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This paper examines the strategic arguments articulated in calls for the teaching and learning of Asia in schools. “Asia literacy” is currently framed as a necessary “solution” for Australian education, but acceptance of this “solution” into the mainstream educational policy agenda has been problematised as a neoliberal and neocolonial construct. Subsequent policy debate indicates the dominance of an economic rationale that is seemingly impossible to resist. This paper suggests that critical policy approaches can be used to identify alternatives to these dominant frameworks, which imagine Asia literacy in alternate ways. Re-imagining the “solution” offers three alternatives: working within an economic agenda; restructuring Asia literacy away from a distinct policy agenda; and treating policy gaps as spaces in which teachers can generate locally relevant possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authorities in a number of advanced countries have produced intergenerational reports that seek to determine the fiscal sustainability of current policy parameters. The Australian government will publish its intergenerational Report in May 2002. This paper attempts to place these reports in analytical perspective. We examine the notion of intergenerational equity, the conceptual basis for generational accounting, Australian efforts at constructing generational accounts, and then review the intergenerational reports of several other countries. The paper concludes with a brief synoptic discussion of various policies that can help Australian governments achieve intergenerational balance in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes, analyzes and compares two cases of major policy and institutional reform in economic policy: Australia's 1983 decision to float its currency and Sweden's 1990 decision to align itself economically and politically by applying for EU membership. Both involved the overturning of long-standing policy commitments and deeply held beliefs on the part of the social-democratic governments that took these steps. We argue that notwithstanding the major institutional differences between the two countries, both changes are explained by the exercise of change-oriented leadership along the lines set out in five propositions that have been derived from the literatures on policy change and comparative government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the changes in the monetary policy of Australia and the U.S. for the period since 1985. The average number of weeks between policy changes was 8.9 weeks for the United States and 16.6 weeks for Australia. Australian monetary policy was changed less frequently than that of the United States. In the pre-announcement period the average number of weeks between policy changes for Australia was 10.7 compared with 5.2 weeks in the United States. In the announcement period the average number of weeks was 18.2 weeks for the United States and 26.6 weeks for Australia. Australian monetary policy has been changed less frequently than US monetary policy throughout the period, although the relative number of changes has dropped slightly in the post-1990 period.

The fundamental research question we seek to answer is this: why has this resource boom, say in contrast with the Korean War and post Second World War booms, not produced long-term political and policy reforms to accommodate the distribution and uneven impact which are the inevitable consequences of the rise in commodity prices? In answering this question, the argument we advance is that the political and policy responses to the current boom must be located in the context of shifts in power and interests in the domestic political economy and in the broader regionalisation of the political economy that have entrenched new transnational and regional forms of capital. An important dimension of this state transformation is the transformation of subnational state institutions and the emergence of what we call the local regulatory state – and its reflection in the territorial politics between resource-rich Australian states and the Federal government. The recent boom in Australia has seen some subnational states engage in activities that have been, until recently, the preserve of the Federal government, namely a complex of diplomacy and international trade. These recent moves have gone well beyond the past symbolic state/federal tensions based on party politics and the creation of sister cities. The Australian case – a resource boom in a developed country with well-developed and capable institutions – provides us with an analytical framework to move beyond the resource curse arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]