This course will provide students with an applied, hands-on understanding of how the Australian political system and how government policy making works in practice.

Students will be guided to choose a political or policy issue they care about as a case study, and to track that issue through the government decision making process to assess who attempted to exert power in shaping the decision and who prevailed. In the process students will learn about our institutions, including federalism, the Parliament, the High Court and our electoral systems. They will also learn about all the key players including the bureaucracy, interest groups, lobbyists, the media, the different political parties and their sub-factions. We will compare theory to practice, to develop an applied sense of how political decisions and policy making really work.