Policy Learning in the Australian Public Service

This chapter discusses the ways in which the Australian Public Service (APS) learns about public policy. The chapter has four sections. First, it presents a typology of policy-learning that can be used to organize research into the policy-learning capacities of a national bureaucracy. Second, it outlines a range of policy-learning successes that can be attributed to the APS and characterizes them using the typology. Third, the chapter examines several long-running criticisms of the APS that seem to be apposite to its capacity to learn lessons in the future. These are also characterized in relation to the typology. Finally, evidence of the APS’s strengths and weaknesses is weighed up in a conclusion, which culminates with an argument that the service’s key strength is its capacity to effectively produce large amounts of ‘single-loop’ and ‘instrumental’ types of policy-learning.