History […] is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past." 1 While public policy is about shaping the future, it must at the same time be understood as a response to the past. Decision-makers in the present inevitably build on the accumulated policies of their predecessors. Much of this process is explained by path dependency, as policy options are shaped by the institutional structures and cultural expectations established by past policies. This explanation is incomplete, however, as it leaves unexamined the strategic, deliberate use of the past through the evaluation of previous policies, even years after implementation. As policy actors choose to revisit earlier policy decisions, policy successes can be reconstructed as failures. Indigenous policy is one area where "policy failure" has gained currency in Australia, as governments have critically re-examined past policies to justify new policy directions. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 provides a useful case study of multiple evaluations over time, revealing contingency and continuity in the repeated evaluations of the role of the land councils. IntroductionThe activity of making public policy is inherently future-oriented. 2 Policy makers are concerned with identifying problems in the present, and imagining a different reality for the future. The policy-making process involves setting goals and determining actions which will address present problems, with the passage of time. While policy makers are constantly looking to the future, however, they are also acutely aware of the past, in terms of the way in which a policy problem has developed, or how previous attempts at solving a problem have succeeded or failed.It is in evaluating a policy that policy makers most explicitly consider the past. Evaluation is not an end in itself, however. As is made clear in the "text book" approach to policy making, the policy cycle, 3 each evaluation of a policy at the "end" of the process reflects on past policy outcomes, but conclusions drawn from this are expected to feed directly into the next policy cycle, maintaining the continuous forward momentum of the policy process. This form of post hoc evaluation is thus an attempt to

The New South Wales Government's NSW HIV Strategy 2012-2015: A New Era represented a punctuated shift of policy direction, and was remarkable for its ground-breaking declaration that HIV transmission could be virtually ended by 2020. This significant policy shift occurred after a long period of stability and only incremental change, some of it represented by policy decline as political and public interest in HIV waned. This article uses punctuated equilibrium theory to explore the conditions that allowed for change, and the roles played by new and long-standing actors in the HIV policy subsystem. It explains the importance of challenges to the policy image and the policy venue as key mechanisms that allowed new possibilities, created by advances in the scientific understanding of HIV, to be incorporated rapidly into government policy.

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Relations between First Nations and the Commonwealth government are in a parlous state in Australia, and the Commonwealth government's response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart has prompted much criticism from First Nations leaders. This paper examines the impact of one of K E Y W O R D S Abbott government, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, First Nations, Indigenous policy, machinery of government S28

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