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Tomorrow the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is discussing his plans to introduce nuclear power with anti-renewable energy commentator, Chris Uhlmann. No doubt we will hear the same claims about renewable energy causing electricity prices to be high and the need for nuclear power to keep prices down that both men have said in the past.

And just as was the case in the past, such claims will again be wrong.

The increased use of renewables in supplying electricity is not the cause of higher retail electricity prices – and it is clear that more renewables will lead to lower prices.

Research and data from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) and the CSIRO all make it abundantly clear that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, and that the high cost of energy is driven by the cost of gas and coal produced electricity.

It is not surprising that people can be misled about the cause of electricity prices. Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) is a complex market stretching to 1,925 pages of rules and regulations such that any explanation of price determination will be greatly simplified.

So let us set out the two key issues to understanding retail electricity prices:

1.      The cost of generating electricity (the wholesale price) is a surprisingly small component of the many costs that contribute to household electricity prices.

By Sarosh Nagar and David Eaves

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the few things growing more quickly than the size of new AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Central to this boom is “compute” — the processing power, memory, and resources needed to perform the computations underlying AI systems. The world’s compute is mostly concentrated within three American giants — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, while in China, Tencent and Alibaba are formidable players.

By Ruth Puttick

The Public Sector Capabilities Index explores if and how dynamic capabilities can be measured in a city government context. While the concept of dynamic capabilities has some history in private organizations, it is relatively nascent in the public sector, particularly at the urban level. Consequently, few individuals within city governments are familiar with the concept of dynamic capabilities. This unfamiliarity presents a dual challenge: it complicates the identification and measurement of dynamic capabilities in city government and makes it difficult to translate these findings into actionable insights for officials and practitioners.

The Problem

We know that some public sector activities are difficult to measure, or as Mintzberg put it:

By Ruth Puttick and Fernando Monge

The Public Sector Capabilities Index is focused on identifying where city governments are strong and where certain capabilities need to be built up. Although it has a city government focus, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical examples. Following our recent interview with Shaun Hazeldine, Head of the IFRC Solferino Academy, in this blog we explore lessons from its work to enable humanitarians to find creative solutions to complex challenges.

The Solferino Academy is the “Think and Do Tank” that supports the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Specializing in Innovation, Leadership and Strategic Foresight, the Solferino Academy supports the IFRC’s network of National Societies “to transform and be fit for the challenges and opportunities of the future”.

By David Eaves, Krisstina Rao and Kassim Vera

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is an emerging term that describes a number of foundational capabilities that enable individuals to participate in society and markets as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer in a digital era. At the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), we define DPI as including digital payment systems, digital ID, and data exchange system(s) (DES). Each component plays a distinct role: digital payment systems facilitate financial transactions, digital IDs verify personal identity, and data exchange systems manage the secure flow of information across multiple platforms.

By David Eaves

A central dilemma for anyone interested in government is the dual nature of the state. On the one hand, the state can be a powerful force for good — harnessing and collectivising resources to create, or enforcing rules and norms that support, public goods. In this role, states have created miraculous outcomes — sewage systems, public health and education, courts… public goods that have radically improved people’s lives. On the other hand, the same Leviathan-like power that can make the state critical to creating public value also make it terrifying. The world is sadly filled with examples of states power used to displace, punish and terrorize marginalized communities, pursue wars of aggression, or simply eliminate dissent.

By Ruth Puttick

The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and Bloomberg Philanthropies are developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index. The aspiration is to measure where city government capabilities are strong and where skills must be built up. It will focus on city governments, but as part of its development, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical attempts at capability building. This blog explores the public sector reforms and restructuring of government carried out by New Labour in the UK.

What happened?

Civil service reform was a core component of “New Labour” during Tony Blair’s leadership from 1997 to 2007. During this time there were various initiatives, including the 1999 Modernising Government white paper, which aspired to create a ‘joined up’ government and ‘learning labs’ to promote public service innovation.

By Nora Clinton, Head of the Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN), Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

At IIPP’s 2024 Rethinking the State Forum in June, many of our external guests from policy and academia commented on the dynamism of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and its deep commitment to putting public value, how it is imagined and practiced, at the center of government and democratic discourse.

This dynamism emanates naturally from our highly committed researchers and academics; but increasingly it is IIPP students in our Masters in Public Administration (MPA) in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value who are outstanding in their work.

Developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index: Lessons from Bogotá, Barcelona, Freetown, Seattle and Seoul

By Rainer Kattel, Ruth Puttick, Mariana Mazzucato, Anna Goulden, Iacopo Gronchi, Fernando Monge, Mia Tarp, Kwame Baafi, Bec Chau, Anjum Dhamija, and Manuel De Feria

By David Eaves and Krisstina Rao

Last month (June of 2024), we launched the DPI Map — the first comprehensive view of the state of digital identity, digital payments and data exchanges across the world.

This work started — in part — because there was little understanding of how many countries had adopted Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) around the world. Given the growing interest by policymakers, multilateral funders, public officials and public interests advocates, we hypothesized that a “map” of DPI could help create a baseline understanding of what is happening, and more importantly, help serve as a foundation for both future research and community on this topic.

And while early successes suggest that that hypothesis has been validated we’ve been so busy with outreach that we’ve not had much chance to share any emerging insights from the initial DPI map we’ve published. This blog post seeks to change that!

Caveats

Before we begin sharing the exciting insights we’ve gleaned so far, there are two important pieces of information to share.

By Krisstina Rao and Michael Chapman

The G20 Digital Economy Working Group and New Delhi declaration have drawn significant attention to the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and made it a critical topic of discussion in international fora. Here at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), David Eaves and Jordan Sandman defined DPI as a set of digital capabilities that are essential for participation in modern society. Prominent examples of DPI include the Central Bank of Brazil’s Pix (instant payments), India’s Aadhaar (digital ID), and the Estonia-led X-Road (data exchange layer). Others, such as the UNDP, have adopted similar or even broader definitions, often grounded in Brett Frischmann’s view of infrastructure as a “shared means to many ends.”

A lesbian woman in Cambridgeshire has own an arbitration between her and the county council because she was banned from her local LGBTQ group over… a gender-fluid dog? What?!

Sophia Cho, Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, and Brian Pacula 

Introduction

In 1978 counter-protesters met each stop of a tour of Australia by Mary Whitehouse, a self-styled “morals crusader” from the UK who was opposed to what she described as the “permissive society”. Whitehouse’s messages included instructing followers in Perth that “a woman was expected to entertain her husband to stop him from watching too much TV”.

On September 20 in Melbourne Whitehouse addressed what she described as a “disappointing” number of followers at Festival Hall while hundreds demonstrated outside against her campaign to restrict civil and human rights for women, lesbian and gay community members and others. The following day a rally by 30 members of the Christian far-right group Festival of Light (FOL) at the University of Sydney was outnumbered 25 to 1 by their opponents. A later FOL rally the same day was met by 350 counter-protesters who were watched closely by 150 police. Meetings in Perth were also met with counter-protests but it was in Queensland where the most disruptive action took place.