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We analyse how immigrants’ level of social assimilation is related to their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the association between assimilation and employment, wages, underemployment, three measures of job satisfaction, overeducation and wages. Using Australian longitudinal data, we find that assimilation is strongly associated with employment and wages as well as a number of job satisfaction measures. We then split our data and repeat the analysis for before and after the financial crisis of 2008–2009. We find important differences in the way assimilation is associated with different measures of labour market outcomes under different economic conditions. Finally, we explore mechanisms that may underlie the results.

A book review of Racism in American Public Life: A Call to Action, by Johnnetta Betsch Cole, University of Virginia Press, 2021. 152 pp. $19.95

The increasing international use of consulting firms in public administration has attracted warnings against diminishing policy capability, accountability and transparency. Whilst significant debates and multiple tensions exist, this article introduces an innovative Australian model which provides scope to harness and balance the strengths of the contributions of consultants and consultancy firms to improve government policy capacity. We argue that advantages exist for engaging Tier 1 consultants provided the conditions are right. Moving past binary debates about whether or not consultants should be used in the public sector, we call for a more nuanced understanding and discussion about how to better leverage expertise, comparative analysis and contestability. Using Wu et al.’s (Policy Soc 34(3–4):165–171, 2015) framework, our pragmatic and sophisticated approach shifts theory and practice on the use of consultants to ensure clarity in the rationale of seeking external advice in order to build or improve policy capacity.

Around the world an expanding array of behavioural conditions are being attached to social security payments. This paper offers empirical evidence of the various moral frames used in the welfare conditionality debate, by its supporters and detractors. We systematically analyse the debates in the Australian federal parliament in 2017 and 2018 on two bills attempting to introduce drug testing of working-age welfare recipients, each of which resulted in stalemate. We find that proponents of welfare conditionality primarily employed consequentialist and paternalist arguments, supplemented by social justice, contractualism and communitarianism whilst opponents primarily employed consequentialist and social justice arguments. We explore how proponents and opponents anticipated and engaged with each other's preferred moral frames. By investigating the normative lenses that underpin arguments made for and against the drug-testing proposal, we shed light on how the debate on drug testing might be moved beyond its current impasse.

This paper identifies the impact governance types can have on the transfer of city-scale climate change policy. We develop a new adaptation of the policy transfer heuristic (based on the work of Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 1996. “Who Learns What from Whom: A Review of the Policy Transfer Literature.” Political Studies; Evans, Mark. 2009a. “New Directions in the Study of Policy Transfer.” Policy Studies 30 (3): 237–241. doi:10.1080/01442870902863810) which draws attention to different types of multilevel governance systems (Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. 2003. “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-Level Governance.” American Political Science Review 97: 02. doi:10.1017/S0003055403000649). This new adaption, “Policy Transfer Across Governance Systems” (PTAGS) heuristic helps to anticipate challenges and opportunities for potential transfer (Manwaring, Rob. 2016. “The Big Society in Australia: A Case of ‘Non’-Policy Transfer?” Australian Journal of Public Administration 75 (2): 191–201. doi:10.1111/1467-8500.12164). To demonstrate this, we present three hypothetical scenarios of policy transfer from the European Union Green Capital Awards (EUGCA) to Australia. Using PTAGS reveals three main complexities that policy actors’ may face when developing city-scale climate change policy. These are: problem identification; the type of transfer networks used; and what aspects of policy contents and goals can be transferred. We argue that the adapted PTAGS heuristic enables a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of transfer across different governance systems. This can better equip policy actors and relevant stakeholders to develop more holistic city-scale climate change adaptation policy that draws on the strengths of governance systems rather than amplifying their weaknesses.

This paper engages with debates over the Liberal International Order (LIO) and Latin America by focusing on Brazil. More specifically, it addresses President Jair Bolsonaro’s foreign policy. His radical-right populist and religious-infused approach has been characterized by an explicit rejection of practically all elements of the LIO, including multilateralism, multiculturism, and regionalism—historically core features of Brazilian foreign policy. We seek to answer two interrelated questions: (1) what were the political conditions—domestic and international—that allowed for such dramatic foreign policy change? (2) what impact is Brazil’s new foreign policy orientation having on the LIO? To address them, we resort to the aspirational constructivist theory, which has allowed us to theorize Brazil’s new identity formation. We argue that Bolsonaro has reshaped Brazil’s foreign policy as part of his endeavour to create a national self-image based on three pillars: anti-globalism, anti-Communism, and religious nationalism. By doing so, the Bolsonaro administration has transformed Brazil, otherwise an avid supporter of the LIO, into one of the order’s most vocal critics. While anti-globalism (and, subsidiarily, anti-Communism) undermines the normative and institutional foundations of the LIO, religious nationalism offers a replacement to the order, based on independent ethno-nationalist communities. If Brazil’s radical right populist model spreads across Latin America, it has the potential to hollow out the region’s support to the LIO.

The study of global politics is not an exercise in objectivity and rationality, but one that is embodied, personal, and deeply affective. Feminist scholarship both within and outside of International Relations (IR) have pioneered discussions of embracing our affective experiences as researchers, as well as maintaining ethical commitments to research participants and collaborators. In addition to feminist contributions, the emotional turn in IR has seen the emergence of vibrant scholarship exploring the role of emotions in sites and processes of global politics, as well as the role of emotions in the research process. In this article, I aim to contribute to this growing body of scholarship by speaking to these and other questions that explore the role of emotions in researchers’ engagement with their work. In particular, I draw on and interrogate my own emotional entanglements with the digital archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The goal of this article is to provide insights into the emotional process of reading and interpreting testimonies of violence, and to illuminate ethical concerns that arise – particularly as an ‘outsider’ – when reading and representing trauma in my research.

Drawing on the case of Wuhan, this article considers how nationalist discourses evolved in the Chinese context during the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed countries’ vulnerability to diverse forms of nationalism and the danger that this presents, it also reveals an irony: how despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism can only exist and thrive insofar as its alter or Other—represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’—also thrives. To prevent this from becoming a vicious cycle, the article contends that nationalism is no solution and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed for securing the post-COVID-19 world order.

Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an individualized funding scheme, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Analysis of survey data (n=2341) showed almost half of frontline disability workers were aware of harms affecting clients in the past year, and three in five felt their employers’ safety and incident reporting protocols were inadequate. Workers’ accounts of barriers to performing their safeguarding roles underline how government’s meta-regulatory approach is enabling provider organizations to prioritise financial concerns and tolerate high safety risks. We argue that advancing the rights of people with disability to be safe from harm whilst engaged in social services requires changes in their external regulatory environments and in structures of power between workers and managers, so that policy, funding and regulatory settings enable appropriate local safety practices to flourish.

We identify the broker each corporate insider trades through, and find that analysts and mutual fund managers affiliated with such “inside brokers” have a substantial information advantage on the insider’s firm. Affiliated analysts issue more accurate earnings forecasts, and affiliated mutual funds trade the insider’s stock more profitably than their peers, following insider trades through their brokerage. Notably, this advantage persists well after these insider trades are publicly disclosed. Our results challenge the prevalent perception that information asymmetry arising from insider trading is acute only before trade disclosure, and suggest that brokers facilitating these trades are in a position to exploit this asymmetry.

Despite the growing breadth of research related to the perceived risks and benefits of Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS), there remains a dearth of research into understanding how perceptions of AWS among military officers are affected by design factors. This paper demonstrates that ease of use, and user perception of the concept of using an autonomous weapon system, would be less of a barrier to trusted deployment by this emerging generation of military leaders than ensuring that autonomous systems have robust, transparent and reliable decision-making processes and that operators or supervisors are able to meaningfully monitor the systems nominally under their command. The core contribution of this paper addresses the question of how deliberate design choices could improve or diminish the capacity of junior officers to exercise meaningful human control over autonomous systems.

The post-conflict transition period in Timor-Leste witnessed the economic and political importance of its extractive industry, with petroleum revenues financing a large part of the national budget. The government established the Petroleum Fund in 2005 to prevent the economy from plunging into the “resource curse,” but the management of the Fund has since become a source of controversy as it created opportunities for corruption and unsustainable spending practices. These governance issues, coupled with falling global oil prices and declining production, pose challenges for an oil-dependent country in planning for economic diversification and sustaining political development. While weak institutions have often been identified as the source of these issues, we ask in this study: how do political dynamics influence the management of petroleum revenues. Using the Political Settlements approach as an analytical framework, we demonstrate how patronage, rivalry, and rent-seeking influence the management of petroleum revenues, thereby contributing to the economic challenges of statebuilding in Timor-Leste.

Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital materialism scholarship – and particularly Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’ – with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what they find important and valuable about the platform. Findings are presented in the form of seven case studies of Facebook use, identifying lively affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities that drive people to continue to use Facebook, moderate their use or take a break. We argue that this theoretical perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of the distributed and relational agencies generated with and through Facebook assemblages that motivate people to stay on this social media platform.

Women fleeing Myanmar in 2015 were trapped on the Andaman Sea for months when States in the region closed off places of disembarkation. Among the horrors of starvation and unsanitary conditions experienced on the boats, they faced additional risks of sexual violence. These women fled from a situation in Myanmar that severely curtailed their rights, including gender violence that is being tried as genocide at the International Court of Justice, and were exposed to further violations while fleeing. Through interviews with survivors of the journey and those who assisted them, this article describes the experiences of these women at sea. It outlines the failure of States to apply customary principles of international law and related regional standards to protect these women. From a feminist legal theory perspective, it explores the reasons for these failures and recommends reforms that guarantee better protection at sea for women in the future.

This article considers how a First Nations Voice to Parliament, if carefully designed, could strengthen the land-based sovereignty and autonomy of First Peoples in Australia. It critiques the proposals presented in the Indigenous Voice Co-design Process' Interim Report released January 2021 for its emphasis on the role of government and existing structures. It responds to Indigenous critiques of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, while arguing for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament that respects and defers to First Nations' Country-based authority.

Robots are increasingly appearing as a potential answer to the ‘care crisis’ facing a number of countries. Although it is anticipated that many positives will flow from the application of these technologies, they are also likely to generate unexpected consequences and risks. This paper explores the use of robots within disability and aged care settings in the Australian and New Zealand contexts. Informed by thirty-five semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders, the paper explores why this area is so difficult to govern examining areas identified as generating tensions around the use of robots in care settings. In each of these areas some respondents saw the introduction of robots to be relatively straightforward applications that do not require extensive structures of governance. Others, however, viewed these applications as having potentially greater implications and the need to govern for these over the longer term. The three areas of tension that we explore in this paper relate to independence and surveillance, the re-shaping of human interaction and who can care. These tensions illustrate some of the problems involved in governing robots in a care service context and some of the potentially difficult issues that governments will need to resolve if these technologies are to be effective. We conclude the paper arguing what is needed is a responsive regulation approach to help resolve some of the complexities and tensions in overseeing these technologies.

Markets are increasingly used by governments to deliver social services, underpinned by the belief that they can drive efficiency and quality. These ‘quasi-markets' require on-going management to ensure they meet policy goals, and address issues of market inequity. This has seen debates emerge around ‘market stewardship' and ‘market shaping’ that center on how best to manage markets toward optimal policy outcomes. At present, there is a significant gap in both literature and practice with regard to what types of actions are most effective for market stewardship. In this article, we outline a framework that helps diagnose different quasi-market problems. We delineate two dimensions of public service quasi-markets—sufficiency and diversity—using the example of a disability personalization market to show how this framework can unpack different types of quasi-market states. Lastly, we outline the types of interventions that might be adopted to help deal with ineffective quasi-markets.

Australia-China relations have been relatively stable over the last decade. However, soon after the outbreak of COVID-19, Australia took an increasingly assertive stance toward China, one that is arguably even more assertive than those of its Western allies. What prompted Australia to adopt a tougher policy against China? This article argues that COVID-19 has brought significant uncertainty to the international system and, hence, to Australia’s external environment, which has affected the country’s decision-making, accelerating the formation of a hardline policy toward China. A contributing factor behind this policy is Australia’s quest for ontological security, which, in the context of COVID-19, has triggered a rise in anti-China sentiment. Meanwhile, this strategy backfired when it encountered China’s own nationalism, which exacerbated the widening political chasm, dragging the two countries into an unprecedented diplomatic confrontation. The core of ontological security lies in maintaining the stability of the identity needed for the formation of consistent policy. The uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic have changed the familiar external environment and challenged Australia’s ability to interpret this new environment and adjust to it, which has triggered ontological insecurity. By analyzing Australia’s identity as a middle power in the context of changing regional security and its commitment to certain values, the article shows how COVID-19 has accelerated Australia’s quest for ontological security, which has changed the country’s China policy.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death in Indonesia, and there are large disparities in access to recommended preventative treatments across the country, particularly in rural areas. Technology-enabled screening and management led by community health workers have been shown to be effective in better managing those at high risk of CVD in a rural Indonesian population; however, the economic impacts of implementing such an intervention are unknown. We conducted a modelled cost-effectiveness analysis of the SMARThealth intervention in rural villages of Malang district, Indonesia from the payer perspective over a 10-year period. A Markov model was designed and populated with epidemiological and cost data collected in a recent quasi-randomized trial, with nine health states representing a differing risk for experiencing a major CVD event. Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) were estimated for the intervention and usual care using disability weights from the literature for major CVD events. Annual treatment costs for CVD treatment and prevention were $US83 under current care and $US144 for those receiving the intervention. The intervention had an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of $4288 per DALY averted and $3681 per major CVD event avoided relative to usual care. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the results were robust to plausible variations in model parameters and that the intervention is highly likely to be considered cost-effective by decision-makers across a range of potentially acceptable willingness to pay levels. Relative to current care, the intervention was a cost-effective means to improve the management of CVD in this rural Indonesian population. Further scale-up of the intervention offers the prospect of significant gains in population health and sustainable progress toward universal health coverage for the Indonesian population.

While Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) does not discriminate against particular groups, our social structures and systems mean some people are more at risk in a pandemic context—from both the disease and the social and policy responses to the pandemic. This is particularly so for people with disability, in part because they often have poorer health outcomes from underlying conditions but also due to discrimination and social exclusion. Here, we draw from a survey about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australian children and young people with disability and their families. Respondents faced a range of inequities prior to the pandemic, and COVID-19 has further exposed and often exacerbated them. We conclude that recent developments in the Australian disability context to personalize services have arguably made people with disability and their families less safe within a pandemic context, and we outline some ways in which these issues might be addressed.

The development of land rights programmes is deeply rooted in power relations. Using discourse analysis, this paper unpacks how Western logics (assumptions and conventions) regarding ‘best practices’ for property rights institutions and tenure security impact the design of peacebuilding programmes. In 2017 the Government of Timor-Leste passed a controversial Land Law Package. These laws were initially developed for a USAID land reform programme. But local dynamics, actions, and interests were ignored. Examining civil society exclusion from decision-making infers a reluctance to acknowledge local voices and practices that threaten liberal peacebuilding interests. This paper is organized into two parts. In the first we argue that peacebuilding ‘best practices’ reflect how dominant Western discourses create conceptual boundaries (‘violent hierarchies’) to restrict the recognition of indigenous ideas as legitimate. In the second we examine Timorese civil society efforts to improve the land reform programme through acts of resistance to bodies of authority. Overall, we illuminate how in Timor-Leste Western assumptions and conventions contributed to boundaries to local participation, which contradicts liberal narratives of empowerment and capacity-building.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel Report in Australia - Anti-Dumping Measures on A4 Copy Paper (Australia - A4 Copy Paper) marks a significant development of the multilateral rules on anti-dumping. Under certain circumstances, WTO agreements permit members to impose anti-dumping measures to counteract the injurious effect of dumping on domestic industries, typically through import duties. The Report is the first to examine in detail when an anti-dumping authority may determine that a “particular market situation” exists in the country of exportation under Article 2.2 of the WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement, potentially justifying the imposition of elevated remedial duties. The Report also develops the jurisprudence on how such remedies may be calculated, expounding the use of benchmark costs for the calculation of a constructed normal value (CNV) under Article 2.2.1.1. These doctrinal questions are central to the longstanding debate over how far the Anti-Dumping Agreement allows anti-dumping measures against state intervention and market distortions. On both fronts, the Australia - A4 Copy Paper panel created flexibilities for WTO members to respond to government-induced distortions. In doing so, the Report deviates considerably from the course set by the Appellate Body in the landmark EU - Biodiesel decision, which seemed to confine anti-dumping measures to responding to private action.1 At the same time, the panel left open several important issues relating to the adoption of CNVs and the use of benchmarks for their calculation, leaving wide latitude for investigating authorities to inflate dumping margins in practice.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia was facing an incipient eviction crisis, the gravity of which had been obscured by inadequate data and the gradual mounting of systemic problems of unaffordability and insecurity. This article reviews the legal framework around tenancies and evictions and the sparse data it produces. Tribunal data obtained by the author shows that Australia’s two largest jurisdictions had, prior to the pandemic, a termination application rate somewhat more than half that of the US ‘crisis’ rate. The article concludes with directions for further research and reforms to address evictions in an enduring way, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article analyses trends in Chinese–international marriages and divorces, using Australia, a major migrant-receiving country, as a comparative case study. In exploring the recent rise of ‘Chinese–foreign’ marriage in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we show that Chinese–international marriage within mainland China is a small, gendered phenomenon that largely involves Chinese women marrying men from other Asian societies. By examining unique data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we reveal that most marriages involving PRC-born people in contemporary Australia are between two people born in China. But the displacement of Chinese intimate relationships to a non-Asian country results in significant behavioural divergences from couples ‘at home’, especially regarding prior cohabitation. Marriages solely involving PRC-born couples in Australia are also typically less enduring than marriages to non-Chinese. We argue that these differences underscore the roles of country-specific immigration policies and labour mobility patterns in shaping unpredicted family formation behaviour.

