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In 2000 the Howard government formed a consultative committee to review defence policy and gauge public opinion on defence issues. It concentrated on the impact of budgetary stringency and dramatic strategic change and supported increased defence spending on equipment to cater for high-level threats. Was there a thorough review? Inconsistencies occurred in the reports developed from the review and statements made by senior policy-makers while it was being conducted. The way the review was undertaken points to conceptual tensions in Australia's strategic culture and serious problems with entrenched interests in the services. Unless these challenges are addressed, a thorough review of defence policy cannot be undertaken. The review process itself needs to be reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of its strategy to win African votes for election to the UN Security Council (2008–12), Canberra sought to leverage its soft power potential by presenting Australia as having "no colonial baggage" in Africa while framing Australia as "a country from the Global North, located in the Global South," and one that would "work with other small and middle powers." Ultimately, the campaign was successful, including up to 50 of Africa's 54 countries voting for Australia. This paper considers this framing in the context of a shared but differentiated colonial history, including its contradictions, given that Australians fought several wars on African soil on behalf of the British Empire, supported white minority regimes and anti‐communist movements on the continent, and maintained the white Australia policy until the 1970s. The paper deploys decoloniality theory to engage Australia's lack of a neat fit within a historicised articulation of a "coloniser‐colonised" relationship between Europe and Africa. We show that, despite this lack of fit, Australia's relations with the countries of Africa reinforce long‐standing of patterns of knowledge, power, and being associated with colonialism. Accordingly, the paper makes three recommendations for cooperation and innovative thinking in foreign policy and diaspora diplomacy between Africa and a more independent and multicultural Australia based on the "equality of being." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations (IR) is a discipline founded upon and shaped by colonialism and Eurocentrism. Its Eurocentric tropes and myths distort the discipline's historiography and its perceptions of why and how it was founded, and for what purpose, such that race and colonialism are eliminated from mainstream discussions of disciplinary history and IR's main themes, concepts, and theories. This is reproduced in both the teaching and research of IR. Focusing on the former, this paper reflects on my experiences as the convenor of a course on colonialism. This is a second year, core course in the Politics and IR program at UNSW Sydney. The explicit purpose of the course is to contribute to decolonising UNSW's Politics and IR curriculum by centring Indigenous perspectives of colonialism and IR, critically interrogating the racism and Eurocentricity of Politics and IR, and exploring how colonialism shaped the world we live in and continues to inform our world and our lived, everyday experiences. This paper explores the concepts and theory informing the pedagogical praxis employed in the course, this praxis itself, and critically reflects on the achievements, challenges, and pitfalls of actively attempting to contribute to decolonising the IR classroom within Australia's settler colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great Britain's decision to withdraw its forces from Southeast Asia by the mid‐1970s created uncertainty for those living in the region. The potential loss of British presence led Australia to attempt to discourage Britain from leaving, while also recsognising recognising the decision as an opportunity to re‐evaluate Australia's strategic outlook in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Scholars have treated Asia and the Pacific as two regions with distinct experiences related to withdrawal. Some address changing Anglo‐Australian relations but include little, or no, mention of the Pacific territories. Others, writing about the Pacific, focused more the individual paths taken by each island than on connecting the larger process of decolonisation in the Pacific to the one in Asia. This article pairs Australia's Strategic Basis of Defence papers with documentary evidence across multiple departments in Canberra to understand how British withdrawal from east of Suez connected Australian concerns about security in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. By connecting the two areas through Australian interests, the withdrawal from east of Suez can be understood as a catalyst for Australia's pursuit of a distinctive role within its neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2016, the United States government agreed to consider resettling up to 1250 refugees who had sought protection in Australia but who were detained offshore under the Australian government's hard‐line asylum policy. This paper charts the story of this resettlement agreement, noting that for many refugees and asylum seekers that story remains unfinished. For an agreement signed to create certainty, there has been considerable uncertainty since 2016. The paper will consider what the agreement with the United States says about Australia's asylum policy. That the Obama administration agreed to resettle refugees who had sought protection in Australia, at a time of heightened global resettlement needs, is because US diplomats were aware of the plight of the refugees held offshore and because the two countries have a long record of cooperation in refugee resettlement. That the deal was begrudgingly maintained under President Trump is testament to the importance of the bilateral relationship. That resettlement in the United States has been so uncertain — and may not be available to everyone — only underscores the deeply flawed and unsustainable nature of the Australian government's insistence on refusing entry to these refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights foreign policy issues in Australia from January-June 2016. Topics discussed include reasons the 2016 Defence White Paper (2016 DWP) is an important document to consider in relation to Australia's foreign policy, four priority areas for Australian foreign policy as integral to the achievement of the Strategic Defence Objectives, and debate over the proper relationship between foreign and defence policy.

