Why is alcohol policy difficult? - Web viewWhy is alcohol policy difficult? Reflections of a...

Why is alcohol policy difficult?

Reflections of a bureaucrat

Jeff Rich

Introduction

This paper asks the questions why does alcohol policy so often fail, and what makes it difficult? Responses to these questions underlie how both researchers and policy-makersboth conduct and converse about alcohol policy research that aims to have an impact on policy. I reflect on some historical examples of failure and my own personal experience of failure. I draw out three explanations of policy failure - dominant interests, weak ideas, and wicked problems - from my interpretation of debates on alcohol policy. While each explanation contributes insights, ultimately I prefer a fourth explanation. The difficulty of alcohol policy is, rather in the tradition of Bernard Crick's defence of politics, the noble difficulty of politics. Good alcohol policies, then, require less evidence based-policy, and more just political compromises of freedom and responsibility. They require more help for the drinkers, and less control of the drink.

It is not a standard academic research paper, but rather the personal reflections of a former alcohol policy bureaucrat. In that role I read much research and thought deeply and daily on alcohol, the drink question, but the forms in which my thought and research found expression were very different to conference papers of the academic world. In the role, I also had the good fortune to work closely with Professor Robin Room. When I left the role, I said to him that perhaps I ought to write something about my experiences, and Robin encouraged me. I thank Robin and the organisers of the Kettl Bruun conference for accepting this paper, which is more personal essay than academic research paper, as a fulfilment of that commitment.

If not a conventional research paper, it is also not a conventional official's presentation. I have let go of dot points, and paragraphs of more than three sentences, and tried to make sense through reflection of some frankly difficult experiences. The views expressed here, I need to state, are my own. They are not the views of the organisation I work for or the Governments I have served. They are presented in my after-hours capacity as an "independent scholar" and citizen, rather than on behalf of my institutional affiliation. I no longer play any role in alcohol policy. Yet, I still speak without an academic's freedom of speech, restricted by the public service code of conduct and rules on disclosure of confidences, but not completely subservient to them. Moreover, these views are puzzled out while writing, and reflect my own deep uncertainty about the answers.

Temperamentally I am with Vaclav Havel who once said [Havel quote ] But framing these questions and essaying some answers, however partial, are essential tasks to bridging the unfortunate misunderstandings between the worlds of research and governing. Policy impact from alcohol research can only come by bridging those worlds through mutual respect for different manners of thought, not digging in with beliefs about "translating research into practice1."

The Kettl Bruun tradition of alcohol policy

In 1972 Kettl Bruun gave a lecture here in Melbourne, the same city hosting this conference. He was sponsored by the Australian Alcoholism Foundation, then chaired by Weary Dunlop, the celebrated doctor who lived through and helped prisoners of war at Changi and

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subsequently helped many ex-soldiers who struggled with the drink2. He spoke on the theme of how to conceive and prepare a good alcohol policy.

He outlined three dilemmas that needed to be dealt with in order to prepare a "systematically planned alcohol policy." I will discuss just the first dilemma, that is, should the object of policy be alcohol or alcoholism? Bruun argued in favour of the product and not the disease. To "talk about alcohol control instead of alcoholism represents an attempt to influence not only alcoholics and the coming rate of alcoholics, but the societal level of drinking, which may be manipulated by such factors as prices and availability3." But Bruun anticipated, if still making light, of the difficulty, the prospective failure in setting such an objective to control the production and sale of alcohol. Such attempts stood "in contrast to the Western world's ideology of free enterprise...so that in many countries the control seems to fall into line with the philosophy of controlling alcoholics rather than that of the economic interest [which he elsewhere says "endeavours to raise the level of consumption]4." So he seeks to reawaken "the historical development of an advanced philosophy in regard to the importance of excluding private profit from the liquor business," as exemplified in the Gothenburg system of local government owned alcohol stories in [Sweden]. Intriguingly, he primarily makes his argument on the basis of principle rather than effect - or what we might call today evidence-based policy. "Specific control measures have not provided much evidence of effect" he admits, but takes consolation in a methodological argument - "the difficulty in singling out one particular detail of control5." Ultimately, his argument rested on a political point: "in countries which are trying to develop an alcohol policy, an awareness should exist of the importance of controlling the economic interests connected with the production and sale, along with discussion of the practicability of abolishing the hit to advertise, and to control prices and availability6." In other words, it is not a question of what works, but of who does what to whom.

