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Centre–left political parties are undergoing an identity crisis. This article is a comparative analysis of how the three sister labour parties in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are refurbishing their agendas. We integrate Barrientos and Powell's framework, with Freeden's concept of ideological morphology, to systematically map the three parties across three main domains: their discourse and values, their political economy, and their social policy agendas. We then apply four different analytical frames to better understand the ideological and policy trajectories of our cases. These frames comprise 'values, not ideology', 'quietism', 'third way', and 'thin labourism'. We argue that the frame of 'thin labourism' best captures the recent developments of these modern labour parties. In sum, the parties are still rooted in a recognisable centre–left tradition, but they operating from a narrower base of core values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The party-money nexus has long excited concerns about corruption and undue influence. However, much of the scholarship in this area has focused on the funding parties receive from external donors or the state. One area of party financing that is underexplored is that of party-controlled commercial enterprises. We examine the nature and scale of the commercial activities engaged in by the two major governing Australian parties: Labor and the Liberals. We find that while commercial activities are long-standing practices, they have diversified over time, becoming more sophisticated and professionalized. Importantly, some of these activities have become decoupled from the proper purposes of parties. The upscaling of party fundraising practices introduces new tensions for parties - both normatively and practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a decade in opposition, the ALP has regained power in Australia, under the leadership of Anthony Albanese in 2022. The road to power has proved hard for the ALP, and the price of victory comes at a high cost. Albanese's government is caught in a familiar dilemma for the centre-left -- how to navigate the course between compromise and achieving lasting reforms. The ALP is likely to achieve a number of significant achievements, including an end of the longstanding climate wars in Australia. Yet, the ALP has had to accept much of the structural inequalities and political agenda entrenched by the centre-right coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the March state election, a Labor government was installed after convincingly ousting Steven Marshall's one-term Liberal government, continuing a tradition of short-lived Liberal governments in South Australia. The Malinauskas Government: Leadership and Performance By the end of 2022, and less than a full year in office, Peter Malinauskas had already made a strong, mostly favourable, impression in South Australia. Premier Malinauskas was quick to claim this as a triumph for his fledgling government, noting the difficulties governments usually face in by-elections ( I ABC News i , 4 July 2022). Chapman leaves a reformist legacy, having been the state's first female Deputy Premier and Attorney-General, and having steered through contentious social reforms in the areas of abortion and voluntary euthanasia - which had been left untouched by more socially conservative Labor predecessors in John Rau and Michael Atkinson ( I ABC News i , 19 April 2022). [Extracted from the article]

