The Westminster Tradition

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 Essendon Football Club”. So says Lindsay Tanner, former Minister for Finance, and President of the Essendon Football Club from 2015...

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 keeper of the Caretaker Conventions, Alison answers Caroline and Danielle's increasingly pointed questions, and we end with arguing about the importanc...

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 narrowly, and what changes when we treat people with lived experience as genuine partners with real power.

Other topics inclu...

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 mixed methods matter when the stakes are high. Along the way we discuss:

• turning a mutual obligation debate into a 'fact question'&n...

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 backward-looking accountability — did we deliver what we promised? — and the forward-looking question of whether we're actually learni...

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 episode, Caroline, Alison and Danielle get into what that actually means for the people who have to keep delivering. How do you le...

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, run by an independent scientific group. Proper science. No cutting corners.

Eleven years and £49 million later, the ...

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 don't have time for?
• Central agencies: great idea, but are they delivering? The trio debates whether they're connectors ...

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 Caroline unpack the impossible balancing act of middle management in high-pressure public sector environments: communicating risk upward without sound...

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 LinkedIn humblebrags and anonymous Twitter accounts, to global political conflicts, the conversation explores how Westminster principles of...

In her first interview since the release of the NACC’s report into Robodebt, Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour joins us to unpack her findings and what it all means for the public service. This is a rare chance to go beyond the written report with candid reflections on the conditions that led to one of most significant failures of public administration in Australia, and the complexities of the accountability process. 

In ...

On 11 March, the National Anti-Corruption Commission released its findings on Robodebt. It found that two of the six referred public servants engaged in serious corrupt conduct, and four did not. 

Caroline, Alison and Danielle discuss three things: the "low level" code of conduct failures that created the toxic soil in which corrupt conduct could grow; the detail of the NACC's findings on the Robodebt Six; and the harder, unres...

In our last episode on Mad Cow Disease, we take our final lessons from the public servicing of this massive health, agricultural and economic crisis. With the benefit of hindsight, we weigh the significant market interventions and public perception against actual transmission data. 

In this episode:

• What decision making looks like under radical uncertainty, where its government's job to keep things running.
• The massive supply...

It’s March 1996 and the UK Government announces that mad cow disease has been linked to human cases. Within days beef consumption falls by half, public confidence is non-existent, and ministers begin meeting in chaotic quasi-cabinet groups sometimes twice a day.

In this episode we discuss:

• How to brief best in the chaos of things changing by the hour 
• Whether policy should change when the risk hasn't changed, but risk p...

Few people come to policy officer positions with specific policy training. They might be teachers, lawyers, front-line workers or subject-matter experts. Who teaches us how to do policy work, and what policy actually is? Enter Salli Cohen’s brilliant new book, 'Rollercoaster: How to be a bloody good policy officer.'

In this episode we catch up with Salli about:

• Her one-word definition of policy.
• What it takes to be a genuine...

Part 2 of 4 on Mad Cow Disease: In this episode,  the cracks in enforcement are showing, panic is slowly boiling, and the science is catching up. 

What we cover: 

• The panic spike when BSE appears in domestic cats
• The danger of stopping at the legislation, without interrogating whether industry is complying and how you would know.
• The reassurance cycle – shock, anxiety, reassurance, repeat, and whether the Gover...

We kick off a new series on 'Mad Cow Disease', or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), and what it teaches us about governing when the science is uncertain, the consequences are enormous, but the risks are very remote.

• Why BSE became a lasting symbol of government failure and secrecy, even though major inquiries later found decisions were largely science led.  
• Where to draw the line for regulatory settings with big marke...

We want to make lasting and meaningful change, but how do we get there? In this special episode Caroline interviews Frances Foster-Thorpe and Jason Tabarias about their insights into the skills and frameworks needed to tackle large, complex and ambitious reform.

We cover: 

• Biting off what you can chew by picking two of three factors: volume, cost, quality
• Examples of big Australian reforms that did and didn't hit the mark
• Lini...

Buy a sports car or start a podcast. It all could have gone the way of a new hobby, with audio kit languishing in a drawer. Instead, this podcast has become a study and celebration of the tricky craft of public service, and it's a source of pure joy for us. 

Reflecting on three years of TWT: 

• Humble and haphazard beginnings
• What’s changed since the Robodebt Royal Commission 
• Our favourite interviews, scandals, ...