When Programs Pretend to Be Policies
One of Australia's growing dysfunctions of governance...
The most expensive defence program in Australia’s history, AUKUS was sprung on the Australian electorate, and (non-US, UK) partners alike on 15 September 2021 without warning1.
While governments retain the right to undertake policy considerations and preparations in confidence, in AUKUS’s case it became apparent that key parts of its own apparatus, such as its diplomats, were completely unaware of the initiative. And while the strategic case (and there is one) may have been apparent to those politicians and policymakers in the know, that case was far less than clear to everyone else.
It’s a prime example of a program that signals a policy shift without the requisite policy work—and thus the broader work needed to make such a massive programme successful—being undertaken. Moreover, its sheer size, complexity, and the disproportionate effect it has on Defence, the military and defence capability, has distorted Australia’s strategic posture and resourcing for decades to come.
Since September 2021, AUKUS has also cast serious discussion of strategy into the shadows: the answer is always ‘AUKUS’, as though a program that delivers a very few submarines 10, 20 years hence will resolve Australia’s serious geostrategic vulnerabilities in the near-term.
And that is a core tension. It’s less the long-term nature of AUKUS but that it’s exemplary of an increasingly common practice: announcement of a program without the requisite policy work and guidance. The result is strategic incoherence, a lessening of sovereign capability, and corroded political legitimacy.
The Anatomy of Programs-as-Policy
Policy establishes ends and marshals means toward strategic purpose. It answers the question: what outcome do we require, and why? Good policy, like good strategy, is hard2. Programs, by contrast, are simply means—they are tools that might serve multiple masters or none. When programs become untethered from strategy, they create what might be called the ‘program trap’: bureaucracies optimising for process rather than effect.
The language is a giveaway. The focus shifts from strategic outcomes to ‘deliverables’ and ‘milestones’—metrics reflecting activity, not achievement. Departments proudly report implementation rates while remaining silent on whether implementation advances national interests—ultimately the ‘why’ of programs.
Programs develop self-perpetuating logic: once established, they generate constituencies, careers, and compliance frameworks that justify their continuation regardless of strategic relevance. That can lead to the irrational escalation of commitment3, resulting in the inevitable scope creep enabled when no clear strategic boundary constrains expansion.
Most insidiously, programs create feedback loops that reinforce dysfunction. They generate metrics that justify more programs, establishing an ecosystem increasingly disconnected from national strategy. In complex systems terms, programs create local optima—bureaucratic silos that function efficiently by their own measures while preventing system-wide coherence.
Anything that promises better project management or coordination without addressing whether projects serve coherent strategy, or has a strategic purpose, exemplifies the problem. They substitute process for policy—the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs while ignoring the destination.
Strategy requires uncomfortable choices. Programs defer them indefinitely.
Why Australia Keeps Falling into This Trap
One of cyberneticist’s Stafford Beer’s heuristics is ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’; that is, to understand a system’s true function, look at its outputs and outcomes, not what the managers or designers say it does.
So when government tells you it is delivering sound policy and programs, spend the time to consider program and policy drift away from original intent, narrative consistency, levels of overhead and waste including that imposed by government on others, and actual accountability.
Above all, consider the incentives embedded in the system.
Political incentives
One of the main drivers of government favouring programs over policy are election cycles. Politicians live in the instant, within news cycles, and within election cycles. Especially with social media, there is ever-present pressure to show the electorate, and stakeholders on whom politicians depend that efforts are being made on their behalf, that promises are being kept, and that the politician is ‘delivering’, including in the form of funding and influence dispensed through programs.
Programs lend themselves to the pork-barrelling notoriously present in US politics but increasingly evident in the Australian context4. Ill-defined programs are loosely tied to amorphous policy statements, rendering them fertile ground for soft corruption, that in turn breeds distrust and cynicism.