I like to think Bruun's talk that night gave birth to the ideas that still shape modern public health policy arguments about alcohol. In the forty years since great scholars such as Robin Room have elaborated these early ideas, and pursued the philosophy of "excluding private profit from the liquor business" despite a world of ideas increasingly hostile to the political principles that underlay Bruun's argument. While these ideas have on the whole struggled mostly in the political contest, they have generated a rich tradition of scholarship, with thousands of research projects detailing dimensions of the control philosophy. They have also steeled a growing public health lobbying industry who are committed to asserting that the way to solve the drink question is for governments to tax, restrict and ban7.

For seven years, I worked by the long fertile river that flowed from Kettl Bruun's ideas, so many expressed so ably by Robin Room. There I ran the alcohol policy unit in the Victorian Government in one of those recurring times when the "drink question" spilled over from private drinking rooms to the political cabinets of the nation. Good and bad ideas were debated fiercely. Good and bad ideas were implemented both weakly and well. My seven years in that role could be seen as a more apprenticeship compared to the lifetime of research by Kettl Bruun or Robin Room. But my seven years were part of longer quarter century career as a policy bureaucrat, dealing with policy questions large and small, governments strong and weak, issues dull and contentious, ideas favoured and opposed. My time in alcohol policy was thus a period of active inquiry not only about alcohol issues but about the nature

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of governing. It was seven years in which I learnt from small, modest successes, but, more deeply still, from policy failures. It was a fruitful time for reflection not only on new ways of framing the "drink question," but also on how to govern well, and why it is difficult to do both well together. As I finished my time there, I said to Robin Room: perhaps I should write a book about what it all meant. So, this little reflective essay is a first public step towards that work.

I wonder today how Kettl Bruun might judge the success or failure of the program he laid out for alcohol reformers that night. A case could be made, with the greatest respect to the distinguished scholars who work in his memory, that his program has been a policy failure. If we look merely at Australia, few governments have adopted his ideas, notwithstanding the exuberant and never stilled chorus of the public health lobby. Indeed, they have generally adopted an opposing program, symbolically represented in Victoria at least by the liberalisation of liquor licensing laws through the Nieuwenhuysen review of 1986. Yet 42 years on from Bruun's program, despite decades unwinding the control model, with more advertising, more availability, lower prices, fewer regulatory controls and more integration of alcohol treatment into mental health care, Australians drink 25 % less alcohol. The wrong policies appear to be producing the better results. Indeed, for several years WHO debated setting a global target to reduce per capita alcohol consumption relatively in countries by 10 % by 2025. Between x and y Australia achieved x % of this target, and with growing evidence that fewer young people are drinking and drinking less, future falls seem likely prospects. This policy triumph has occurred deep opposition by public health advocates. Surely, in the world of health policy, such a misdiagnosis counts as a failure?

2. Alcohol policy's history of failures

If Bruun's program were counted a failure, he would be in distinguished company. Alcohol policy has a long and distinguished history of policy failures, some tragic, some comic. By policy failures I mean attempts to change societies through public policy that lead to major unanticipated consequences or are defeated by ferocious resistance. The archetypal case of policy failure (perhaps in all policy, not just alcohol policy) is prohibition, and demonstrates both. Prohibition was no accident, no political whim. It resulted from decades of global campaigning, accumulation of evidence and passionate advocacy by the temperance cause. In Victoria, the Maine Law (an early predecessor of prohibition) was being debated in the Victorian Parliament in the 1850s. Yet despite good intentions, evidence and strong coalitions of support, prohibition had disastrous consequences. The USA's 1919 Volstead Act led perhaps to reductions in drinking, but more certainly to resistance and subterfuge (moonshine and corruption) and disastrous unplanned side-effects (crime and unsafe products).

