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From new labour to Rudd/Gillard: dilemmas, lesson-drawing and policy transfer

From December 2007 until May 2010, both the Australian Labor and British Labour parties were in government. This was an unusual occurrence and had only taken place twice since the Second World War. The concurrent governments, headed by Gordon Brown in the UK, and Kevin Rudd (twice) and Julia Gillard in Australia were a curious mixture of innovation, policy differentiation, and yet beset by a range of underpinning problems. This special issue tracks the policy agendas of these two sets of governments, and examines the links, common dilemmas and policy transfer between these ‘modernised’ forms of British and Australian social democracy. More specifically, this special issue maps the policy agendas of these governments in the realms of political economy (Spies-Butcher and Wilson), social policy (Manwaring), foreign policy (O’Neill), public administration (Legrand), party management (Gauja) and ideology (Edwards and Beech). The special issue seeks to make a contribution in three distinct ways. First, these empirical cases provide key insights into the wider policy transfer, diffusion and convergence literature. There are significant gaps in how we can understand and conceptualise the links, and transfer of policy, between sets of governments (e.g. Marsh and Sharman 2009; Benson and Jordan 2011; Stone 2012; Manwaring 2015). These centre-left cases provide key insights into the evolving knowledge of policy transfer, diffusion and convergence. As a number of contributors in this issue point out, including Manwaring, O’Neill and Gauja there was learning, transfer and influence between the two sets of governments. Yet, the cases shine a light upon some key limitations in the policy transfer and diffusion literature, especially in seeking to understand why there was influence and/or transfer. The authors in this issue consider the transfers across a range of the Labour governments policy domains, including social policy, political economy, and innovatively, O’Neill considers the policy transfer literature in the domain of foreign policy – an area which tends to be neglected by policy transfer/diffusion writers. As the policy transfer/literature evolves, the contributions in this issue address some of the key limitations in the policy transfer literature. First, policy transfer heuristics, notably the framework offered by Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 2012), offer useful, but limited ways of understanding why and how transfer takes place (Evans 2009). Generally speaking, as Evans (2009) and Manwaring (2015) point out, the transfer frameworks tend to be