ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Unpacking lessons for the public service, starting with the Robodebt Royal Commission.
In 2019, after three years, Robodebt was found to be unlawful. The Royal Commission process found it was also immoral and wildly inaccurate.
In 2019, after three years, Robodebt was found to be unlawful. The Royal Commission process found it was also immoral and wildly inaccurate.
Ultimately the Australian Government was forced to pay $1.8bn back to more than 470,000 Australians.
In this podcast we dive deep into public policy failures like Robodebt and the British Post Office scandal - how they start, why they're hard to stop, and the public service lessons we shouldn't forget.
Update frequency:
biweekly
Average audio length:
44 minutes
Guest interviews
English
Australia
84 episodes
since July 1, 2023
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
You might like to get in the mood for AFL footy finals by revisiting this first episode of our three part series on the Essendon Footy club drug scandal! Meanwhile we will keep enjoying our late winter / early spring hiatus 😇
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“Lack of good governance is why good people did bad things at Essend…
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
In honour of forthcoming Victorian and NSW elections, we are republishing this episode during our late winter hiatus. Enjoy!!
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The starter's gun has gone on Australia's national elections for 2025 and Parliament has been prorogued.
In this episode, former head of Cabinet Office and ke…
Danielle talks with Georgia Heath from Yup Yup Labs about what becomes obvious when you design services from far away, and why remote communities expose the hidden assumptions baked into policy, technology and “digital by default”.
We also dig into who gets excluded when the public service recruits…
We talk with Eleanor Williams from the Australian Centre for Evaluation about making evaluation fast, rigorous, and genuinely useful for public service decisions. We move from a 40,000-person employment services RCT to the practical steps that make testing possible, then unpack why transparency and…
Three-quarters of government evaluations are commissioned to improve implementation. Two-thirds are commissioned for accountability.
They're not the same thing, and building a system that serves both turns out to be harder than it looks.
This episode is about the structural tension between bac…
Budget season is here — and it’s tighter than many public servants have been used to. Across Australian jurisdictions, governments are landing budgets with real constraints: restrained spending, savings packages, efficiency dividends, and the ever-popular one-in-two-out hiring freeze.
In this episo…
In 1997, Tony Blair’s government inherited a problem: tuberculosis in cattle was rising, farmers were furious, and nobody agreed on whether badgers were responsible. The solution was to commission a gold-standard randomised control trial — 30 sites across the southwest of England, three conditions,…
Inspired by the new podcast The Curiosity Shop, Alison, Danielle and Caroline take on the things they might never agree on — welcome to TWT Fight Club.
In the ring:
Do academic and conceptual frameworks actually help public servants do their jobs, or are they a privilege that most people simply …
A new hypothetical scenario, this time from the big smoosh of middle management.
Imagine if... your Minister has announced a 15-day processing target, your team is already drowning, there's no cutting corners, and there's no extra resourcing.
In this episode, Alison, Danielle and Carolin…
How public can public servants be in the social media age? Is having a LinkedIn account a professional necessity, or a professional risk?
In this episode, Danielle, Alison and Caroline unpack the history, rules and realities of what public servants can say, post, share and support publicly. From Li…
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