The political history of alcohol contains many such examples. In my role I would study examples as an antidote to the historical ignorance of today's public policy discussions, in which a line graph of data for the last ten years is commonly the deepest reflection you get on the past. I would steel myself when planning education campaigns with the case of the 1950s French President/Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes-France. Mendes-France assembled all the evidence on the harms of liver cirrhosis and the costs of alcohol-related hospital admissions to the war-impoverished French taxpayer, and then launched a campaign to persuade the

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French to drink milk, not wine. He failed, and soon retreated from accusations of pandering to dairy interests and the sneers and cat-calls of every cafe on the left-bank. I would console myself when advising on arguments to change the drinking culture by raising tax on cask wine, with the tale of William Gladstone's attempts in 1882 [check] to change alcohol taxation rates. It was a time when alcohol taxation was a much larger share of government revenue than today, and Gladstone sought both to open the trade of wine with continental Europe and to encourage a civilised culture of wine drinking. But he badly misread the mood of newly widely enfranchised public and its beloved drinking habits, and was so defeated at the 1882 election. Gladstone commented afterwards that "We were washed away in a torrent of beer and gin." There were many times in my seven years as an alcohol policy bureaucrat that I feared I would be washed away in a torrent of vodka and Red Bull.

The historical example of failure, however, that I paid closest attention was early closing hours and its consequences of the six o'clock swill on Australia's, especially Victoria's, drinking culture. Australia has had a long policy obsession with trading hours and outlet density. Victoria never introduced Prohibition, although the idea was first investigated in its first democratic Parliament in the 1850s as the "Maine Law8." In nineteenth century Melbourne temperance advocates knew well "the drinking bill" and all its hidden harms, and had public inquiries into the misuse of opium, but tobacco was mainly seen as a problem when it was used as a cheap adulterant for watered down beer. By the 1880s a rapidly growing, prosperous Melbourne had given birth to strong social reform movements - including temperance - leading to a petition for local laws to cap hotel numbers which attracted the signatures of 25% of the adult female population. In 1885 trading after 11.30 pm was stopped. Temperance conferences went onto debate the Gothenburg system of local government controlled supply of alcohol, and brewers organised together in the early twentieth century a first minimum price for alcohol scheme, as part of the elimination of unhealthy competition when Carlton and United Breweries was formed. Soon after in 1906 the notoriously pure deal-making politician Thomas Bent succumbed to both temperance advocates and hoteliers' interests to establish a liquor licensing buyback scheme was established to reduce the number of hotels. Looking back, you would have to ask what social benefit was gained by spending public money in eliminating competition in the brewing and hotels industry as Victoria went through 40 lean years and public retrenchments. But it took the crisis of war and the sectarian divisions of conscription, for the last step in 1916, when six o'clock was set as closing time. But even trading hours and reducing outlet density was not enough for the temperance advocates. Prohibition was the end game, and they secured an agreement to hold a regular referendum for prohibition or local laws every 10 years in Victoria. This regular referenda is the only one of its kind that I am aware of in the history of Victoria - proof perhaps that alcohol has long been a "whole-of-government" priority, but it never succeeded, and never really came close. The highest vote was recorded in 1932 with 3x% voting yes, inspired by the famous poster - Booze: a shadow over the land. [Insert image] But unwinding the world war one deal took decades and much political frustration - John Cain Senior removed the requirement for a referendum after World War Two. In 1956 freshly elected Henry Bolte, later Premier for 17 years - who according to legend would plot his strategies while sharing a good cigar and a bottle of whisky with his closest advisers - tried but failed to convince voters at a referendum to remove six o'clock closing even if just for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. The referendum on the matter failed x to y %. There was a time in Victoria when a "wowser" was feared, not ridiculed. It then took the Phillips Royal

