This report examines three policy areas which have experienced near-constant upheaval: further education, regional governance and industrial policy.

This article argues that a $3.8 billion expansion of the New South Wales prison estate by 7000 beds represents a failure of public policy. Three reasons are given: first, a lack of evidence to support the expansion; second, because prisons are a blunt and inefficient crime control measure and finally, because of the opportunity cost...

The competing principles framework for analysing Australian Indigenous affairs is revisited, starting with Rowse on 'the Coombs experiment'. Rowse rehabilitates this term from pejorative critics, arguing that all government policy in Indigenous affairs is experimental. The task becomes one of characterising changing patterns of government experiment since the Commonwealth became involved in Indigenous affairs on...

From leaky buildings to financial crashes, from mining disasters to deep water oil spills and from poor patient care to financial misselling, regulation can fail to prevent disasters arising from the risks it is meant to manage. Although each disaster is unique in many respects, analysis of the regulatory failings that contributed to those disasters...

This article argues that the government subsidisation and protection of the car industry is widely recognised as a policy failure.