In contrast, the hard work of good policy is much less evident to the public eye, slower than grant handouts, and does not readily reward supporters. Good policy practice requires contestability—the stress testing through argument and evidence that exposes inconvenient facts, requires listening to uncomfortable truths, and generating realistic solutions. Good public policy can take months to work through, and because it is the definition of a wicked problem, does not offer politicians the certainties that they prefer.
Bureaucratic incentives
Increasingly, the dynamic between politicians and the public service is shifting from that of partners with the goal of pursuing the national interest, as seen through the lens of the government in power, to an ‘upstairs/downstairs’ relationship, where the role of public servants is to do simply as ordered. That’s been exacerbated by the growth in the size of ministerial officers, staffed largely by political operatives plus seconded APS advisers with subject matter expertise.
Public servants advance through visible initiatives, not through steadfast protection of inherited policy intent. The result is an endless churn of rebranded programs, each claiming to fix predecessors’ failures through better ‘delivery’ while never questioning whether the underlying policy, where present, remains relevant and sound.
Consequently, those public servants rewarded by the systems as being ‘fully effective’ or a ‘safe pair of hands’ are often those who are able to ‘deliver’ for ministers impatient with policy and process. And that will mean crafting programs that meet ministers’ political, or politically shaded, needs rather than providing contestability and engaging with the hard questions of policy, statecraft and effective, coherent, consistent capability programs at a whole-of-nation level.
The nation-building fallacy
Australia has announced an impressive array of initiatives claiming to build ‘sovereign capability’: AUKUS, the Future Made in Australia and the National Reconstruction Fund, clean energy transitions, regional development programs. Yet these remain programs searching for a strategy, and as such more likely to drift or be repurposed.
Genuine sovereign capability—the organic capacity to identify, develop, sustain, and employ strategic tools independently—cannot be programmed into existence through funding announcements and delivery frameworks. It emerges from deep technical expertise, industrial ecosystems, institutional memory, and strategic culture accumulated over decades. Programs offer the appearance of sovereignty while often failing to match such promises in substance.
The contradiction runs deeper than poor execution. Programs are structurally antithetical to building sovereign capability because, currently, they outsource to contractors, consultants, and ‘delivery partners’ rather than developing internal capacity. They fragment rather than integrate, creating silos that prevent the cross-domain synthesis essential for strategic effect.
Most perversely, they create dependencies while claiming to build independence—Australia becomes reliant on foreign primes to ‘deliver’ sovereign capability, a logical impossibility that apparently troubles few. Programs prioritise compliance over competence, measuring success through process adherence rather than actual capability generation.
The distinction matters because in complex adaptive systems, local optimisation prevents system-wide coherence. Each program creates constituencies defending its continuation regardless of strategic relevance. Moreover, focus on process mechanics hides strategic drift and enables opportunistic political distortion, creating what might be called accountability sinks5 where responsibility dissolves into complexity.
The staffing paradox
This combination of incentives and time-frames creates a staffing paradox that perpetuates dysfunction. Programs require administrators, not strategists. They need people skilled in stakeholder management, compliance documentation, and process optimisation—valuable skills, certainly, but not exclusively the skills required to build whole-of-nation capability.
The career incentives select for precisely the wrong talent: people who excel at managing programs rather than developing strategy, who can navigate bureaucracy but not design deterrence architectures or nurture industry ecosystems. Over time, departments fill with program managers while strategic and technical expertise atrophies, making future course corrections progressively harder.
The Consequences
When policy coherence collapses, capability becomes impossible. In complex adaptive systems, components optimise locally without reference to system-wide goals. Defence develops exquisite platforms that cannot be manned or sustained. Industry policy funds research that never reaches production. Immigration settings import skills that don’t match industry needs. Each program functions adequately by its own metrics while the nation accumulates disconnected capabilities that don’t cohere into strategic effect. And when strategic conditions shift—as they inevitably do—programs locked into compliance frameworks cannot pivot.
