James Martin Institute brings together universities and government

The James Martin Institute for Public Policy has made “extraordinary progress” in its first two years, says its chair Peter Shergold.

The James Martin Institute for Public Policy has made “extraordinary progress” in its first two years says its chair, Peter Shergold. Photo: Monique Harmer

The James Martin Institute for Public Policy has made “extraordinary progress” in its first two years in building links between university researchers and government, according to chair Peter Shergold.

The institute, known as JMI, aims to create avenues for academics to offer their policy expertise to government and for the public service to call on universities for policy research.

Professor Shergold, a former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and chancellor of Western Sydney University until last year, said that as a result of the institute’s work university partnerships across the NSW government and parliament had deepened.

He told the JMI Policy Summit on Monday that the institute had now undertaken 12 high-impact projects with the NSW government, and these had made a demonstrable difference.

He said that in the two years of its existence the institute had witnessed “the enthusiasm and the commitment and the excitement of people coming together with a shared vision of how academic research can contribute to the goals and the direction and the complexity of public policy”.

“The debilitating distrust and suspicion, that too often in the past weakened effective intellectual collaboration, has been broken down and in their place came mutual respect and profound recognition that a dialogue of ideas can bring policy perspectives that are greater than the sum of their individual parts.”

JMI is a joint venture between the NSW government and five NSW universities – the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, Western Sydney University, UNSW and Charles Sturt University – and the institute harnesses academic expertise to work on NSW government policy priorities.

Professor Shergold, a former academic, said JMI was providing a solution to a frustrating problem he identified when head of the Prime Minister’s Department and saw how little university research was called on to solve public policy problems facing government because of a cultural gulf.

“I appreciated how irritatingly other-worldly public servants found many academic researchers ,” he said.

While on the academic side, he said, “they worried that their research, intermediated by public servants, would be used in a manner and for purposes that they had not intended”.

Professor Shergold praised the successive NSW governments that had improved this “dire situation” by supporting the institute.