What if we had peer review for political policies?

There is a really good reason why scientific journals remove the names of the authors from a research paper when they send if for peer review. Imagine if authors had to put pictures of themselves on their research papers. The problems are obvious.

In some countries, the tick might be on another person, but you get what is being said by this image.

Peer review, if you aren’t familiar with it, is the process whereby a scientific article is reviewed for accuracy by experts in the field. Removing the names of authors reduces the chances of reviewers pre-judging a paper based on any biases, or personal animosity, they may have towards the authors. Reviews are similarly anonymised before being delivered back to authors. This allows the reviewers to be frank and honest in their comments. The most prestigious journals reject far more papers than they publish and rejection is common, even for distinguished professors.

Peer review is best practice, and lesser journals may cut corners; but not the good ones!

Analogous principles apply during drug testing. When testing a drug for safety or efficacy, you typically take a group of people, divide them randomly into two groups and give one group the drug being tested while the other group gets a pill that looks the same; called a placebo.

You don’t tell anybody which group they are in. Patients don’t know if they are getting the test drug or the placebo. You also don’t tell those assessing the outcomes. This is because doctors can be as biased as anybody else about treatments, particularly if they had a hand in the development of the drug, or might profit from its success.

The process is called “blinding”. When a drug trial is “double blinded” then the situation is as I just described. Both the patient and the assessor are blind to which group the patient is in.

Think about it. As the following cartoon explains (From XKCD), it can be hard to test everything using such methods!

Imagine if political policies were similarly assessed

Imagine if the policies of political parties were produced and sent to journalists for review, but without branding or author details.

For example, suppose you have 10 policies from each of 6 parties. That’s a bundle of 60 documents. A neutral body, set up for the purpose of managing the policy rollout, gives each document a number and keeps an index of which numbers belong to which party. The body then copies and the documents and sends them to a bunch of journalists for comment. Journalists select the policies in their field of interest, or expertise, and write their reviews. The publication headline would be something like “Review of policy 27: [some headline]”. A day or two after publication, the party advocating the policy would be revealed.

Wow!

Suddenly journalists wanting to fling mud at whichever party they loved to hate, would have reason to tread carefully. Unwarranted praise could also be risky. The consequences of a Saturday paper writer hurling invective towards a Greens policy or an Australian writer praising that same policy would have consequences; if only to expose such writers to the mirth of their peers. Nobody wants to be a laughing stock, so you’d expect reviews would tend toward being more serious and objective.

And what about us? We the voters would similarly have to read and think carefully. No more knee jerk judgements that this or that policy was typical of the left-wing/right-wing treehugger/fascist we most loved to criticise.

Guessing a party from a policy

Of course, you might think it easy to guess the party from the policy content.

In the lead up to May’s election, the Financial Review ran a story about Peter Dutton’s progressive plan to direct gas companies to divert supply for the domestic market. Who’d have guessed that was a Coalition policy? Similarly, imagine a policy to extend the North West Shelf gas operation until 2070 had been announced before the election.

Who’d have guessed that to be an ALP Policy!

And what would a journalist guess when receiving an unbranded policy for a mostly renewable electricity system firmed almost entirely by clean energy (nuclear) rather than gas; a system cleaner at the end of its implementation than the path we are currently on. Any suspicion by a reviewer of this being a Coalition policy would likely have vanished upon reading that the nuclear reactors would be built and operated by the Government; rather than by private investors.

I’d reckon more than a few journalists would guess that Chris Bowen had been finally rolled by the pro-nuclear forces in the ALP. The occasional journalist might have even thought that this was a Greens’ policy. Polling prior to the Liberal announcement of its backing of nuclear showed that plenty of Green voters support nuclear, so maybe the grass roots nature of Greens policy prognostications had enabled a revolution at the policy level. It’s certainly fun to imagine educated rationality triumphing against the Canva supercharged marketing of Simpson’s cartoon level thinking. Here you can see my biases showing!

Had policy announcements been blinded, we could probably have avoided all manner of bullshit in the way the Coalition nuclear policy was reported.

Of course, my suggestion of blinded policies wouldn’t have worked in the context of the Coalition’s dribbling out of its nuclear policy over weeks as a series of thought bubbles. Some mistakes are impossible to correct, regardless of how you structure the review process. But some false commentaries could have been avoided.

Consider some of the myths around the coalition nuclear policy that rolled through the election campaign:

1. “The policy comes from fossil fuel stooges who aim to halt renewables”. No-one would have risked this, because they’d probably have read enough beyond the branding to understand that the policy still implied a majority of renewable sources powering the grid. They’d have understood that the Coalition end point relied on less fossil fuels in the grid than the current ALP Plan (as described by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) Integrated System Plan (ISP)). To be precise, the Coalition plan was for 62% of electricity to come from renewables in 2051 and 38% from nuclear.Renewables in 2023 provided 38.3% of Australian electricity and just 38.9% in 2024. So the renewable rollout is already slowing and in serious trouble. Claims about the Coalition’s real goal being to stop the rollout mean little in the context of the current renewable problems.

2. The early, false and frankly ridiculous claims from the so-called Smart Energy Council (SEC) about nuclear costing $600 billion would have been less likely had initial reporting been blinded and more accurate.Telling lies is against the journalistic code of ethics, so when they want to do it, they merely quote the false claim in a favourable context from somebody unconstrained by any journalistic ethics; like the SEC. The ALP used exactly this trick to also avoid directly telling lies. They cited the SEC claim ad-nauseum, well aware that there are no truth-in-political-advertising laws in Australia, except as relates to the details of the voting process.This is how falsehoods about nuclear waste being some kind of difficult problem keep recycling. There’s no stopping some urban myths. Whac-a-mole is a horrible expression, but more commonly understood than Sisyphean, and it captures the essence of ALP and Green nuclear mythology.

   
   

Ad hominem attacks

Ad hominem attacks, where people attack a policy based on the presumed character of the proponent rather than the policy itself, are incredibly common in politics. Are they always wrong? Every time a politician tells a lie, they give succour to pushers of ad hominem criticisms. But pressures to drop nuanced discussion in favour of short marketing-friendly phrases make it difficult to distinguish reasonable simplifications from distortions.

For what it’s worth, there were many reasons didn’t vote for the Coalition; its support of the live export of sheep was a showstopper for me.

But I would have loved it if the Coalition's nuclear policy had been proposed by the ALP ... or even the Greens. I'd have loved it to have been given a more objective treatment by Australia’s media. It may not have been perfect, but building a high penetration renewables grid makes building nuclear plants look clean, quick and easy. I've written about this before. So it's no surprise to me that it isn’t working here or in any other non-trivial grid. I didn't know much about the Spanish grid until its deadly failure at the end of June; but once I realised its structure, the blackout wasn't at all surprising; it was South Australia in 2016 all over again.