Search

The article discusses the historical and conceptual framework of race and its role in the development of national identity, migration policy and refugee politics in Australia. Topics discussed include impact of white nationalism on the nation's migration policy or the movement of non-white population in and around Australia, the colonial foundations of Australian whiteness, and the conflict between white politics and the contemporary multicultural and Indigenous policies.

The article presents addiction-related news briefs on topics including opposition to the Australian coalition government's plan to implement a drug testing trial for welfare payment recipients in Mandurah, Western Australia. According to the article, criticism of the Filipino government's drug war has increased in the wake of the police shooting death of a schoolboy named Kian Delos Santos. It states that New York, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio signed a package of tobacco control laws in 2017.

In 2010, Australia finally introduced maternity leave, making it one of the last OECD nations to do so. Yet this policy had been announced by the Keating Government some sixteen years earlier, only to be watered down and then ultimately scuppered by subsequent governments. How, then, do we make sense of the rise and fall of this policy in the 1990s? This paper examines this question, arguing that while effective mobilisation by women in the labour movement was crucial to placing this issue on the Keating Government's policy agenda, the continued dominance of a male breadwinner model ultimately served to provide powerful impediments to policy implementation. The paper draws on interviews with key actors and analysis of policy debate to make this case, employing the concepts of policy windows and path dependency to make sense of the opportunities and impediments to policy change respectively. While an important and neglected story of maternity leave policy in Australia, this analysis has important implications for understanding policy-making, policy trajectory and even gender roles in Australian politics and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Gorton government's tentative, but significant role in reshaping Australia's approach to overseas investment, focusing on the role of the Prime Minister himself. Prime Minister Gorton and his Cabinet ultimately accepted the need to pursue a more overt form of economic nationalism for political gain. This provided a basis for subsequent governments to offer more direct, national government intervention in foreign investment decision-making to the Australian polity. Historical accounts and more recent assessments are drawn on to make this case and point to the legacy of Gorton and his government in the political management of foreign investment in Australia. The approach to foreign investment that emerged during Gorton's government demonstrated to subsequent governments the worth of developing a calibrated response that appeared to address populist concerns while still enabling substantive and increasing investment inflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the reform on the alcohol and drug treatment policy in Victoria. The topics discussed include the reforms carried out by the government since 1994 to 2014, the developments in the alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment policy of the government, and the key drivers for the imposed reforms.

