6. Describing Legislative Patterns

The second major data chapter includes five figures. It examines policy change year by year. It has three aims: (1) to identify the number of punctuations in the Australian policy agenda; (2) to examine the content of punctuations and conduct analysis of the minor codes; (3) to examine the link between punctuations and long-term policy change as found in the previous chapter. We find 57 punctuations in Australian legislation over 47 years. The codes are not equally punctuated. In that way Australia resembles other countries. However, punctuations emanate from quite different sources, and many are artefacts of coding, with diverse legislation that happens to fall under one code. Punctuations seem random and not linked to long-term change. Incremental change over time seems more important.