Welcome and opening remarks

Susan Calvert: Good afternoon and welcome to BI Connect 2025. Hi, I'm Susan Calvert, Managing Director of the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government. You know us as BETA. Our mission is to improve the lives of Australians by generating evidence from the behavioural sciences to support the design of policies and services that work for people. And we're really pleased to be hosting this annual conference to bring together policymakers, practitioners and researchers from across government, academia and the private sector. Thank you all for joining us.

Start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land. Wherever you are joining us from around Australia today here in Canberra, I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people and recognise other families and people with connections to the lands of the region.

I want to also acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to Australia and welcome all First Nations people joining the conference.

This year's BI Connect focuses on the application of behavioural insights through the stages of the policy cycle, and we're really pleased to be showcasing some excellent practical examples of policy that's been designed around people and based on evidence of what works. Our speakers this afternoon include practitioners from Australia and around the world, including the OECD. We'll hear about evidence-driven regulatory change, about behavioural insights, transforming systems to reduce sludge, and we'll hear from the teams embedding evidence in policy decision making. We'll also hear about designing citizen-centred approaches to disaster preparedness, and international best practice in behavioural public administration. As we go, we invite you to share your questions for the presenters via the Q&A button, which is up in the top corner of your screen. So let's get started to open BI Connect. It's my great pleasure to welcome our Secretary, the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr. Steven Kennedy.

Dr. Steven Kennedy: I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as traditional custodians of the land I'm standing on today and recognise any other people or families with connection to the lands of the ACT and region. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and extend my respect to First Nations people with us today.

I would like to welcome you all to BI Connect 2025, whether you're a policy maker, a behavioural insights practitioner, or someone with an interest in evidence-driven policy. Thank you for joining us and thank you to all our presenters for showcasing policies that were designed and tested using behavioural insights as public servants, we have the privilege to develop policies, services and programs that will improve the lives of millions of Australians. Designing policy that works is rewarding, but as you know, it can be challenging. Good policy starts with understanding people. In the coming sessions, we will hear how behavioural science can help us develop policy and deliver services that are designed for people and driven by evidence of what works.

To design policy that works for people, we need to understand their goals, the barriers in their way, and the enablers that can help them get there. We need to acknowledge that Australians lead busy lives and are living in a complex world.

We need to appreciate the pressures they face and all the things they consider when making choices. This means understanding how people actually behave, not how we think or assume people should behave. This is done with respect for people's autonomy, and their freedom of choice by better appreciating where people are coming from and where they want to go, we can design our services to align with people rather than expecting people to adjust to us. Policy design based on evidence of what works is important too.

By rigorously testing policy options, we can make sure we are developing solutions that work for people in the real world. We should be humble about how much we know. People may not respond to our ideas the way we expect them to, or think they should.

Trials tell us if our idea is worth pursuing at scale. This gives us confidence that we are investing in policies and services that work and make a difference for Australians. We can apply an understanding of people and evidence for what works at multiple stages of the policy cycle.

At the problem definition stage of the policy cycle, qualitative research, like interviews, allow people to explain their experiences in their own words and quantitative data from sources like surveys or data assets help us understand how prevalent these experiences are in our society. For example, BETA recently partnered with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water to understand what was preventing Australians from switching to battery electric vehicles. BETA surveyed nearly 4,000 consumers. Respondents confirmed some known concerns like charging time and driving range, but they also revealed new insights, like how polarising the importance of home charging is. As it turns out, people who find the convenience of home charging appealing are more than five times more likely to buy an electric car than those who see it as a challenge. Now the department is using these insights to support consumer education and awareness activities so people can make an informed choice and they are working with BETA to develop an online tool to help consumers understand whether an EV would suit their needs. At the policy options stage in the policy cycle, testing and trials can help compare between policy solutions to find out what works. The complexity of people and systems means we are rarely entirely confident a proposed policy intervention will work. It's why we test, monitor and adapt. For example, BETA has been working with Treasury to test ways to help consumers get a better deal on their banking products. The team interviewed and surveyed consumers to understand their experiences and conducted randomised control trials to test where the prompts would encourage Australians to seek and switch to better offers. Results showed that prompt design really matters. We learned that a personalised prompt comparing someone's existing interest rate to the average rate makes people much more likely to engage with the market. The team also found that prompts alone are not enough. Other frictions in the loan switching process, like finding and comparing options, the complexity of banking products and the paperwork required all limit switching behaviour. This kind of research, done early in the policy cycle, helps us understand what effective prompts could look like, where their limits lie and what are the challenges consumers are facing.

Finally, at the evaluation stage of the policy cycle, a behavioural lens can inform the effectiveness of a policy or program for people and help make adjustments before it is rolled out at scale. For example, BETA supported an independent review into the new paid family and domestic violence leave entitlement. They surveyed hundreds of victim-survivors over a thousands of employers and 3,000 other Australian workers. The team also held in-depth conversations with both victim-survivors and employers, all in order to gauge the public's awareness and uptake of the leave entitlement and its impact on victim-survivors and their employers. BETA found that the leave was effectively helping victim-survivors stay in work, maintain their income and access services. A randomised control trial also found that raising awareness of the entitlement in communities and workplaces reduce stigma towards victim survivors. BETA's research provided a valuable evidence base for the independent review underpinning its recommendations for how the leave entitlement could be better administered and accessed.

I've spoken before about five key ingredients in developing evidence-driven policy. The first is ensuring we use high quality evidence when forming our decisions and when producing evidence in-house, we match the resources we invest in line with the gravity of the policy decisions we're making.

Second, we need to build a culture that values this sort of deep work. We need to acknowledge what we don't know and be keen to find out with curiosity and humility. We need to make rigorous testing, learning and adapting standard practice and give our people the support they need to do this fearlessly.

My third ingredient is ensuring our institutions value high quality evidence. We have tremendous evidence producing agencies and teams across the APS and mechanisms like the impact analysis process require evidence to be explicitly considered in policy development. We need to value these systems and use them as best we can.

The next ingredient is open access to data and investing in IT infrastructure. The APS has taken a huge step towards high quality linked data assets that help us spot, understand and solve problems and track changes over time. But we still have work to do to ensure the right kinds of data are being collected so we can measure progress holistically.

My final ingredient is building capability and networks. We need policy advisors to have at least a basic understanding of human behaviour and different types of evidence.

To support this, we need experts that we can call upon both within and outside the APS. We have a range of networks and forums where this exchange can happen. The Australian Centre for Evaluation runs the Evaluation Profession, APS Evaluation Network and the broader impact evaluation practitioners network. The APS Digital Profession has a vibrant research and design community and BETA runs a behavioural insights practitioners network. The examples I've mentioned are only a slice of the great work happening across the APS and beyond.

This work matters because policy decisions informed by high quality evidence and an understanding of people are more likely to work and improve the lives of Australians. Finally, thank you to all our speakers who are sharing their knowledge. I look forward to seeing the learnings being applied right across the APS. And to all our participants, I hope you enjoy BI Connect.