Consider the Estonian contrast. Estonia’s democracy was earned through resistance to Soviet occupation, creating what might be called active democratic reflexes—a society that understands threats viscerally and responds with genuine capability development. Estonia built sovereign cyber capabilities not through programs but through necessity, creating technical depth that exceeds many larger nations. Their approach integrates military, civilian, and private sector expertise organically rather than through coordination frameworks. Australia’s inherited democracy, by contrast, substitutes programs for strategic culture, assuming capability can be procured like any other commodity.
Breaking the pattern
The cruel irony is that genuine sovereign capability requires exactly what programs cannot provide: patient capital, tolerance for failure, institutional continuity, technical depth over administrative breadth, and strategic clarity that survives political cycles.
Breaking entrenched patterns requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: Australia may need crisis to create the conditions for reform. The current system works perfectly well for those operating it—ministers get announcements, bureaucrats get programs, consultants get contracts. Without compelling pressure, why would any actor voluntarily surrender these comfortable arrangements?6
The deeper pathology is cultural: Australia has convinced itself that capability can be purchased rather than developed, that strategic challenges yield to proper management rather than requiring sustained national effort. Breaking this delusion requires intellectual honesty from elites willing to admit decades of drift—and political leaders willing to speak plainly about strategic insolvency, dependencies and unpleasant truths.
The patience required seems impossible in disrupted times demanding nimbleness. Yet strategic patience isn’t rigidity—it’s maintaining clear purpose while adapting methods. The distinction matters: programs change, policy intent endures. Australia mistakes programmatic churn for adaptation when it actually prevents the institutional learning required for genuine agility.
Conclusion
Let’s return to AUKUS. There is a sound strategic narrative for AUKUS—but only as one part of a broader coherent policy and strategy that is missing. The National Defence Strategy does not serve: it addresses only the defence aspects, and even there, fails to provide the needed funding to balance the distortionary effect of AUKUS on Defence and defence capability, let alone address Australia’s strategic insolvency.
Because it is a program-driven initiative, AUKUS has closed the lens to alternatives. Had the government started with policy, then strategy, then the types of operations to put at risk an adversary, to exert force, to coerce outcomes, then Australia may have arrived at different force and capability solutions, even given the path dependency of the current structure.
Australia faces strategic circumstances that would unsettle policymakers in any comparable democracy. The country depends on a distant superpower guarantor whose reliability increasingly comes into question, while its largest trading partner grows more assertive and the regional balance tips toward naked coercion. In this environment, the program trap, when programs pretend to be policies, becomes existential. The choice is not between programs and policy—it’s between comfortable delusion and uncomfortable realism.
That’s not the first time a major defence capability has been sprung from the blue on the Australian electorate. In 1963, Robert Menzies made the surprise announcement, pre-election, that the Australian government would be buying F-1-11s.
I recommend that anyone who believes otherwise read Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Crown Currency, 19 July 2011, 2011).
Max H Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
The temptation for pork barrelling in Australia is ‘systemic, universal and deeply entrenched’, with a multitude of examples from both sides of politics, is arguably becoming more prevalent. For example, ‘sports rorts’ in both 1993-94 and in 2020 (the Community Sport Infrastructure Grant (CSIG) programme), the 1998 Natural Heritage Trust Environmental Fund, the Roads to Recovery, the 2001-4 Stronger Families and Communities, Sustainable Regions, and Regional Partnerships, and the 2018-19 commuter carpark rorts (the Urban Congestion Fund), the 2016-22 Safer Communities Fund and the 2016-22 Building Better Regions Fund.
Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Some changes, both structural and process, could accelerate recognition without requiring full crisis. Examples include independent capability audits that assess actual capacity rather than compliance; during policy development, make the separation of policy intent from delivery mechanism in Cabinet submissions mandatory; include sunset clauses that require policy revalidation, not just program renewal; and, tie career incentive structures, especially for senior public servants, to strategic patience over program announcements.