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Commission at last to unwind 50 years of law creating the drinking culture of the crowded six o'clock swill, which surely was a great Australian ugliness. But advocacy had created its own monster. So Phillips commented that: "the issue of hotel bar trading hours seems to me to be one arousing great public interest. I formed the impression that defence of the existing situation had become, in some cases, an act of faith. Defeat on this issue was important, not so much because it would open the way to an increase of specific social evils or accentuate existing ones, but because it would register defeat for the forces standing for morality and victory for selfishness and self-indulgence. To " Stick to Six , was not solely a programme dictated by a weighing of sociological considerations, but a required resistance to the forces of darkness9. p 24

It was in the backwash of this debate - a mere six years after Phillips had defied the wowsers to propose a different dispensation of morals, freedom and responsibility to suit a 1960s Australia no longer chained to the world view of the Protestant churches and the Salvation Army - that visiting Finn, Kettl Bruun, issued his call to arms for advocates of government control of drinking supply. Today, you could see it as exquisitely badly timed, although great and fertile ideas are rarely timely. Alcohol consumption would shortly reach its post-war peak; there was fair reason for Bruun to be concerned, but from then it began a long decline. The intertwined market and social revolutions of the 1970s were making the world of politics, business and government culturally inhospitable for rekindling policy experiments of Nordic local governments from the nineteenth century. Briefly in the late 1970s a tiring Victorian State Government tried to protect hotel business interests against price cutting by supermarkets by introducing a minimum price scheme for beer, but it did not work and it did not last. Finally in 1986, under Premier John Cain Junior's leadership, and with a young Jeff Kennett supporting as Opposition Leader, John Nieuwenhuysen's review of liquor licensing finally laid to rest the great cause and noble policy failure of alcohol control. [Insert quote] To this day, public health advocates have neither understood nor forgiven him. Even the Victorian Auditor-General felt free to caricature his report without bothering to read it10. The battlefield of ideas had changed, but public health advocates were about to take their battle plans from a general fighting an earlier war. They would have done better to leave them behind, and, to echo another political phrase, declare them dead, buried, cremated.

I have sketched this history with some detail since I found in seven years only a rare few partisans in the debates knew this whole sad story, and so often passionate arguments were based on very weak ideas of the history of the drink question. But I do it with respect and modesty to aid understanding. It can be difficult for bureaucrats to speak openly of the government policy failures to which they contributed, but it is a routine part of governing life. I too failed in my seven years as a policy bureaucrat.

In 2008 the Victorian Government released a comprehensive policy to deal with alcohol covering the full gamut from prevent, regulation and health care actions11. Like any policy document it was a compromise, but it marked a shift. But like many policy documents, as it approached its conclusion, some forces were keen to push an agenda, and to sharpen the political message of the document. A law and order package was added to the balanced if dull compromises. The package was summarised in three cut-through words - the freeze, the crackdown and the lockout. It got the headline it wanted - the Herald-Sun screamed "Booze Party over" on the day of the launch - but that was the lockout's last success.

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The lockout was only added to the package after weeks of internal debate - both on its likely effect on policy - would it work, and its likely effect on polls, how would people respond, especially young people. On both issues, the strategic calculations proved dreadfully wrong. It did not work at all, not least because there were legal problems at the start. And it provoked a furious backlash. There is nothing else I have done in government that got people marching down the streets with signs saying "I want to get drunk at the Tote again." Before too long people twigged that this was not a "policy experiment," but a reactive stunt that was attacking some people's way of life with no clear, achievable political objective. It was an idea born of a policing mindset that was embraced by those who saw it as an attempt to control drinking behaviour. Police, leading doctors, VicHealth and the Australian Drug Foundation all spoke out in favour of the experiment in public. Although I personally never proposed nor advocated the lockout, however, I have always regretted not saying strongly enough, in the confusing and scattered conversations that settled on this policy, that it was a bad idea that would not work.

