The Language of the Rebuffed: A Critical Appraisal of How Policy Advisers Communicate A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University By Christiane Gerblinger Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science College of Science June 2020 © Copyright by Christiane Gerblinger 2020 All Rights Reserved Except for such quotations, ideas and information as I have attributed to other sources, this thesis is wholly my own original work. Christiane Gerblinger June 2020 Word count: approx. 89,000 words (excluding footnotes, tables and bibliography) 2 Contents Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................. 5 Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 7 Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 11 Locating the phenomenon of rebuffed advice ................................................................................. 14 Case studies and thesis structure ..................................................................................................... 17 The language of policy advice ........................................................................................................... 20 Primary materials and thesis methodology ...................................................................................... 25 Do the rebuffed know they are a phenomenon? ............................................................................. 29 Thesis contribution and rationale ..................................................................................................... 35 Chapter 2 Strategies of Impersonality: Constructing a Framework for the Rebuffed.......................... 37 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 37 The text ............................................................................................................................................. 42 The micro-context ............................................................................................................................. 48 The macro-context ............................................................................................................................ 55 Chapter 3 Knowing what not to Know: Advice on South Australia’s Blackout and the Role of Renewable Energy ................................................................................................................................ 66 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 66 Discussion of departmental advice ................................................................................................... 69 The text ............................................................................................................................................. 84 The micro-context ............................................................................................................................. 99 The macro-context .......................................................................................................................... 115 Chapter 4 Excess of Objectivity: Australian Intelligence Assessments of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction ......................................................................................................................................... 132 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 132 Discussion of Australian intelligence assessments ......................................................................... 136 3 The text ........................................................................................................................................... 149 The micro-context ........................................................................................................................... 162 The macro-context .......................................................................................................................... 174 Chapter 5 The Language of the Unrebuffed ....................................................................................... 204 Contemporaneous comparisons ..................................................................................................... 204 Triangulation ................................................................................................................................... 213 Chapter 6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 225 Bibliography........................................................................................................................................ 240 4 Acknowledgments I am indebted to my incredible supervisory panel. Joan Leach and Sujatha Raman from the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science never doubted that my ideas and content had legs, which made me feel valued and supported right from the beginning. They are taking their field into thus far overlooked realms here in Australia. I am a beneficiary of their willingness to enable others to do so as well. John Uhr from the School of Politics and International Relations was always responsive, daring and keenly observant of the sort of generally unnoticed detail that ends up being the main attraction. I would not have felt as emboldened as I did without him. I owe him a huge debt for “the rebuffed” – as soon as he said it, my year-long procrastination came to an end. I also greatly enjoyed discussions with the Crawford School of Public Policy’s Helen Sullivan. I have been able to write this dissertation with the generous support of the Sir Roland Wilson Foundation, a scholarship fund set up in partnership with the Australian Public Service (APS) to study and develop public policy in Australia and overseas. I am particularly grateful to those in the APS who supported my application and to the Foundation’s board who saw potential in it. Many thanks also to the Foundation’s staff; they are a great team and work really hard to help scholars during and after their studies. During my time in the Netherlands, I was pleased to be able to spend several weeks at the Nederlandse School voor Openbaar Bestuur (Netherlands School of Public Administration). I really enjoyed my time with the school’s researchers and I’m particularly grateful to Paul Frissen and Eline van Schaik, who went out of their way to welcome me and helped me locate relevant contacts. I would also like to thank my Dutch interviewees in The Hague for their valuable time and participation: Michèle Blom, Michel Groothuizen, Peter Hennephof and Frans Leeuw. I wish I had been able to use more of their material and think there may be another thesis in there somewhere! In Australia, I am grateful to Ken Henry and Paul McCullough for their thoughtful insights and for so readily offering their time. 5 I am also thankful to many others for their time, interest and help: Michael Brennan, Gerard Castles, Jenet Connell, Carol Croce, Ted Crook, Frances Cruickshank, Emma Cully, Michael di Francesco, Grant Douglas, Peter Grabosky, Angelia Grant, John Halligan, Lin Hatfield Dodds, Alastair Hill, Bea Hogan, Rob Hoppe, Maja Horst, Paul Hubbard, Andrew Kennedy, Richard Mulgan, Diane Owenga, Beryl Radin, Brian Rappert, Rodney Scott, Paul ‘t Hart, Pamela Todd, Martijn van der Steen and Stavros Zouridis. Ian Shepherd was an enthusiastic reader, who asked detailed, thought-provoking questions not just about this thesis, but also about its (author’s) future. I thank him very much. Big thanks also go to Justine Molony for copyediting this thesis. Any errors that remain are my own. Every day, my husband Clarke listens good-naturedly as I exhaustively dismantle even the most meaningless trivia. It must be pretty wearing, but he is always proud of me and I am very lucky. I dedicate this work to our son Ari. His keen observations, humour and candidness are just some of the many, many reasons I adore him. 6 Abstract After official policy advice to governments is publicly released, governments are often accused of ignoring or rejecting their experts. Commonly represented as politicisation, this depiction is superficial. Digging deeper, is there something about the official advice itself that makes it easy to ignore? The relevant academic literature has not yet grappled with this. Public policy and administration studies tend to conflate policy and political communication, making it difficult to discern the influence of official advisers, while science and technology studies focus largely on science advisers outside government. This thesis is situated at the interface between the two. Instead of lamenting a demise of expertise, it asks: does the expert advice of policy officials feature characteristics that invite its government audience to overlook or misread it? To