The Labor government’s response to the Varghese Review about future funding for strategic policy work is hardly a barbeque stopper, coming as it does a few days before Christmas. But it matters to those independent experts who make their living in the think-tank and policy world.

Organisations engaged in policy work are strange things. Their worth is not tangible or immediately obvious. They must deal in facts, but their real value is building on facts in offering analysis, assessment and new ideas, which inescapably have subjective and speculative elements to them.