It very quickly unravelled, and diverted the policy goals to which it was a late appendix. Hubris descended on those who, on the night of the announcement, were cock-a-hoop with how their tough, decisive act of political will was playing on the 6 pm news. But the good headlines disappeared quickly, and the resistance soon blossomed. The decision was challenged and undone in the local administrative tribunal. Trouble on the streets went up, not down. The idea of "venue-hopping" disappeared from discussions almost the moment the decision was made - it was a convenient bit of nonsense that served its purpose of pitching a posture, not solving a problem. New bids for more police resources and powers soon followed, along with high visibility policing operations. But the protest grew. Within weeks thousands of protestors had joined a "no 2 am lockout" facebook page. Very large protest marches gathered around Parliament House. Many bureaucrats - who also enjoyed a good night out - looked on in sympathy. When related additional security requirements for late-night hotels forced owner of the Tote - or so he claimed - to close this institution of inner city drunkenness, people lost their reason. Protest marchers carried signs down Bourke Street saying "I want to get drunk at the Tote again." Cold panic ran through government media staff when a rumour spread that both rock icon, Paul Kelly, and the touring AC-DC would reprise the famous "It's a long way to the top" performance on a truck down Swanston St. Before long, no-one wanted to own up to suggesting the lockout, and its travails were used by others in the bureaucracy to attack and sidetrack me and my colleagues who wanted to deal primarily with the health problems of excessive drinking. In a bizarre sidenote, cultural studies academics developed conspiracy theories that this sad episode was a benighted assault by culturally insensitive wowsers on the live music industry. In fact, it was just a failure, just a complex mistake. It was a classic example of the strange forms of misdiagnosis and group think that can infect politicians, bureaucrats (including those bureaucrats who wear police uniforms) and advocates alike when governing the drunken commons12.

Three unsatisfying explanations of policy failure

All round, it was a dismal experience. I could wallow in the failures, or become distant and cynical, or worse arrogantly deluded in assuming I could never make similar mistakes, and it was only others, who ignored "the evidence," who caused this fiasco. But the fact is

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governing is a people business, and people make mistakes. To admit mistakes, moreover, is to begin to learn the lessons from the difficulties that alcohol policy encounters. We are more likely to understand the nature of the policy problem and how to make an impact on it if we acknowledge failures and difficulties of all kinds and then ask why.

This long track record of failure, after all, impacts on the likelihood of future success through convincing political actors to take action in the future. Failure seeps into the folklore of government and politics. It influences the sense of what is possible in the art of the possible. Political players take on lessons of past failures and retell the stories of farce or heroism or tragedy to advise actors on the strategies they are likely to face and the scope of ambition. Every political leader who was urged to show "political will" or "leadership" or "just crash and crash through" - just like David Cameron with minimum pricing - will listen but ignore those chest-beating, delusional counsellors in future. Every institutional leader - whether in business or bureaucracy or research or community organisation - absorbs a lesson too: to be careful what you wish for, to be wily in defeat of over-zealous opponents, or to obfuscate your own mistakes in criticising the motives of another institution.

So how do we explain these failures? Over the course of my time in alcohol policy I heard many explanations proffered for why one or other policy case did not succeed. I synthesize these explanations into three main strands of argument, using plain terms, with no particular reference to theoretical explanations. These three explanations are dominant interests, weak ideas and wicked problems. Each may explain part of what is going on, but each I find ultimately unsatisfying.

Do dominant interests explain policy failure? (700)

The first explanation is dominant interests. Alcohol policy is difficult because entrenched and powerful interests oppose good policy. In less polite language, this explanation blames failure on the self-interested motives of your bastard opponents.

