Club Troppo

Dave Bath of Balneus fame has accepted my repeated naggings to hop onto my nascent (and currently on hold) Ozblogistan network. David has in the past few days started posting at The Wonkery, a site devoted to all things to do with inquiries, reviews and other instruments of consultative, report-driven policy making.

As Dave writes:

Wonkers-in-residence might disagree with what you say to government, and not only defend your right to say it, but encourage you to say it.

Posts and comments (apart from the occasional editorial like this one) will usually cover one or more of the following items…

• Notices of government (and departmental inquiries);
• Preliminary musings of Wonkers-in-residence while preparing their own submissions;
• Notice and/or review of particularly interesting submissions as they are made available on government websites
• Reviews of parliamentary (majority and minority) reports once the inquiry has finished, particularly if there is a gross mismatch between the submissions and the report.

Dave is also using the site as a jumping off point for his polite crusade to get governments around Australia to provide RSS feeds for important streams of documents, such as press releases, reports, notices, announcements and the like.

Nominally I am one of the Wonks-in-Residence, but at the moment it’s mostly Dave’s prodigious output that makes it go. We are keen to get a few more Wonks-in-Residence, so if you believe in having input into policy, do drop by.