Between 2010 and 2018, Australia saw four sitting prime ministers deposed by their own parties, giving the country the title "the coup capital of the democratic world". In this paper, we use Australian Election Study surveys and commercial opinion poll data to analyse what voters thought of these changes and whether they lifted the electoral fortunes of their respective parties. The results suggest that voters' views of the changes depended on the popularity of the leader in question, but that a desire to see better economic performance reinforced support for a change in prime minister. There is little evidence that opinion polls played a role in any of the changes, at least for voters. There is also no evidence that the changes improved the subsequent vote for each of the parties that changed a prime minister; indeed, in three of the four cases the party vote declined significantly following the change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical study of exemptions has focused on escape from protectionist policies designed to control and monitor Aboriginal people in Australia — restricting their freedom of movement, intruding into their family life, and reducing their ability to participate on equal terms in the labour force. In this paper, we consider a contemporary policy — income management — which primarily restricts the freedom to dispose of personal income and has targeted Aboriginal people and communities, both directly and indirectly. Provisions for individual exemptions have been incorporated inconsistently within the many iterations of income management, and Aboriginal people are significantly less likely than others to be granted an exit from this form of financial control. The study reported here is an example of mixed‐methods social research, rather than an historiography. We use techniques of historical comparison to illuminate contemporary practices and identify the ongoing influence of settler‐colonial governance in the lives of Aboriginal people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of political developments in Australia from January to June 2023. It discusses the Labor government's focus on trade union concerns and its pursuit of specific ideological agendas, such as increasing wages and job creation. The government faced challenges related to inflation and tighter monetary policy. Notable events mentioned include the establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the Indigenous Voice referendum. The article also highlights troubles and scandals, including a poorly conceived discussion paper on superannuation, a scandal involving a former senator, and a consultancy firm leaking confidential information. Additionally, it provides updates on various political figures and mentions the announcement of the purchase of nuclear-powered submarines and the release of the budget for 2023-24. [Extracted from the article]

The Colombo Plan and Point Four program were programs that provided technical and economic assistance to the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia. They represented Commonwealth and American attempts to promote economic development in the region. This paper will investigate how these policies, which were framed by US policy‐makers and academics, were adopted in Australia. In so doing, it will demonstrate the ways that development was perceived as an important consideration in the foreign policies of both Australia and the United States. It will also examine the place of these programs in the Cold War and postcolonial world of the 1950s. As this paper will show, the interaction of these factors would affect Australian foreign policy for decades to come, revealing much about the complex nature of the Australian‐American relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's international relations (IR) discipline has a deep colonial history, but has never been through a conscious process of decolonisation. Although discussions of decolonising IR have taken place elsewhere, the discussion in Australia is in its infancy. This collection examines the possibilities for decolonising Australia's IR in the present moment, looking at its teaching practice, its research, its styles of analysis, and its relationship with Australian foreign policy. We consider what is particular to Australia's settler colonial context, what is achievable, and what is not. The collection also seeks to develop a new style of anti‐colonial foreign policy analysis in Australia, looking at the relationship between colonisation, settlement, and foreign policy. In this introduction, we first look over debates on decolonisation elsewhere in the field. We then examine the historical background of Australia's IR discipline, and look at Australian Indigenous diplomacy, to consider what is specific to Australia's context. We conclude by looking over the contributions of the papers in this collection, and consider what a decolonised Australian IR might look like. Ultimately, we argue that any process of decolonisation will be extremely difficult, and that decolonisation in Australian IR should be perceived as an ongoing struggle, rather than an endpoint in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empire/imperialism are terms that re‐emerge with patterned frequency. Claims that the Australia United Kingdom and United States agreement is imperial, that an Australian empire exists, or that coloniality continues after the end of formal colonialism are all made without connecting colonialism, settler‐colonialism, coloniality, or sub‐imperialism to the larger whole of which it is a part — empire. At the same time, political science has begun to make claims about empire as a particular type of politics and comparative historical literature has also emerged. This paper argues that empire should a site of inquiry for any decolonial project and elaborates what would be involved methodologically. It engages the question of methodology by comparing different approaches to the study of empire. My argument is that the interpretivist approach is the more methodologically robust principally because it raises a series of unresolvable methodological problems. I argue that study of empire, as a particular form of politics, is not just a social scientific question, it is an ethical normative question. I argue that it is politically necessary for the decolonisation of knowledge to broach the question of empire and its methodological problems. Only when we know the truth about empire, can we confidently contribute to a politics that would be post‐imperial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While political trust has declined in Australia, reaching its lowest level ever recorded in 2019, there remain very few