Cyber-enabled foreign interference remains a key threat to many advanced industrial countries. In many cases, the security response has been to build "resilience" – cyber, national and, increasingly, democratic resilience – in line with whole-of-government and whole-of-society strategies. However, many of these securitised responses are "top-down" and elite driven. These resilience agendas do not pay sufficient attention to the views, concerns and threat-perceptions of citizens, potentially undermining their efficacy. In this article, we focus on the Australian case to better understand how citizen cyber skills, threat awareness, and perceptions of institutional capacity can inform democratic resilience to evolving cyber and information risks. We find strong evidence of a clear gap between citizen views and the securitised responses of governments in dealing with cyber-enabled foreign interference. A further issue from the Australian case is that citizens are framed as a passive strategic resource, rather than conceived of as a potentially substantive partner in a "joined-up" response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars increasingly refer to 'democratic resilience' to understand the ways democracies respond to threats and challenges. Likewise, policymakers advocate democratic resilience as part of foreign and security strategies, and as an aim of internally strengthening democratic practices, amid changing threat environments. But what does 'democratic resilience' mean? Does it align with well-established resilience theorising across other disciplines, and does it provide anything distinct from existing means of understanding democratic perseverance? To answer these questions, we conduct a systematic review of literature discussing democratic resilience, and measure findings against a synthesis of multidisciplinary theorising on resilience. We find that democratic resilience is often under-theorised, used in a fashion that largely repackages existing democratisation concepts, or fails to incorporate advancements in broader resilience theorising. Recent contributions to both theoretical development and operationalisation of democratic resilience, however, indicate a potential turning point in the evolution of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the long-standing connection between South Australia and the national development of immigrant multiculturalism, epitomised through the role of Premier Don Dunstan, recent policy developments have not yet been studied at the state level. This article evaluates the development and ‘policy success’ of multiculturalism in South Australia from 2007 to 2017, a period characterised by the so-called ‘backlash against multiculturalism’ in many liberal democracies. The study is based on interviews with policymakers and policy stakeholders, triangulated against policy documentation and other grey literature. Overall, policy efforts by successive state governments can be characterised as ‘quiet multiculturalism’, in that they have become entrenched as the political norm. Multiculturalism tends not to be politically contentious, leaving policymakers to implement policies without much fanfare. At the same time though, there is a risk of fragility. Deeper structural barriers to equal opportunity may be overlooked due to an attitude that existing policies promoting ‘access and equity’ are sufficient or can be scaled down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social democracy is in a state of change and flux, and the electoral fortunes of many centre-left political parties are poor. This article offers an analysis of the current trajectory of the centre left, by detailing a systematic mapping of policy change across the family of social democratic political parties. Many of the parties, especially in the 1990s, took a 'third way' turn, or a shift to what has been called the 'new social democracy'. Yet, the 'third way' label is a poor descriptor to capture the changing policy profile and dynamics of the family of mainstream centre-left political parties. In Adam Przeworski's view, there have been four main waves of social democracy. We employ the 'wave' frame to examine if there is an emergent, fifth, breaking wave of social democracy. Overall, we find that social democratic parties have moved beyond the 'third way'; they are shifting leftwards, but they are a new kind of 'left' from that of previous decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses economic, political and social issues in South Australia in the second half of 2019. There was a 0.9 percent increase in the unemployment rate by September, raising it to 6.9 percent. The government's Land Tax bill was passed near the end of the year. The mental health services plan of the government was launched in November, with targeted efforts to reduce the incidence of suicide at its center.

There are widespread claims that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the British Labour Party has entailed a shift to a more 'radical' and 'left-wing' form of politics. Yet, many of these claims are untested or lack clear empirical evidence. This article seeks to contextualise Labour's policy agenda, by focussing on the 2017 Labour Manifesto 'For the Many, Not the Few'. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we challenge both the media portrayal of 'For the Many, Not the Few', and also the existing academic literature concerning Corbyn's policy agenda. We offer the first detailed and systematic analysis of Labour's policy agenda. The article uses the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) database to contextualise Labour's 2017 manifesto and compare it with every Labour manifesto since 1945. The MARPOR data are then linked with a qualitative analysis of Corbyn's policy agenda in the areas of economic policy, social policy and foreign affairs. The qualitative analysis focusses on comparing the 2017 manifesto with the 1983, 1997 and 2015 manifestos. Overall, the article argues that the wider claims about Corbyn's radicalism tend to mask some long-standing continuity in the Labour tradition, and these claims tend to simplify understanding of a more complex policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the concept of labor in the Australian Labor Party's administration of state governments in Australia. Topics discussed include analysis of the ideological and policy profile of state Labor governments, policy mechanisms of state Labor governments based on a framework adopted from policy experts Armando Barrientos and Martin Powell, and the comparative profile of modern state-level social democracy in Australia.

The article discusses political issues concerning South Australia (SA) from July to December 2018. Topics explored include the 2036 manifesto released by the administration of SA Premier Steven Marshall which outlined proposed changes to some government policies, the 2018 state budget presented by SA Treasurer Rob Lucas, and the initiatives launched by the state government to address the public health crisis in the region.

