BI Connect 2025

Join us for BI Connect 2025, BETA’s annual conference bringing together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to explore how behavioural insights (BI) can make government policies and programs more effective.

The 2025 conference will focus on ‘Behavioural Insights in government: Applying behavioural insights from policy design to program delivery’.

This half-day online event will showcase the many ways behavioural insights can create better outcomes for Australians by bringing human behaviour to the centre of policy design and service delivery.

Whether you’re a policymaker or a BI practitioner, you’ll gain practical insights from real-world applications in Australia and overseas. You’ll hear from behavioural public policy experts on how behavioural insights are used across the policy cycle—from planning to program delivery and evaluation.

Presentations will focus on applied examples rather than technical detail, highlighting how behavioural science translates into impact.

With a series of insightful presentations and a panel discussion held across one afternoon, BI Connect is your opportunity to learn and be inspired.

BI Connect 2025 is free to attend and open to all. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear how behavioural insights are shaping the future of government policy and program delivery.

Presentations

Empowered: How timely evidence can drive policy and regulatory change

Laura Bennetts-Kneebone | BETA, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

In 2020, the Australian Government's Minister for Energy requested an amendment to the National Energy Retail Rules. New rules aimed to simplify power and gas bills for households and small business owners and support consumers to engage with the market to find better energy deals.

But what actually makes a bill better?

How easy can it be to switch to a better plan?

This presentation will take you on a policy development tour, covering 4 BETA projects and showcasing how behavioural insights are saving Australians money.

About Laura

Laura has worked at BETA since 2019. She is currently a Senior Adviser of BETA’s Energy, Environment and Economics team, designing behavioural solutions to policy problems and testing them with RCTs. Prior to joining BETA, Laura spent 10 years at the Department of Social Services working on the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children and other Australian longitudinal studies. She has qualifications in Social Research (ANU), Linguistics, Anthropology and Chinese (LaTrobe).

System wide regulatory and customer transformation: Sludge reduction with Heritage NSW

Alex Galassi | NSW Behavioural Insights Unit, NSW Department of Customer Service

Elizabeth Owers | NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

The NSW Government is using sludge audits to improve the efficiency, inclusiveness, and fairness of public services. There is also opportunity for a whole-of-organisation approach to build on the existing work on specific, targeted processes. In 2025, Heritage NSW and the Behavioural Insights Unit launched the first agency-wide sludge reduction program as part of a broader transformation of heritage services. The initiative established the ‘Heritage NSW Sludge Academy,’ developed a pipeline of audits, introduced system-wide evaluation, and prioritised service improvements to reduce regulatory burden, improve customer experience and boost productivity. This program marks the first systematic application of sludge audits across a government agency, providing practical lessons for embedding behavioural insights at scale.

About Alex

Alex Galassi is a Manager in the NSW Behavioural Insights Unit where she leads projects aimed at improving customer outcomes and designing more accessible, user-friendly services through the application of behavioural science. She has worked closely with agencies across NSW Government to identify, quantify, and reduce unnecessary friction points in systems and processes to shape more equitable and effective public services. Alex is passionate about using evidence and behavioural insights to drive meaningful, human-centred change.

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Owers is the Acting Executive Director of Heritage NSW, where she leads strategic initiatives to modernise and strengthen heritage management across the state. With a strong background in the NSW government, Elizabeth has held senior roles across policy, regulation, and program delivery. She is a passionate advocate for applying behavioural insights to public sector challenges and is particularly focused on the power of sludge audits to identify and remove unnecessary administrative burdens. Elizabeth is committed to transforming how Heritage NSW operates—making it more citizen-centred, efficient, and impactful.

Strengthening citizens’ resilience in crises and disasters: Designing citizen-centred and effective information on disaster preparedness

Valerie Giesen | Federal Chancellery, Division of Behavioural Science and Citizen-Centred Governance / Ministry of Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation (Germany)

Helping citizens prepare for the future is a challenge for government in many areas, including health (e.g. prevention), finance (e.g. pension planning) and sustainability (e.g. informing investment decisions). When it comes to emergency preparedness and civil protection, governments face additional complexity which can undermine effective risk communication.

The German Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the German federal disaster management agency (BBK) were interested in leveraging a deep understanding of how citizens experience these issues to better support emergency preparedness. From 2024 to 2025, BBK and the German Federal Chancellery’s team for Citizen-Centred governance ran a joint project to better understand citizens’ experience and translate insights into principles for citizen-centric information on emergency preparedness as well as to rework information products, starting with the agency’s disaster-preparedness guide.

This presentation reflects on how behavioural insights fed into the process of re-thinking and re-designing information on emergency preparedness and the value of including citizens in the design process.

About Valerie

Valerie Giesen is a sociocultural anthropologist (SOAS University of London; Columbia University). She has a background in applied anthropological research, having consulted companies and foundations with humanities-based strategy consultancy ReD Associates. She now works for the German Federal Chancellery’s division for citizen-centred government, where she is responsible for qualitative research and innovation for citizen-centred policy and services. The unit supports German ministries and government agencies in applying behavioural insights to improve policy development and delivery.

Nudge Thyself, A Blueprint for Behavioural Public Administration

Cameron Knott | OECD

Behavioural science has already used evidence to make policies more effective. Now the challenge is to bring rigorous, empirical evidence to the routines and rules that shape how public administration itself works. This presentation will cover what practices have been tried, what worked, what did not, and why. In will help leaders decide where to invest in Behavioural Public Administration capability, and equip policymakers with the practices they should adopt, adapt and translate to their administration’s context.

About Cameron

Cameron is a Project Lead in the OECD Behavioural Science Team. He oversees work with the Italian Government and leads a workstream on applying behavioural science to public administration. Before the OECD, Cameron was the Research Lead for BIT Singapore, overseeing research in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Cameron was a founding member of the Victorian Department of Premier & Cabinet’s Behavioural Insights Unit in 2016. He has worked in education, regulation, and transport policy for KPMG’s government advisory practice. He began his career at Grattan Institute in the Higher Education Program.

Embedding evidence in policy making within the Australian Public Service: Behavioural science and beyond

Behavioural science has long been at the forefront of the evidence-informed policy movement. The Australian Public Service (APS) has developed a cluster of entities in central departments tasked with ensuring the Australian Government’s policy decisions are made with access to high-quality, relevant evidence. Together these entities maintain strategic oversight of the structures, systems and processes for evidence generation and consideration within the APS. This panel will feature the heads of the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), the Australian Centre for Evaluation (ACE) and the Office of Impact Analysis (OIA). The panel will discuss the APS’s evidence architecture, how different entities collaborate to embed behavioural science and evidence at different parts of the policy cycle, how the APS’s structures and processes of evidence brokerage and generation have changed over time, and where there are still opportunities for improvement.

Panel chair:

• Cale Hubble, BETA, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

SES panellists:

• Eleanor Williams, Australian Centre for Evaluation, The Treasury
• Susan Calvert, BETA, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
• Joanna Abhayaratna, Office of Impact Analysis, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet