories work. The real world is treated as exogenous and therefore irrelevant.

The overall effect has normally been the development of policies in particular portfolios that fail to take any account of the real world that surrounds that narrow specialisation but that may temporarily be seen to solve a problem or dilemma in that narrow area, whilst creating often bigger and more serious problems in that real world outside their mind models.

Examples of this propensity proliferate like blow-flies at a barbecue.

When John Howard decided to make home ownership an investment rather than a place to live and created policies to achieve that, problems of inadequate incomes, higher interest rates, an inadequate housing stock and inadequate investment in accompanying transport, health and educational infrastructure made that policy, the cause of the major homelessness and accompanying infrastructure problems we are experiencing today. The same could be said about the development of policies to reduce governmental expenditures on post-secondary education. That has led to a vast shortage of skills in a wide range of areas that have stifled economic growth and the development of new and more sustainable industries. In other words, the fact that government policies get put together in silos means that policy is only coincidentally developed and implemented in a socially, economically and culturally productive manner.

The solution of course is that policy development needs to be far more sophisticated and inclusive. That raises the question of how you do that.

It seems to me that at least a part of the solution is that policy skills in the public sector need to be dramatically improved and need to be organised in an integrated policy Department that is separate from the Departments that implement those policies.

That Department, or it could be a statutory body associated with Universities across Australia, that uses the most sophisticated digital and AI skills to test policy ideas in the real world to determine what are all the unintended consequences of those policy ideas, prior to their adoption into administrative practice.

That policy group should not be constrained in the development of those policies by ideological presuppositions so that the policies developed are intended to deal with the problems in the real world unconstrained by those pre-dispositions.

Those policy studies should be public documents such that when government proposes to implement those policy solutions their reasons are clear and are understood and supported by the public.

Adopting that approach will render our pretend and ineffective democracy real and functional!