Ep #115: Championing evaluation with The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP
The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP joins us on the episode of Work with Purpose to highlight how evaluation can help create better policies and programs.
On a recent episode of Work with Purpose on the art of policymaking, our experts agreed that evaluation should be baked into the development process from the get-go – but how do you make it work when the pressure is high?
The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, and Assistant Minister for Employment, joins presenter David Pembroke to talk about why evaluation shouldn’t be an afterthought. Assistant Minister Leigh reflects the year past since the establishment of the Australian Centre of Evaluation, and how it aims to raise the quality and quantity of evaluation across the Australian Public Service.
Discussed in this episode:
- Assistant Minister Leigh’s story from growing up as the child of two aid workers to working in politics
- his role as Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury and Assistant Minister for Employment
- the role of the Australian Centre of Evaluation one year in
- lessons from medicine for randomised evaluation
- why there is a strong appetite from politicians to pursue randomised trials
- overcoming thought barriers to randomised trials
- why solely relying on observational data can be misleading, and
- building an experimenting society.
Show notes:
Guest:
Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP
Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, Assistant Minister for Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Arts and Law. Andrew is a past recipient of the Economic Society of Australia’s Young Economist Award and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.