In explaining policy reform, there is a tendency to assume that causes and outcomes are temporally contiguous and that the consequences of reform efforts unfold quickly. There is no obvious reason, theoretical or empirical, why this should be the case when considering the relationships between policy failure and policy success. This paper considers why and how policy failures may be causally linked to future policy events in sequences over extended periods of time. In particular, this paper focuses on the different mechanisms that might connect assessments of policy failure and subsequent reform success. Empirically, it draws on selected evidence from patterns of policy failures and successes in Australian health policy over a 40-year time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly short-term, opportunistic, adversarial politics has consistently constrained and compromised significant and genuine tax reform in Australia. This article reviews the various attempts at tax reform since Asprey in the mid-1970s, assesses the existing tax system and attempts to set out the major essential ingredients of genuine tax reform in this country. Tax reform is seen as particularly urgent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often face immigration 'control dilemmas' between popular pressures for tighter immigration controls versus economic pressures for more liberal work visa controls. Using a systematic process analysis of recent policy developments in Australia, this article argues that the Howard government's large expansion of 'wanted' forms of immigration hinged upon its ability to control 'unwanted' forms of immigration. The concept of 'control signals' is introduced to account for the government's success in exiting an immigration control dilemma, which allowed it to pursue skilled immigration reforms that would have otherwise proven difficult. A research agenda is established for examining the conditions under which the use of control signals is likely to be successful and for applying the concept to other realms of public policy where states face control dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch-all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a multistakeholder engagement process conducted in an Australian policy setting that led to a new community engagement framework: Science and Technology Engagement Pathways ( STEP). I describe the process in the context of a lack of awareness, experience, and culture of deliberative public engagement in Australia, particularly in relation to decision making concerning science, technology, and innovation. Increasing cautiousness in government and industry approaches to nanotechnology development, in Australia and elsewhere, creates an imperative and an opening for improved stakeholder and community engagement to improve the legitimacy and sustainability of decisions. In this context, STEP may stimulate movement toward deliberative engagement by raising awareness and commitment from diverse stakeholders and providing a structure for developments in engagement and public dialog. STEP potentially provides 'rules of engagement' and 'intervention pathways' for ongoing public engagement with science and technology developments and for critical 'science in society' perspectives to inform policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his work on policy development, John Kingdon discusses the role of 'policy entrepreneurs' in advocating particular solutions to policy problems. This article discusses a group of policy entrepreneurs in the US who have been actively seeking to shift drought policy away from a crisis response towards an approach based on risk management. The case is discussed by comparison with the development of Australian drought policy which has taken a risk management approach since 1992. Drought policy in Australia has largely been developed in a top-down fashion while in the US policy advocacy has been more bottom-up. This case highlights a key point that Kingdon and others have made, that policy entrepreneurs cannot succeed alone in achieving policy change, and raises the question as to whether the concept of 'policy entrepreneurs' is useful beyond being an appealing descriptor of influential but not decisive agents in the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1977 and 1982, the Australian Government resettled over 54,000 Vietnamese refugees. It also admitted 2,059 Vietnamese asylum seekers who arrived by boat without state authorisation. Although the number of Vietnamese asylum seekers was significantly smaller than the number of Vietnamese refugees processed offshore in refugee camps, the unexpected arrival of these boat people stimulated debate in Parliament and in the press about an appropriate response. This article examines the language politicians used to describe Vietnamese asylum seekers and the arguments used to justify their inclusion or exclusion. The evidence demonstrates that the political rhetoric used in this period in Australia's immigration history cannot be solely categorised as inclusive or humane. Rather, the overall impression is one of resistance and pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Calwell was the major architect of Australia's successful post-war migration program that laid the demographic, economic and cultural foundations of contemporary society. In public memory, however, Calwell is now mostly associated with the White Australia policy, which aimed to preserve Australia as a white, British-Australian society by severely restricting Asian immigration. This article assesses Calwell's leadership of the immigration program, his impact and his legacy. It identifies three distinct, often irreconcilable leadership characteristics, defined in terms of him as 'innovative policy-maker', 'political broker' and 'agitator'. This focus on leadership challenges the one-dimensional view of Calwell that exists in Australian political historiography. It is also intended to extend our engagement with leadership studies and illuminate the role leadership plays in political decision-making, especially sensitive portfolios like immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, senior departmental secretaries in Australia deliver keynote speeches to a range of audiences. What are these secretaries talking about, and to whom are they directing their comments? This article will examine keynote addresses by the secretaries of the two key central agencies in Australia - the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and The Treasury - over the calendar years 2009 and 2010. I argue that 'public rhetorical leadership' by secretaries poses challenges for traditional understandings of Westminster governance. Utilising the concepts of public value theory, the significance of this 'public rhetorical leadership' is assessed in terms of its impacts on policy implementation and questions of accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to perform two tasks. It seeks to first detail the changes to the industrial relations system entailed in WorkChoices (set against the background of previous Howard government policies in this field), analyse the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU's) campaign against it and the Australian Labor Party's (ALP's) industrial relations policy in response to it, and belated changes to WorkChoices. Second, it seeks to examine the extent to which WorkChoices (and the industrial relations issue) was decisive in Howard's defeat. This will be done by using Newspoll surveys to plot the revival of ALP electoral support against salient events leading up to the election, drawing upon early post election assessments and existing studies, and also examining the results of the Australian Election Study 2007 to see whether this new evidence confirms the importance of industrial relations in the election outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant perspective in the literature linking governance, globalization and public policy argues that globalization undercuts state capacity, weakening a government's ability to effectively regulate its domestic affairs. This paper shows otherwise with special reference to the Australian experience in financial regulation. It challenges the conventional wisdom that the Australian state is weak and cannot adopt anticipatory industrial policies. This paper argues that the adoption of the ‘twin peaks' model of financial regulatory arrangements is an example of the existence of government-led steering in Australia which can adopt a proactive approach to financial regulation by steering and coordinating policy networks. ‘Governance through hierarchy’ in the financial services industry may be a function of the government's political entrepreneurship; its skill in setting and implementing an agenda; and an ability to create new policy communities and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1996–2007 Howard Coalition government introduced Shared Responsibility Agreements in 2005 to allocate discretionary funding to indigenous communities in a “mutually responsible” way. The policy was widely criticized as an ineffective and ideologically driven “showpiece”. Its significant governance-building dimensions went without comment. Through the deployment of the conceptual tools of contract and governance, SRAs established new and depoliticised relationships between government and indigenous peoples, replacing the centralized political structure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The future of the policy under the Rudd Government is uncertain, but understanding the impacts and implications of SRAs remains important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a state's eye view of trends towards a more centralised system of governance in Australia. It argues that while globalisation strengthens the roles of national governments it also provides less noticed public policy and management opportunities for sub-national governments. The article shows how state governments in Australia can use high-level policy proposals to reinforce their continuing relevance as key members of a federal system of government. It proposes that skilful deployment of policy ideas and analyses can enable the states to sustain alternative national agendas despite hostility or lack of interest by the federal government. In conclusion, the article examines the implications for federal-state relations under the Rudd government. It suggests that the elements for productive reform agendas are present but that bringing them together will require considerable effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed debate about Australia enriching uranium raises issues associated with a previous attempt thirty-five years ago. The Atomic Energy Commission hatched plans in the mid-1960s to position Australia as a supplier of enriched fuel, especially to the Japanese market. This would be done using centrifuge technology, a cheaper and more efficient method than that used by the United States. That fact, along with concerns in Washington to restrict the proliferation of nuclear weapons, led to opposition to rival enrichment programs. Whitlam and Connor miscalculated here. Ratifying the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was not enough to stay opposition to raising a loan designed mainly to give Australia an enrichment program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the merits of conscience voting and the historical record of parties imposing discipline when matters of individual conscience are raised in the Australian federal parliament. It examines three examples of conscience voting in which legislators were freed from their normal obligation to vote as their party requires. These involved bills to do with euthanasia, research involving embryonic stem cells, and the abortion drug RU486 — all issues posing parliamentarians with difficult questions of personal morality and highlighting the contentious intersection between religion and politics. Voting records on these bills are examined in detail as is the interaction, once party discipline was removed, between the voting decision and residual party loyalty, gender and religious affiliation. Although parties allowed legislators to vote according to their conscience, party differences remained apparent. However, gender and religious variables did challenge majority party opinion. Conscience voting remains the exception rather than the rule in the Australian parliament. Party leaders on both sides prefer predictable outcomes and to retain executive control of the legislative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the political conditions faced by the state and federal governments of Australia in 2008. The installation of the government of prime minister Kevin Rudd from the Australian Labor Party is described. A financial crisis in Australia is related to concerns about a budget deficit and efforts to reform taxation. Rudd's coordination of an apology to Aboriginal Australians for their mistreatment by the government is characterized. A summit organized to develop Labor Party policy is assessed. Chronicles of state government activities across Australia are also presented.

