Institute for Public Policy and Governance

UTS Master of Applied Policy - 3min 39 sec
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Good policy, and why policy matters, is that it can change people’s lives for the better.

Great policy does change the world. Really great ideas that are able to be translated into initiatives that can be implemented and embraced by a whole range of different players, change the world.

Policy is important because it can make changes, but it can also be really about getting things done, and that’s what I’m interested in terms of policies.

So policy is incredibly important, it sets out the guiding principles and the foundational ideas for legislation, for budget allocations, and it is the foundation from which actions flow, by government, by businesses often and NGOs. Better policy development sets a different framework, it comes from an aspirational view of us, it comes from a view of us that looks at our strengths and from that you get completely different outcomes.

Good policy is impactful so it is important to measure its success and it’s important that we design that in a way that reflects the type of policy that it is, but its critically important that policy is seen as a living thing, and so following through on policy is just as important as creating policy in the first instance.

The challenges are that our problems are bigger than previous centuries, we have the very wicked problem of climate change, rising fundamentalism, global movements of people. These are big problems and they need big solutions. They are problems that are going to need to be solved not by one sector alone, so gone are the days where the government could just issue a policy and all else will follow, policy making in the 21st century is much more around collaboration, partnerships and I suppose getting people all on board for a shared vision.

One of the great opportunities we have through the shift in community expectations, the shift in community confidence, the shift in technology etcetera, is that we can make policy

in a much more cooperative and collaborative way that ever before. It’s all about problem solving for issues in the community, issues in the environment and so the success of policy is about its application, you can't separate the two.

What makes the UTS Master of Applied Policy unique is really reflected on the title so it’s a Masters degree that is focused on students getting real skills that are going to be useful for them in their work. So it’s a Master not of public policy but of policy, is being delivered by the Institute of Public Policy and Governance at UTS and that’s really about the link with the work the institute does in bringing real life policy problems to the students in the classroom. So the ‘applied’ is a very important dimension with this, we are working on current problems that students can tackle through the course.

The great thing about studying policy making is that it offers you so many opportunities to change the world, you can go into public sector policy making and work in government and increasingly you can go into the private sector and work on their policies which are often similar to what the government is interested in whether it be sustainability or social justice initiatives, because at the end of the day what policy is about is problem solving, and problem solving with expertise, both in content and in implementation. I think it’s a really exciting area to be involved in and I think it’s a set of skills that transfers a whole range of career options.

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