Globally, labour markets are encountering profound changes because of the digital revolution. Middle income countries such as China, are leapfrogging high-income countries to take advantage of the digital economy. The growing use of digital technologies is also reshaping the labour market in high-income countries such as Australia. Potentially, new technologies may facilitate both employers and employees to overcome some of the barriers to disability employment. However, it seems that the opportunities and hopes have not yet translated into improved employment rate for people with disability. This paper uses an ecosystem framework to examine the state's role in improving the critical elements of disability employment: developing a national strategy, creating employment opportunities, building capacity and enhancing accessibility. This paper compares the historical development of disability employment and the policies introduced to take advantage of digital technologies across China and Australia. It studies the national policies, funded activities and the governing structure in China and Australia. The findings revealed distinctive approaches that have played to the strengths of each country. However, both countries need to address the weaker links to deliver a real paradigm shift.

Kant's account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant does not talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead, Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil and leaves other clues that his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is—by default and yet by our own deed—bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant's account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources.

Governance systems reconcile diverse interests to enable collective decision-making and action. Questions related to representation in the governance of networks are addressed in the literature; underexplored is the empirical variation in governance arrangements and pathways of representation. Complex, multi-jurisdictional disasters provide a robust theoretical and empirical context in which to investigate network governance pathways due to the tensions between democratic principles of representation and the need for timely, expert-informed response actions. In this article, we address three questions related to network governance, representation, and complex disasters: what governance structures allow for a representation of diverse interests? What governance structures provide a perception of voice to key affected parties? And where do we see variation in the kinds of structures that give voice to these entities? Using an inductive, grounded theory approach along with mixed methods that include case studies, interviews, and archival data in the form ICS 209 incident reports, we provide evidence from 10 of the most jurisdictionally complex wildfires that took place in 2017. In doing so, we introduce the distinction between macro and micro structures of network governance for understanding more precisely the pathways by which representation occurs and how representation functions in disaster networks. There is no singular normative goal when we think about network governance and representation in disasters; rather there are competing contingencies that emerge out of complex contexts. We propose four key propositions to guide further work in this arena.

Crowdsourced news rating systems have been suggested as a solution to reducing the amount of misinformation online audiences see. This study expands previous research crowdsourcing by looking at how characteristics of the rating system affect user behavior. In an experiment (N=1,021), two parameters of the rating system were manipulated. First, users were shown different varieties of news brands on the “menu” they were asked to rate. Second, participation was mandatory for half and voluntary for others. Results indicate partisans rated more news brands when they saw an ideologically dissimilar news menu than one that matched their ideology. Further, the trustworthiness rating of the mainstream news menu decreased when participants had a choice to participate rather than were forced. These results have important implications for understanding how users participate in crowdsourcing news credibility.

Abstract This paper analyses promissory discourse for genome editing and human health in the UK, attending to the articulation of public goods and their beneficiary publics. Focusing on promissory reasoning about an emerging technology field as anticipatory and ethical considerations as integral to such debates, the notion of ethical regime as a mode of governance is applied to the concept of promissory regime. By analyzing key documents and interviews with opinion leaders—thus focusing on the discursive dimension—an enabling promissory ethical regime for genome editing and its contestation are identified. This regime posits scientific knowledge production now, and improved treatment or prevention of hereditary diseases later, as key goods of genome editing for human health and as a sociotechnical project worthy of support. Specific publics are created as beneficiaries. These publics and goods play out as ethical rationales for the promissory governance of the emerging field of human genome editing.

Networks play a vital role in the delivery of public services, especially in countries where governments are constrained by capacity and funds. This study develops a framework of governance networks based on two dimensions: at the national and community levels, and within the governmental and non-governmental sectors. Based on the framework, this article analyses the governance networks of the Bougainville Healthy Communities Programme (BHCP) and their nature of integration and collaboration. BHCP mainly operates as a public healthcare advocacy program in Bougainville, an underdeveloped autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. BHCP’s success reveals that the nature of interaction among the various actors is key to making governance networks work. Its experience demonstrates that governance networks are important in the effective delivery of services, particularly in countries where the governments face financial and human resources shortages.

The rapidly emerging scholarly literature responding to autonomous weapon systems has come to dominate our perceptions of future warfare. Scientists, governments, militaries, and civil society organisations continue to debate how to respond to their development. This paper draws on empirical data to consider how emerging defence leaders in the Australian Defence Force perceive major elements and questions within the autonomous weapon system literature. In doing so, this paper offers a data-driven end-user interpretation of the potential interactions between military officers and the autonomous weapon systems they may be asked to oversee. In the absence of a pre-emptive ban under international law, this paper presents a call for greater engagement with junior military leadership as a tool for analysing the assumptions made by policy makers and politicians on this issue.