Although the powerful have always sought advice from the knowledgeable, it took the appeal of the policy sciences movement of the late 1940s and onward to build and consolidate a veritable industry of policy analysis and advice. 1 One of the hallmarks of this development was the advent of institutes that were exclusively devoted to produce research-based policy arguments and to inject these into the policy-making process. These organisations were referred to as ‘think tanks’. Half a century later, the project of the policy sciences movement has been amply criticised, and has mutated into various philosophies of policy analysis, each harbouring distinct and often conflicting perspectives on the nature and role of (scientific) knowledge in the battle of arguments that is public policy-making. The first wave of the policy sciences movement's privileging of science-based policy has not disappeared. In fact it is currently experiencing a revival under the banner of ‘evidence-based policy’. But it has to compete with other views of public policy-making which deconstruct the authority claim of scientific knowledge, emphasising instead its contestability. Yet there are now more organisations that refer to themselves, or can be labelled, as ‘think tanks’ than ever before. Why? And what does it mean to be a ‘think tank’ in the post-positivist era and in the increasingly boundary-less, highly networked societies of today? This article first surveys recent developments in the world of think tanks as reported by the international literature on the subject, and then examines the implications for understanding the nature and role of Australian think tanks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community consultation has become a widely accepted part of policy development in Australia. In this article, we consider how, in an Australian context, consultation can be incorporated within gender analysis processes. Gender analysis refers to systematic procedures to detect and correct gender bias in the full range of government programs, projects and policies. We draw upon insights from a qualitative case study to argue that policy workers located within women's policy units could play a key role in designing and coordinating meaningful and inclusive consultation. We conclude that well-resourced women's policy offices within Australian governments are essential to ensuring effective, equitable consultation exercises are included within gender analysis processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to assess the Report of the Commonwealth Government's Taskforce on Reducing the Regulatory Burden on Business (the Banks Report), released in April 2006, and the government's response to the Report ( AG 2006a,b ). It focuses on the report's recommendations in regard to the system for making regulation in regard to business, particularly the regulation impact statement process (RIS), contained in chapter seven. This focus is chosen since it is the chapter in the report that addresses the underlying causes of over-regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on evidence from case studies of local government contracting in the Australian state of Victoria. It argues that one of the key elements of competitive tendering – the separation of purchasers from providers – undermines another of its essential mechanisms – the specification of services – at the point where previously in-house services are exposed to competition. The managers who are to become purchasers lack the requisite knowledge of services, which instead resides in the minds of the service delivery staff whose work is to be subjected to competitive processes. Separating purchasing from service-provision ‘distances’ the staff from the managers, impairing employees’ willingness to share the relevant information. At the same time, the introduction of competition increases the probability that staff will withhold that knowledge, and makes it harder on probity grounds to maintain the type of collaborative relationship which might overcome their reluctance to share it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at politics in Australia in 2006. Changes made to the cabinet of Prime Minister John Howard are reviewed, noting the replacement of Minister for Defence Brendan John Nelson, Minister for Finance and Administration Nicholas Hugh Minchin, and Minister for Family and Community Services Kay Christine Lesley Patterson. Major political issues in Australia are discussed, including the Workplace Relations Amendment Act of 2005, the removal of Kim Beazley as leader of the Labor Party, and his replacement by Kevin Rudd.