The most developed form of this argument is of course that developed to counter-attack specious claims put out by the tobacco industry. Shutting out the dominant interests of "big tobacco" is understandable in relation to that industry. In recent years the same rhetoric has been used in Australian alcohol policy, with the idea of "Big Alcohol" used to attack differing points of view and to offer a comforting explanation for unsuccessful lobbying. Anti-tobacco tactics and leading advocates have migrated across to the drink question. Governments have been accused of making bad policy because they rely on alcohol industry revenue - a rather ridiculous claim in the case of state governments - or political donations or Researchers have been accused of taking tainted money, and there have been quite bizarre attempts to portray a worldwide "alcohol industry" conspiracy to buy favourable research results. Policies have been accused of fundamental failure on no other grounds than that bureaucrats have actually spoken to the diverse range of businesses who produce and sell alcohol.

This is a kind of frenzied group think that does Kettl Bruun's tradition no good. In both its crude and subtle forms it is no more an ad hominem argument, and a hypocritical one at that since we all have our interests and our biases. While such arguments may sometimes be

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appealing in the hurly burly of politics, they do not offer satisfactory explanations of failure except to the already converted.

It should also be pointed out that there is a dark mirror image of the dominant interests argument. This argument is presented by the industry to besmirch good public health people. This can be described as the "Sock puppets" argument13. Here the interests are not large commercial revenues, but influence, prestige and public research funds in the world of ideas. This exact argument is made by some representatives of alcohol-related industries about the good people gathered at the Kettl Bruun conference.

Across the desk of a bureaucrat lie me angry missives from both sides fly, and there is much mutual misunderstanding. In my experience these kind of hostile, mutual misunderstandings and caricatures contribute more to policy failures than any undue attention to commercial interests. Of course, interests do lobby in off-stage arenas, but the interests that do so are not only commercial interests, and include public health and research organisations, and the culture of good governance and public duty is in my experience very strong. In my experience, Ministers and bureaucrats do not make complex policy failures because they have met with Hawker Britton or the Alcohol Policy Coalition. A deeper explanation is required.

5. Do weak ideas explain policy failure? (700)

The second hypothesis is that alcohol policies fail because the underpinning ideas, policies or research are too weak or poorly founded. In other words, things go crook because they are just dumb ideas. There is a particular version of this explanation which is the idea of evidence based policy. In this account, there are certain kinds of policy ideas that have the unusual characteristic of being based on evidence. Just what is meant by

Unfortunately, we live in a world of too much information, too much evidence, and too few ideas. Ideas chase evidence, evidence do not generate ideas. A clear idea of how things work is always a good thing. But we should be wary of overstating the insights into complex operations of human societies offered by even the most sophisticated and best quantified concepts. Their ability to predict the outcomes of strategic interactions between players and conditions is simply not good enough.

Researchers who aspire to policy impact can go astray in the adamant pursuit of models based in the pure elaboration of strong ideas, validated in academic research. Sometimes the ideas just do not explain or predict that much. Sometimes defending the idea becomes more important than responding the situation. Worse still it descends into an argument about the elevated prestige and authority of expert opinion or science - whether that be the economics profession (is there anything more silly than open letters signed by economists?), all good doctors everywhere or the public health model, even with the weighty global endorsement of the World Health Organisation. What begins as an argument about evidence, quickly becomes an assertion about who has the authority to interpret the evidence.

This becomes particularly challenging when policy assumptions are turned into statistical models. Models are a particularly common way today to market the strength and coherence of thinking. Presenting supposed connections between social phenomenon with equations and

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lots and lots of data creates an impression of disciple and intellectual command, and few poor bureaucrats or Ministers will have the time or the inclination to unpick the model. But public policy terms, a model is an appealing way to present a more or less complex spreadsheet with a list of varying length of challengeable assumptions. Sometimes in advocacy or research terms they can seem to work like magic charms. but they bring a false precision. It takes a moments' thought and a few days or weeks of harder work to unpick most policy models. In Australian terms, I witnessed the failures of being carried away with mental models in both the arguments over the years about alcohol taxation and minimum pricing, and in the failure

