This course seeks to give students a hands on applied understanding of how Australian government decision making really works.

This course takes an innovative approach to teaching this subject matter. Students will be required choose an issue they care about as a case study, and then track that issue through the government decision making process. Each week students will be introduced to a new element of the government system and the power plays at work as different actors seek to influence the outcome. They will then have the opportunity to apply this knowledge, by researching how their issue played out at this step of the decision making process, who tried to influence the decision and who prevailed.

At the end of the semester students will have intimate knowledge of their own case study, they will also have been exposed to more than a dozen other case studies.

Students will gain a rich and applied sense of how the Australian government works in practice.