The Westminster Tradition
In 2019, after three years, Robodebt was found to be unlawful. The Royal Commission process found it was also immoral and wildly inaccurate.
Episodes
84 episodes
🐊When the rains come: the gap between policy and delivery in remote Australia with Georgia Heath 🐊
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 als...
🧪🧮 We CAN test big policy ideas without slowing government down: Eleanor Williams from the Australian Centre for Evaluation 🧮🧪
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 ...
The moment of maximum ignorance: evaluation in public policy part 2
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.<...
💰 ‘Not your money’: reflections from government budget season ✂️
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 e...
Grumpy, elusive creatures defending well-defined territory: evaluation in public policy 🦡
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 s...
Fight club: things we never agree on
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 conc...
Smart dissent: middle management
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 resourc...
Seen and not heard
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 publi...
Kylie Kilgour, Deputy Commissioner at the NACC: On Robodebt
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 w...
Robodebt: Reflections on the NACC's Findings
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 discus...
Mad Cow Disease part 4 - unblocking the beef chain
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 percep...
Mad Cow Disease part 3 - too much on Monday, too little on Thursday
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 some...
What Makes a Bloody Good Policy Officer?
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 bri...
'Mad Cow Disease' part 2 - a bogus professor and a dead cat
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...
'Mad Cow Disease' part 1 - a crisis without a crime
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 bec...
How to do Big Reform
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...
How It Started v How It’s Going: 3 years of TWT
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 pur...
Buzzword Bingo
In this Christmas special, Caroline, Alison and Danielle unwrap the public service’s most gear-grinding buzzwords, what they’re supposed to mean and what they have now quietly become. With words crowdsourced from the fine listeners of TWT, we t...
Imagine if... you were leading an orchard of bad apples
Your shiny new promotion turns out to be more than you bargained for. In this scenario-based "Imagine if..." episode, Caroline and Danielle assume the role of a newly promoted manager who steps into a team they didn’t choose and som...
Imagine if … your sleepy grants program woke up
When politics meets process, what’s a conscientious public servant to do? This “Imagine if…” episode puts Alison and Danielle in the shoes of a project manager caught between legality, leadership and media heat — and explores what good judgment...
Inside the public service's ‘Human Handbrake’: why reform stalls and how to fix it
Demos has released a fascinating paper, The Human Handbrake, on the five human habits that stall public sec...
“It’s just a minor restructure” said no calendar ever
In our second change management episode, Danielle pulls apart the myth of the “minor” restructure and lay out a practical way to change without breaking the work. From function mapping and ministerial comms to union engagement and the “fourth t...
Who Really Moved My Cheese? Tales from the change management trenches
Danielle takes us on a romp through change management, starting, as with all good contrarians, with a challenge to the idea of ‘change management’ itself. Some of the ideas covered:Change is happening all the time in gov...
Regulator/policy cage fight: ANZSOG National Regulators Community of Practice Conference 2025
Our first live show at the wildly successful ANZSOG NRCOP Conference in Brisbane August 2025.The conversation tackles head-on the structural disconnections between our regulatory and policy systems, particularly in federated models like ...
The Hon Tom Koutsantonis MP: Lessons from a Veteran Minister
What makes someone qualified to be a minister? In this candid conversation with Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia's longest-serving current parliamentarian, Danielle explores the fascinating intersection where political leadership meets public ...
