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In 1942 the Australian Labor government accepted multilateralism in the form of Article VII of the Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement. Some historians have argued that this was the beginning of a turning point in Australia's economic history: a movement away from the declining British empire towards the United States. I have two arguments in this article. The first is that Labor's acceptance of multilateralism did not lead, at least in the first five years after the war, to a deterioration in Australia's economic relationship with the United Kingdom. The reverse was true. Because of the acute shortage of dollars in the postwar world. Australia was obliged to expand her trade within the sterling area and to discriminate against American goods. The second argument is that although the Chifley government supported multilateralism as a theoretical concept, it opposed vigorously what it regarded as the Americans' precipitate moves to dismantle the sterling area. The Chifley government sought to protect this cooperative system of exchange and import controls as a bulwark against the dollar shortage and against the possibility of a depression spreading from America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses conservative intellectual attitudes to feminism, with reference to the journal Quadrant. It is argued that a conspicuous failure to seriously address the issues raised by feminist writers is both short-sighted and self-defeating, since such issues are not as compartmentalized as Australian conservative intellectuals appear to think. Contrasting attitudes to feminism are explored with reference to the respective approaches of conservative writers, John Carroll and Ronald Conway. While this comparison reveals that it is possible for conservatism and feminism to co-exist, it is shown that Conway is almost alone among Quadrant intellectuals in appreciating this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissatisfaction with Australia's federalist constitutional and administrative arrangements seems universal. The Labor Party has historically proferred a centralist thrust to the Australian federal compact. From the opposite, decentralist tack the Liberal-National Coalition parties currently propose that the Commonwealth should hive-off policy functions to the States. These attitudes are expressed in an intellectual climate that disparages the allocative efficiency of Australian federalism and debates these issues in terms of shifting power to or from the Commonwealth. A more sensible focus is on the usage that the citizenry has made of the federal system in obtaining satisfactory service delivery. Using this approach our federal system works efficiently (in a limited political-administrative sense. This is not an argument chat Australia's federal system is good because it maximises fiscal efficiency or guarantees equity. It does not do the former and varies in its attainment of the latter. The federal system is good because it maximises opportunities and avenues for citizens to obtain what they want from government. In that sense the Coalition parties are fundamentally confused both about their philosophy and that philosophy's relationship to the political nature of Australian federalism. Labor's slowly-ebbing centralism equally ignores the political usage that citizens have made of the administrative and funding arenas provided by our federal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note reviews work by Gerritsen on budget outputs in Australian States, and more specifically on the explanatory significance of Labor and non-Labor parties in office. It also extends his work by introducing a comparative dimension across time. This consists of comparison of the findings for the period Gerritsen studied (1979/80-1982/83) with a later period (1985/86-1987/88) to assess the impact of partisan change in State governments on their relative budget efforts. The findings offer more support for the partisanship hypothesis than Gerritsen's allowed, by virtue of the findings for Western Australia and Tasmania It concludes that though budget efforts axe structured by a number of factors, partisanship nevertheless appears a potent explanatory variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the reasons why Australia, in the period 1965-84, manifested markedly lower levels of income maintenance expenditure than most other OECD nations. A pooled cross-section research design is utilized to bring within the scope of a single model the wide range of institutional, demographic, economic and political factors that have been hypothesized to influence income maintenance transfers. Having developed such a model, the article examines some of its implications for proposed welfare cut-backs and reform in Australia and the OECD nations generally [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic adjustment, a political priority for Labor governments throughout the second half of the 1980s, and in contrast to earlier Australian scholarship and practice, is now recognised to be an internationally, as well as a domestically, determined and constrained enterprise. Theoretical developments in international political economy in North America of late have provided a variety of approaches for conceptualising this twofold enterprise. Taking two cases (the development of the Cairns Group and its activities in the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations and the development of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) this paper looks at two of these approaches-to show how they can contribute to the understanding of international economic policy under Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic and political debates about international sanctions tend to focus on the instrumental purposes of these measures—their ability to hurt a target state sufficiently to cause it to change its behaviour. By contrast, the symbolic purposes of sanctions are commonly assumed not to be as important. Such assumptions are appropriate for states which have the capabilities necessary to achieve these ends—great powers or regional powers targetting very weak neighbours, for example. But are these assumptions useful in explaining the sanctions policies of non-great powers, particularly those which impose sanctions against great powers? This paper explores the case of Australian and Canadian sanctions against the USSR after the invasion of Afghanistan and demonstrates the fallacy of such assumptions, and argues that symbolic purposes were much more important than the instrumental utilities normally associated with sanctions theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We outline the history of election night forecasting in Australia. We first identify the major structural features of the Australian voting system which determine how the problem must be approached: single-member constituencies; preferential voting; the counting on election night, in polling booths. of first preference votes only, and the existence of a two-party system. We note that the major statistical difficulty associated with election night forecasting in Australia is that progressive counts in a seat, far from being random samples of the votes cast. are non-random and systematically biased samples. We finally outline the increasingly sophisticated computer models which have been used to correct for this bias, culminating in the 'matched polling places' model implemented by the Australian Electoral Commission at the 1990 election, which has effectively eliminated the problem of bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal organisation of government in Australia is one of the least understood aspects of the Australian political system. Despite the durability of federal structures, federal theory in Australia remains largely underdeveloped. Aside from a few scholars who have persistently analysed the federal process, federalism in Australia has received attention as an outmoded system with Little scope for distinguishing the benefits to be gained from n understanding how government is organised. But where Australian federal theory has languished. American federal theory has flourished. This paper borrows some of the major ideas which have influenced analyses of government functions in the American system and posits them against analyses of Commonwealth and State government functions in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]