It is commonly argued today many difficulties of the global financial crisis were created by the blindsiding of key economic policy-makers and regulators by their own mental models. The things that were happening were simply not factored into the models. A similar problem has occurred in Australian alcohol policy in recent years. After all we have supposedly had the "perfect storm that our mental models tell us would mean drinking is going through the roof. Prices are falling. Availability is increasing. Marketing is ubiquitous. Yet alcohol consumption is falling. It should lead us to redo our models, but too often it leads us to persist, locked into certain convictions, cornered into defending positions, trapped into not compromising with opponents who may, it seems, have a point. Our ideas themselves become our idols, our interests, and no longer mere tools to respond to the world that is appearing before our own eyes.

In the face of this evidence, more modesty about the quality of the ideas and models used to advise governments are called for. Conviction itself is not a compelling argument for change. To claim with a smooth and compelling voice that the "evidence shows this" may fool some of the policy makers some of the time, but will never fool all of them, all of the time. It is only too clear that the argument presented is an interpretation of an interpretation.

While there have been policy failures led by the fallacies of clever ideas, there have also been occasions when judgement and intuition breaks the charm. I looked back on the the 1965 Victorian Royal Commission into liquor laws. This inquiry was a wonderful example of the senior judge not taking conviction in the superiority of ideas at face value. Phillips faced a group of advocates adamant that their ideas were superior. He subjected themselves to an evening of alcohol consumption to directly assess the effects on their bodies and perceptions. They tested statistical evidence, and examined the complex moral and philosophical arguments that sit beneath most appeals to control or liberate the supply of alcohol. Yet still, they were confronted with exceptional ardour on the part of the 1960s equivalent that extending hours of trade devastate Victorian society. This found expression in a direct admonishment of advocates who get carried away with the certainty of their own convictions. It was expressed in language that was blunt and sometimes I wish was still part of public discourse on policy issues: "In general men are as incapable of evaluating their own ideologies as they are of smelling their own breath14."

6 Is alcohol policy a wicked problem or just a normal job?

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So I come to my third and last false explanation of alcohol policy failures. Some problems are hard to solve, as they say, because they are not simple, they are not technical, they are not well-defined, but rather they are wicked problems.

Wicked problems has its origins in a work of the early 1970s, and is now an ubiquitous explanation of all sorts of policy difficulties. Wicked problems are said to be those kinds of problem where opposing parties cannot agree on the nature, terms and characterisation of the problem; where standard technical solutions do not suffice; where situations and complex and dynamic and the effects of interventions are highly uncertain; where the problem can only be solved by how people think and act together about the problem. Sometimes wicked is simply used as a synonym for intractable. It is the more optimistic version of describing a problem as unable to be solved, so that it can only be managed. It is a way of saying perhaps these intractable problems can indeed be solved, if only we find the special even kind of leadership and dialogue that they demand. These are all common characteristics of alcohol policy.

Ideas about wicked problems are widely presented in policy conferences and taught across schools of government, and associated with ideas about complexity, adaptive leadership and that special form of policy thinking designated with the redundant honorific of "strategic." It is a terribly seductive idea, especially for the more intellectually inclined within the bureaucracy. After all, what exquisite kind of bureaucrat is needed to lead us through these kinds of wicked problems? For much of my time working in alcohol policy, I explained failure in this way, and aspired to success through redefining problems, multi-stakeholder dialogue and changing the terms of the dialogue.

There is no doubt that it can be a very productive idea. There are many benefits after all a set of ideas that encourage people to see the world in all of its bewildering complexity, to view opponents not as monsters but as companions in adversity, and to set humble limits on the power of government policy-making. In some respects, much of the later work I did in alcohol and drug policy would not have been possible without these ideas.

