The Policy Space provides a politically neutral blogging platform for debating major public policy issues in Australia and overseas. Our purpose is to heighten the quality of policy and political debate and enhance the capability of our political systems to deal with long-term challenges. We invite high quality contributions from academics, practitioners, journalists and political activists on the key issues of our time. The Policy Space encourages blogs that: address a topic of interest to the Policy Space audience; are aligned with key blog themes (e.g. Australian politics and policy, international policy developments, new forms of political participation, leadership etc.); are clearly argued and well written; provide important lessons for better policy, better policy practices,  the future of politics or democratic innovation; and, while we encourage opinion pieces it is expected that supporting data should be provided when strong knowledge claims are being made e.g. the majority of Australians are vegetarian!

Participate in the Policy Space – together we can make a difference!

Guildlines for Submissions

All blog posts written for The Policy Space should follow the following style guidelines. Posts should ideally:

• Be between 500-1,000 words in length.
• Be submitted with an appropriate eye-catching title and a three line summary of the central argument or ‘hook’ of the blog post.
• Be submitted with a picture of the author and a summary of the author’s background and research interests.
• Be tightly focused on showing how an academic insight can help improve public understanding of a specific political issue.
• Be accessible, with specialist academic language kept to a minimum. Authors should explain in simple terms what complex academic concepts mean and why they matter.
• Be communicated in a straightforward and readable manner. This means being grammatically succinct and using active and engaging language (first person is preferable) to bring a particular topic or academic concept to life.
• Be non-partisan, in the sense of not explicitly supporting or criticising one party political position over another. This does not mean attempting to eliminate all political, moral or ethical ‘bias’, but rather harnessing a particular academic perspective to foster a more nuanced and informed understanding of a contemporary political issue.
• Contain links to academic articles, news features or related blog posts where appropriate.

Please email your submission with a short biographical note (roughly three to four lines) and a suitable picture of yourself to: [email protected].

We will get back to you with any substantive revisions that we feel are required. If the required revisions are only minor stylistic or grammatical issues, we reserve the right to exercise discretion in making any adjustments that we see fit.