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Public policy is frequently characterised as a sub-discipline of political science which is practically oriented and concerned with what government does and does not do. Further, policy analysis can also be characterised as concerned with either the analysis 'of policy' or 'for policy'. This clearly has implications for the design and delivery of public policy courses. More broadly, higher education in Australia, like elsewhere, faces calls to ensure that students graduate with a range of skills and aptitudes that make them 'job ready' and able to engage with 'real world problems'. One of the ways in which this can be pursued is through industry engagement. However, limited research has been undertaken regarding what this might entail or how it can be pursued. Accordingly, in this paper we explore these issues by: (a) situating engagement within the field of public policy; (b) reviewing how the changing context of higher education, with a particular focus on the drivers and rationale for greater engagement with industry, intersects with the teaching of public policy; and (c) providing a framework which helps to clarify the different modes, potential and risks associated with industry engagement.

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]

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]