In the policy advice literature, there has been two main "waves" of research focus. In the first wave, the focus of scholarly attention tended to focus on single policy advice actors. A key innovation was offered by Halligan, who sought to frame policy advice within a policy advisory system, with a focus on government control and location. In later research, Craft and Wilder called for a "second wave" of research which also sought to integrate factors such as policy content, context, ideational compatibility but also reflect the increasingly polycentric advice landscape. This article contributes to the second wave drawing attention to a key element of the institutional dynamics of policy advice systems, namely the issue of political "demand". A core argument offered in this article is that the dynamics of demand need to be interrogated more fully, and be given greater prominence in current understandings of PAS dynamics. The net effect of marginalizing "demand" factors is that it can de-politicize the extent and nature of advice-giving, and reduce it to a seeming technocratic exchange. To expand our understanding of demand, this paper offers a framework for understanding the dynamics of demand within policy advice systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a call for a "second wave" of scholarship on policy advice to expand our understanding of the relational dynamics within a policy advisory system (PAS). In this article, we use a case from Brazil to address two key gaps in the PAS literature – the lack of attention to systems of network governance and the current predominance of "Westminster" empirical cases. To better understand the impact of policy advice within a system of networked governance, we apply the frame of "metagovernance" – the steering of governance networks. We then introduce and employ the concepts of funnelling, political brokering and gate-keeping to better understand how policy advice is shaped, modified and then either rejected or accepted. The contribution of the article is that, while much of the existing PAS literature describes the contours and key actors within an advisory system, we develop new conceptual scaffolding to better understand the trajectories and impact of policy advice, and the interplay between actors and agents, within a broader system of metagovernance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of green parties has injected new lines of competition into national party systems, with discernible issue competition effects for established, ideologically-proximate social democratic parties. Despite a burgeoning literature on green and social democratic issue competition tactics in settings where coalition government is common, we have less understanding of these same effects in settings where majority government is the norm. Using the case of the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party, we explore issue competition dynamics in a polity where the majoritarian electoral system reduces opportunities for coalition formation. We find that the absence of strong electoral imperatives for either party to enter coalitions has encouraged them to compete adjacent to one another, rather than in direct competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of policy advice giving in a policy advisory system (PAS) is complex, multifaceted, and relational. Research on policy advice has shifted from a “first wave” to a “second wave” that places a greater focus on the dynamics of PASs. This article expands our understanding of the impact of advice giving in a PAS by developing a framework that integrates supply, demand, content, and contextual factors. This article introduces a new type of policy actor (the “thinker in residence”) to better understand the relational dynamics of a PAS and compare why some actors achieve greater impact than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic and political situation in South Australia from July to December 2017. Topics explored include the energy plan introduced by the administration of South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill to address electric power failure problems, factors which contribute to the high cost of electricity in the region, and the planned transformation of public health services in South Australia.

The article discusses several developments involving politics in the Australian state of South Australia between July 2016 and December 2016, and it mentions the leadership of the Australian Labor Party-led government under South Australia's Premier Jay Weatherill. A budget surplus is addressed, along with a power blackout event in South Australia which was caused by an extreme weather event. South Australia's role in the nuclear fuel cycle is assessed, along with social policy.