This article focuses on the interaction between government policy and public attitudes in order to explain why the Howard government was reasonably pragmatic given that it maintained enough popular support to win four successive federal elections from 1996, and why such a relationship is crucial to evaluating policy trends in Australia's liberal democracy in terms of understanding both policy possibilities and limitations no matter how flawed or divisive certain policies may appear to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lateral structures are the various cross-linking arrangements which enable staff at similar levels to undertake project, policy or operational work in cooperation with officials in other divisions or departments. Their reliance on the expertise, judgment and commitment of their membership, and their comparative freedom from direct line control helps define these structures as an alternative to conventional hierarchies. This study examines the commonly made but rarely tested claim that lateral structures are one of the main ingredients in the organisation's capacity to achieve high quality results in situations requiring superior levels of skill and efficiency (Mintzberg 1973; Galbraith 1977). The study provides an empirical assessment of a number of important aspects of these work arrangements and reports the results of an investigation into the performance of lateral structures in the Australian public sector between 1987 and 1989. These data indicate that lateral structures outperform conventional hierarchy in quality of results, capacity to manage internal conflict, time-management and technical competence. The research also identifies the importance of professional and political commitment in explanations of the success of these structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reaction to the June 2007 decision by the Australian government to assist Aboriginal peoples with primary health care. The statement is from the Australian Rural Nurses and Midwives Inc. concerning political activity related to the government announcement and support of the decision.

The article presents a statement in response to an initiative by the government of Australia concerning primary health care for indigenous Australians. The statement, signed by Ann-Louise Hordacre of the Primary Health Care Research and Information Service, recounts government involvement in indigenous affairs dating back to 1992.