I’m wanting to see more well-rounded policy that can be supported by the major parties regardless of ‘who floated it’, hoping for better enduring government rather than this ‘rip and replace’ bullshit.
Obviously with the right wong think tanks invading, this is nothing more than a thought exercise, but i reckon its worth exploring.
My heretical angle is significantly reducing thenterms that parties have in power - not extending to 4 years but instead reducing to 1 or 18 months. The thinking being: If you cant get anything done because the only work one is interested in doing is ideological nonsense that caters to a narrow part of society maybe it shouldn’t get off the ground in the first place?
Ironically, “running the country like a business”.
Have policy outline an objective, Set KPIs, thresholds, etc. If the policy fails to meet them it gets automatically canned. Otherwise it’s safe.
Want to lower road deaths, that is your policy “lower road deaths by 2030 by 10%”. (Largely) A goal everyone can get behind.
But you’ve got to specify how you measure it, allow all parties to add their own metrics like “average journey time must not increase by 5%” or “maintain 99% licensing in rural communities”.
How you achieve the policy is (mostly) irrelevant. Want to do it by lowering speed? Fine. But that might increase journey time significantly. You could improve driver training, but that might impact rural communities.
Subsequent governments could cancel it, but only if it’s failing its KPIs, or if their new policy is “don’t lower road deaths” or “make cars go faster”
Sounds like the interpetation of statistics becomes a very subjective game.
Any metric that becomes a target, ceases to be a useful metric and all that