Policy Forum Pod

Policy Forum Pod is produced by the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and Anna-Greta Hunter and Sharon Bessel co-host it. It is an interview show at heart. The hosts frame each question at length, naming the issue and the Australian debate around it. Then they step back so a guest can build an argument through evidence, examples and caveats. Episodes open with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land and a nod to reconciliation. The same concern shows up in the subject matter. An end-of-year episode reflecting on 2023, with John Falzon and Thomas Mayo, recalls a year of conversations about the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, along with housing, the cost of living crisis and efforts to reimagine social policy. That episode also cites Barry Jones calling the year perhaps the worst in half a century. The environment comes up more than once. In 'The Forest Wars: securing the future', a guest remembers walking through a logged site with a state minister: debris piled chest high, a possum crushed under a tree, and a minister who said nothing on the drive that followed. The account is specific rather than rhetorical. The conversation with Sophie Lewis pairs biodiversity loss and climate change with smaller local answers in the ACT, from toy libraries and community toolboxes to buy nothing groups, and presents them as glimmers of hope. 'Care, connection and who decides' considers well-being as an alternative to growth-focused, consumptive models of development and notes that measures such as the Australian Unity well-being index dipped after COVID. Institutions get the same attention. In a conversation with ANU Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell, equity of access sits beside what she calls equity of aspiration, and summer and autumn schools come up as a way for high school students to see a campus before their first day of orientation. The episode with Sara Bice looks at Australia's big build, where megaprojects sit close enough together that their cumulative effects on communities become a question of their own. Specialist vocabulary, from social inclusion to circular economy, is used as everyday working language. The pacing is measured and the tone warm, turning grave or dry when the material calls for it. Nobody is rushed toward a punchline. A listener comes away with less a verdict than a clear view of how a public problem reaches children, campuses, forests and streets. It rewards a listener who wants the full reasoning behind an Australian policy debate.