But over time I found that the appeal of the idea wore off. While sometimes there are simple problems in government, the overwhelming majority of issues could be characterised as wicked problems. In some respects, all of the issues that command attention of Cabinets are complex, riddled with conflict and miscomprehension, interpreted through interpretations of interpretations. They are all wicked problems, and not much is really gained by naming them so. They are all problems that demand some kind of simple human response from governments today. and cannot wait till the final research study comes in, the latest complex model or the day when everyone might agree on issues that have been disputed for centuries. In the end I felt, like Stein Ringen, that interpretations of wicked problems merely restate that a policy field has experienced failures, and that commentators have moved in endlessly telling us all in difficult language the obvious truth that social life is complex. [direct quote]

7 Politics as an explanation of both failure and success (700)

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It is politics in its best sense that explains the difficulty of alcohol policy. By politics in its best sense I mean the inherently creative if difficult and frustrating process of compromising between divergent interests and values through a framework of public reasons quote Sen

But if politics in its best sense is the explanation for the difficulty of alcohol policy then perhaps, the alcohol policy advocates and researchers can console themselves that they are not alone or not uniquely special in experiencing the troubles responding to the "drink question." Indeed, there are two contemporary debates of wider significance that should inform discussions of how alcohol policy researchers can best achieve impact.

First there is extensive work, particularly associated with Patrick Dunleavy at LSE on policy impact. This work goes beyond the ratehr tired old ideas that the role of bureaucrats and Ministers is to see at the feet of experts and researchers and "translate research into practice." today about the quality of government

If we look more broadly, we can see that though

Let me generalise from the specific case with the benefit of Stein Ringen's work on what governments do.Policy impactDunleavy

9. Beyond Kettl Bruun and the WHO expert tradition (500)

So let me return through this circuitous essay to Kettl Bruun in 1972 and his living heritage, perhaps after all our journeyings to know him and to celebrate him for the first time.

Put aside the expert and return to the alcoholic

10. Concluding statement (100)

We may face adverse odds in our hopes to avoid failure, but the point is to continue on, not with cynicism, nor despair, nor unscrupulous optimism, as Beckett might say to fail again, fail better. [move to the end]

a different better path

Science they say progresses as each stands on the shoulders of giants. Some more sceptical souls say it progresses one funeral at a time.

This sense of accumulated progression of knowledge within less frequently overturned paradigms it is not an experience open to the practical political thinker

politics or working in government feels at times rather more like walking across a battlefield of slayed giants, or like Klee's Angel of history blown hard by the hot winds of progress into the future, looking back on the disasters of good intentions that unfold in retrospect.

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I have only ever walked across that field as a lowly corporal. I offer them to you not so much in the hope that I can persuade you to change your mind, so as to encourage you next time that you want to make a policy impact to open your minds and your hearts to some different ways of governing our troubled drunken commons.

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1 I employ some academic apparatus with imperfect but I hope forgivable attribution of sources.2 Bruun. T This Foundation has since been restyled the Australian Drug Foundation.3 Bruun, p 54 Bruun p 55 Bruun p 76 Bruun p 87 While they have so been greatly encouraged by the model of tobacco, they have not always followed the model of Bruun's scruples in admitting their argument is based on principle not evidence.8 Singleton, VPP9 VPP p 24 Phillips 196510 Audit Open public criticism of the auditor by public servants is strongly frowned on and can be punished. However, the audit report on the VAAP was inept.11 The policy was known as Restoring the Balance: Victoria's Alcohol Action Plan 2008-2013. I was directly responsible for its development and implementation.12 I am aware but have not closely followed the recent experience implementing a lockout in Sydney. At least one political adviser to the then Victorian Government, Nicholas Reece, has stated publicly, in the context of the Sydney lockout, that the Melbourne trial was unsuccessful and ill-conceived.13 UK publication sock puppets14 Phillips Royal Commission 1965 v 1, http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/papers/govpub/VPARL1964-65No22.pdf)

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