This article offers an overview of recent attempts to reconfigure the relationship between state and civil society in Australia. The article offers five models of how state/civil society relations might play out under the Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government. These models include corporate, nostalgic, technological, neo-liberal, and the UK government’s Big Society variants. The article concludes that the Turnbull government’s approach to civic renewal is not innovative, and has reverted to a thin corporate model of state/civil society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 2007 to 2010, there were national Labour governments in Britain and Australia, the longest and only third time this had occurred since the second World War. The period of New Labour was closing in the UK, and in Australia the Rudd government came to power after 11 years in opposition, directly influenced by the, at times, trailblazing UK Labour government. In the domain of social policy, New Labour was a source of policy inspiration and transfer. Specifically, the Rudd/Gillard governments borrowed heavily its ‘social exclusion’ agenda, and also the use of ‘compacts’ with the third sector. This article examines the policy diffusion and transfer between the UK and Australia, and in doing so offers critical insights into the policy transfer literature. The article examines the reasons for the Australian Labor Party's adoption of these policies, and links this to wider dilemmas and identity crisis that are afflicting centre-left governments across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Big Society was a flagship policy initiative launched by the UK Conservative party, under the leadership of David Cameron, to win office in 2010. Closely associated with the ideas of Phillip Blond, the Big Society agenda seeks to introduce new forms of civic activism and revive wider civil society. There has been speculation that the Big Society agenda might take hold in Australia, and Blond has been active in promoting it in Australia. Using Dolowitz and Marsh's policy transfer heuristic, this article examines the likelihood of the Big Society being adopted by the Abbott Liberal Coalition. The article outlines a number of potential variants of the Big Society, and concludes that for a variety of reasons it is unlikely to be adopted by the Liberal federal government in Australia. The case also highlights both strengths and limitations in the Dolowitz and Marsh framework, arguing that it can be used in an innovative way to speculate on potential transfers, but is limited in accounting for why transfer may or may not take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour governments around the world are struggling to renew labour and social democratic values in the modern era. The South Australian Labor government, led by Mike Rann (2002-11), presents a striking case of a labour government that pursued a renewal of social democracy. By offering a critical examination of the ideological contours of the Rann Government, this paper contributes to wider debates about the flux of social democracy. In Australia, debates about Labor's identity tend to focus on the federal rather than state level, which this article seeks, in part, to redress. The Rann government's economic and social inclusion policies are examined and compared with its South Australian historical forebears, and the Rann government is located within the various labour 'traditions'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several political developments in South Australia (SA) between July 2015 and December 2015. The SA government's responses to the Australian state's economic problems are examined, along with the region's unemployment rate and the work of SA's Premier Jay Weatherill and Liberal Party of Australia member and opposition leader Steven Marshall. The death of former Australian Labor Party member and SA Premier John Bannon. Submarine construction plans are also assessed.

An essay is presented on politics and democracy in Great Britain and Australia. Topics discussed include the identity crisis of the political party Australian Labor Party (ALP), the adaptation of democratic renewal agenda, and insights from the British politician Ed Miliband of the centre-left political party in Great Britain, Labour Party.

The article discusses Australian domestic politics in the first half of 2013. Particular focus is given to Australian economic policies, the plummeting popularity of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government, and her deposition as a leader of the Australian Labor Party by party colleague Kevin Rudd. An overview of the situation in Australian local governments is presented.

The idea that governance has replaced government, and that networks have replaced hierarchy as the dominant mode of governance, have become mainstream views in the public policy literature. In this article, we consider a key initiative of the Rudd government in Australia, the 2020 Summit, which, at first sight, seems like an example of network governance in action. Having considered the operation and outcomes of the Summit, however, we argue that it more accurately illustrates how governments, perhaps particularly in Westminster systems, attempt to preserve hierarchy, through a process of metagovernance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2006, the South Australian government undertook the largest consultation ever to take place in the state. Over 1600 South Australians were involved with the consultation on the revision of South Australia's Strategic Plan (SASP). This ‘big-picture’ consultation was a significant attempt to connect with, and gain feedback from, the South Australian ‘community’ on the Rann government's vision for the state. This article is the first formal evaluation of the 2006 consultation on the SASP. To critically evaluate the consultation process, this article uses Pratchett's framework which examines participative processes through the two principles of responsiveness and representativeness. The article concludes that the state government's rhetoric about the success of the consultation obscures a number of deficiencies and tensions that underpinned the consultation process. This critique of the South Australian consultation provides some key insights for the current trend for strategic planning at the state level in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the politics of governments administered by the Australian Labor Party, the changing dynamics of Australian federalism, and the performance of sub-national social democracy in Australia.