CHAPTER ONE
I NTRODUCTION AND O VERVIEW
1.6 Research Methodology: Historical Documentary Analysis
The research question concerns the integrity and viability of ESD as a concept, in part by reference to theoretical considerations and in part by reference to governmental
deliberation and action. The latter raises the following questions for this research: did government (in this context, ministers, officials or both) understand the nature of ESD; did they understand what implementing a goal of ESD would require; and if they did understand these things, did they act consistently with their understanding? If all three questions are answered in the affirmative and if ESD is the coherent concept that the thesis argues it to be, any policy failure must have been due to ‘conventional’ factors such as under-funding or inadequate administration. On the other hand, if, as the thesis will argue, some of these questions must be answered in the negative, the task is to identify how and why government failed to understand and implement ESD.
1.6.1 Why This Method?
The research seeks to test this hypothesis of government failure, first by reference to the thinking of officials, as revealed in high-level deliberative documents and formal advice to governments, and second by reference to the understanding and intent of ministers, as
98 Bruce Moore (ed) Australian Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2005), fourth definition of ‘generation’.
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revealed in their cabinet submissions and official written policy statements.99 In the Australian system, cabinet submissions are drafted by officials but sponsored by ministers under their own name and responsibility for content, while cabinet memoranda are the work of officials alone.100 In both cases, the documents contain ‘coordination comments’ from departments other than those preparing them.101 These documents therefore set out views from a range of officials, and in the case of submissions also reflect the views of the sponsoring minister. Individual ministerial policy views are otherwise on the public record only when canvassed occasionally in memoirs.102 Collective views adopted by ministers in Cabinet (ie the official views of Government) are revealed in policy statements.103
The writer selected documentary analysis as the research method on the basis that high- level deliberative documents and policy statements were the richest source of evidence on policy thinking. While analysis of these documents might have been supplemented by interviews, allowing, in Bowen’s terms, a ‘triangulation’ with inferences drawn from the documents,104 the writer opted to maximise the breadth of analysis, on the basis that this approach was most likely to reveal new evidence. This was primarily because the relevant events occurred over 25 years ago and the information sought concerned the detail of complex policy thinking, possibly difficult to recall.
1.6.2 Access to Australian Government Records
The writer obtained ‘special access’ to environment department records under the Archives Act 1983 (Cth).105 This Act enables an authorised decision-maker in the relevant
department to grant access in certain cases to records that are not yet publicly available because they do not yet fall within the ‘open access period’ under the Archives Act 1983
(Cth), defined at the time of writing as applying to documents created before 1996.106 The
99 Pursuant to the Archives Act 1993 (Cth), most records of the Commonwealth Government, including Cabinet submissions and memoranda, were, in 2018, publicly available if generated in or before 1995. 100 Australian Government, ‘Cabinet Handbook’ (10th Edition Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017) 19–20.
101 Ibid 20.
102 Individual ministerial views may be recorded in Cabinet notebooks but most of the notebooks relevant to this thesis are not yet released: under s 22A of the Archives Act 1983 (Cth), Cabinet notebooks, which often record the views of individual ministers, prepared in 1983 or earlier were publicly available in 2018. 103 Of course, individual Cabinet ministers might have opposed a proposed policy statement, or might endorse a collective view with reservations or reluctance, but for present purposes the principle of Cabinet solidarity can be applied to justify the conclusion that any document endorsed by Cabinet reflected the thinking of the Government.
104 See Glenn A Bowen, ‘Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method’ (2009) 9(2) Qualitative Research
Journal 27.
105 See section 56, together with Archives Regulations (Cth), reg 9. 106 See Archives Act 1983, ss 3, 31.
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relevant ground on which the writer, a former senior executive of the environment department, was granted access was that:
(ii) … the work is likely to make a substantial contribution to the recording and assessment of events in the political, social, economic, cultural, scientific or other development of Australia, particularly as that development relates to the administration or affairs of the Government of the Commonwealth.107
The writer’s perspective as a former senior official was that successive governments appeared to have moved away progressively from ESD, without formal deliberation, despite the apparent coherence of the concept and the worsening nature of the problems to which it responded. In the apparent absence of viable alternatives, a comprehensive analysis of ESD and the reasons why successive governments had moved away from it, might make a useful contribution to future policy development. Access was granted to documents created prior to September 2013, a time selected to exclude records of the current government.
Record Searches
This section describes the approach used by the writer to search records made available under ‘special access’.
The Environment Department operates a records database, which can be interrogated by the file name or the name of the work unit.108 File names may include one or more of the following: a topic, a work unit, a government program title, or an activity such as the organisation of a conference. Searches can be restricted to a range of dates. The search method was that the writer provided the department with lists of search terms; the department then provided the writer with lists of files with titles containing those terms and the writer then selected files to review; he then identified documents relevant to the research by viewing the file contents. This was the most thorough way to identify relevant records, short of examining all files created in relevant periods, an impossibly large task.
107 Reg 9(2)(d).
108 Almost all records during the period covered by the research were held on (physical) files. Towards the end of that period the environment department began transitioning to a records system that is mostly based on electronic files.
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Because the database search parameters are designed to assist management rather than research, the level of assurance that well-directed searches would reveal all relevant documents was not as high as would apply to a search of library records. Further, the writer found that the standard of record-keeping varied, even though that standard was, overall, high. As a result of these factors, there were a few documents which the writer was unable to locate, such as final ministerial advice when the file contained only a final draft. Overall however, the writer’s assessment is that the search method revealed the vast majority of relevant records.109 These comments also apply to publicly accessible records held in the National Archives, which, like those of the environment portfolio, are organised by agency, file series and file name, rather than by subject per se.