Something changed in how governments talked about what they were doing. The change was not dramatic. It did not arrive with a manifesto or a policy paper announcing that henceforth the language of governance would shift from outcome to expenditure, from mechanism to allocation, from what we are trying to achieve to how much we are spending to achieve it.
It arrived gradually, in the late 1990s, and settled so thoroughly into the conventions of political communication that it is now difficult to remember that it was a change rather than always having been the case.
The koala is a useful example precisely because it is not contentious. Nobody is against koalas. The koala’s survival is not a politically divisive question in the way that tax rates or border policy are politically divisive questions. The koala therefore provides a clear field for observing the rhetorical structure without the structure being obscured by the political conflict it would generate in more contested territory.
A government that wishes to demonstrate its commitment to koala conservation announces a funding package. One million dollars for koala conservation. The announcement is reported. The reporting generates the coverage that the announcement was designed to generate. The coverage conveys the message that the government is taking the matter seriously. The evidence offered for the seriousness is the size of the number. The number is concrete. It can be reported in a single sentence. It can be compared to previous numbers. It can be contrasted with what the opposition has spent or promised or failed to spend. It performs the function of demonstrating commitment in the medium where demonstrations of commitment are required to occur.
What the number does not convey is what will happen to the koalas.
The mechanism that would produce the outcome—the specific interventions, the habitat decisions, the disease management, the infrastructure changes, the long-term monitoring, the adaptive management as conditions change—is not in the announcement. It may exist in documents that are not announced. It may be partially developed and not yet complete. It may be genuinely uncertain, because the ecology is complex and the variables are not fully under the government’s control. The announcement does not require the mechanism to be present. It requires only the number.
This is the substitution. The number stands in for the mechanism in the communication, as though the allocation of resources were equivalent to the deployment of resources toward a specific end by a specific method with a specific accountability structure. The allocation is the input. The deployment is the mechanism. The outcome is what the mechanism produces. The announcement describes the input as though it were the outcome. The input and the outcome are not the same thing.
Money is measurable at the moment of allocation. The outcome is measurable only later, if at all, and the measurement requires a sustained commitment to tracking, to honesty about what the tracking reveals, and to the willingness to publish findings that may show the allocation did not produce the expected result. These are commitments that the political cycle makes difficult. The announcement is in the news cycle today. The outcome is in the news cycle, if it enters the news cycle at all, years from now. The number is available immediately. The result requires patience, method, and the accountability structure that holds the announcement to what it actually delivers.
The shift from functional framing to fiscal framing did not occur in isolation. It arrived alongside several overlapping developments that created the conditions for it to settle in as the dominant mode. The neoliberal management reforms that spread through Western governments from the 1980s onward brought corporate language into public administration—efficiency, cost-benefit, value for money, fiscal responsibility.
The language was borrowed from contexts where the relationship between input and output was more direct and more immediately visible than it is in complex public policy domains. The corporate production line that spends a dollar on materials and produces a product worth more than a dollar has a tractable relationship between input and output.
The government that spends a million dollars on koala conservation is operating in a domain where the relationship between the expenditure and the outcome is mediated by ecological complexity, implementation quality, time lags, and variables the government does not control.
The corporate language applied to the public domain produced the appearance of the same tractability without the underlying conditions that make it tractable. The spending announcement borrows the directness of the production line without the accountability structure that makes the directness meaningful.
The factory that spends a dollar and does not produce the product discovers this quickly and adjusts. The government that spends a million dollars and does not produce the outcome may not discover this within the political cycle during which the announcement was made, and may not be required to account for it when the discovery is eventually made.
The audit culture that developed alongside the managerial reforms added a further layer to the substitution. Governments were required to demonstrate accountability through quantifiable evidence of action. The quantifiable evidence most readily available was expenditure—the budget line, the fund, the package, the commitment. These are numbers that exist and can be reported. The outcomes that the expenditure was supposed to produce are harder to quantify, take longer to appear, and are more ambiguous in their attribution. The audit system that rewards quantifiable evidence of action rewards the announcement of expenditure more readily than the demonstration of outcome, because the announcement is immediate and the numbers are clear.
The result is a system that produces exactly what it rewards. Governments that are evaluated on the basis of demonstrated commitment to funded programs produce announcements of funded programs. The announcements are genuine in the sense that the money is real and the commitment to spending it is real. The announcements are not the policy. They are the announcement of the intention to fund the policy. The policy is the mechanism, the implementation, the adaptation, the outcome measurement, and the accountability for the gap between the announced intention and the actual result. The announcement of the intention is the beginning of the policy, not the policy itself.
When the announcement is received as the policy, and when the political system rewards the announcement rather than holding it accountable to the outcome, the announcement becomes sufficient. The mechanism can remain underdeveloped. The implementation can be weak. The adaptation can be absent. The outcome measurement can be superficial. The accountability for the gap can be deferred. The number was announced. The commitment was demonstrated. The cycle moves on.
The citizen who is trained by repeated exposure to fiscal announcements to hear the announcement as evidence of the outcome has acquired a political habit of perception that serves the announcement rather than the accountability. The training is not deliberate. It is the accumulated effect of a political communication environment in which the announcement is the news, the mechanism is the detail, and the detail is not where the news cycle spends its time.
The opposition’s response to the announcement reinforces the training. The opposition does not typically respond to a funding announcement by asking whether the mechanism is well-designed or the outcome measurement is adequate. It responds by questioning whether the number is large enough, or by noting that a previous government spent more, or by announcing a counter-commitment of a larger number. The debate is about the scale of the fiscal commitment rather than the quality of the mechanism. The debate rewards the fiscal framing and does not challenge it.
The media’s role in this is structural rather than partisan. A funding announcement is a news story. It has a number, a context, a politician making the announcement, a response from the opposition, a comment from an affected party. It fits the format of the news report. The mechanism—the ecological systems plan, the implementation structure, the accountability framework—does not fit the same format. It is complex, it requires sustained attention to understand, it produces uncertainty rather than the clarity that news stories prefer. The format selects for the announcement. The mechanism is reported, if it is reported at all, as detail in a longer story that most audiences will not read to the end.
The koala may survive or may not. The survival or non-survival will be determined by the ecological conditions, the interventions actually deployed, the quality of their implementation, and the variables that the government does not control. The announcement did not determine any of these. The announcement determined only that a number was associated with the government’s stated intention to address the matter.
The number answered: what did you allocate?
It did not answer: what changed for the koalas?
These are different questions. The political system has developed a strong preference for asking the first and a weaker mechanism for demanding an answer to the second. The preference is not universal and not without exception—there are governments and jurisdictions that take outcome measurement seriously and build genuine accountability into their policy frameworks. The preference is dominant enough, however, that the fiscal framing has become the default mode of political communication about policy, and the default mode shapes what the audience expects and what the system is rewarded for providing.
Funding is a means.
The means is not the policy.
The policy is what the means produces.
The production requires a mechanism.
The mechanism requires accountability.
The accountability requires the willingness to measure what actually happened.
The announcement said one million dollars.
What happened to the koalas is a different sentence.
The Vorpel Foundation