studies on what explains the variation in political trust and therefore what leads to such change in political trust is less certain in Australia. This paper examines the role of political performance, grounded in the valence model of electoral support, in shaping the political trust of citizens in Australia, using Australian Election Study data from 2001 to 2019. Political performance is measured by economic performance, partisanship, leadership image, political satisfaction, and leadership change, based on the valence model of electoral support. The results demonstrate that economic performance, leadership image, and political satisfaction have contributed to a change in the level of political trust in Australia, whereas partisanship and leadership change have not been significantly associated with variation in political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the controversy generated by a series of publications in 2009 by prominent Australian journalist Andrew Bolt. The overall argument is that the controversy generated by the Bolt case contributed to a reimagining of a twenty‐first century version of the global colour line. Bolt's articles rested on a "racial grammar of whiteness" that enabled him simultaneously to assert and mask the hegemonic naturalness of whiteness. A racial grammar of whiteness mediates what people take to be the norm in representations and writings about the natures, roles and attributes of whites and non‐whites in social situations and the social relations appropriate to them. It enables such views to be presented as just so much common‐sense. Demonstrating this racial grammar at work is important because his articles appeared to echo an earlier era's narratives about race, power and privilege that were themselves informed by the global colour line, and which culminated in the now defunct White Australia Policy. The paper explores how those echoes were given substance within Bolt's articles and the subsequent court case about them, and how this contributed to a reimagining of the global colour line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offshore detention and bilateral free trade constitute hallmarks of Australia's international policy. This paper explores how these policy directions were originally justified in the Pacific Solution and the Australia‐US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA). In the literature both policies are theorised as security offerings but whilst the Pacific Solution is obviously exclusionary, AUSFTA aimed at including Australia in the US's orbit. This suggests that security as a justification for policy is flexible, complex, and warrants closer observation of its practical articulations. Reviewing the speeches with which the relevant Ministers introduced their legislation, I argue that offshore detention and bilateral free trade derive from a specific language of security in which policy‐makers view individual actors as the basis of national threats. The language of security invokes a threatening international environment by focussing on the selfish and amoral components of human behaviour whilst diminishing social institutions and collective structures. Vague anarchy and simplified individualism position the state as a righteous protector rather than a rational policy‐maker. I conclude by questioning whether this is a sound basis for policy and canvass options for escaping the language of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the concepts of the climate discourse complex, and national climate policy regime, in order to analyse significant patterns in Australian national climate politics over the twenty-five years from 1988 to 2013. Six major discursive fields - scientific, ethical, economic, technological, political/legal, and 'everyday life'- contribute to the ensemble of discourses that constitute a climate discourse complex. The climate discourse complex in turn serves to frame and discipline climate debate and the articulation of a national climate policy regime. The composition of Australia's climate discourse complex has been dominated by the economic discursive field. Debates over 'old' and 'new' economic discourses have been the key drivers of and constraints on the trajectory of Australia's climate policy regime for much of the period under consideration. These debates have diminished and sometimes marginalized the influence of scientific, ethical and other discourses, contributing to Australia's weak mitigation ambition. The paper also suggests that significant changes in Australian climate discourses and Australia's climate discourse complex have largely been initiated by factors external to Australia, with the major shift occurring in the period 2006/2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1951, performers from Daly River and Tiwi Islands Aboriginal communities staged a corroboree strike. The musicians and dancers had routinely entertained visiting cruise ships in the Darwin Botanic Gardens, but now joined dockside workers to protest the jailing and exiling of two Aboriginal agitators Lawrence Wurrpen (Urban) and Fred (Nadpur) Waters. In Melbourne, the Australian Aborigines' League expressed solidarity with the Darwin strikes and protested the exclusion of Aboriginal voices from the Jubilee of Australian Federation. The League's leaders Doug Nicholls and Bill Onus produced a new work of musical theatre featuring east coast Aboriginal performers Fred Foster, Margaret Tucker, Georgia Lee, Harold Blair, and others in 'Out of the Dark — An Aboriginal Moomba'. In this paper we examine political uses of performance in Australia's assimilation era, and show how Aboriginal agitators used music and dance to connect struggles for rights across Australia, and to keep cultural identity alive. In doing so we show how performance operated both as work and as assertion of cultural sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of Australian foreign policy issues between January and December 2009. It discusses issues such as the impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the Australian economy and explores United States' response to the issue, the delivery of the Defence White Paper, which outlines the country's military expenses, the Chinese steel industry's demand for Australian iron-ore and the Australian policy on the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the continued deployment of troops.

Like many other regional powers in the Asia‐Pacific, Australia is a middle‐sized state wedged between two great powers, the United States (US) and the People's Republic of China. While Australia continues to rely upon the US alliance for security, China remains its biggest trading partner. Over the past two decades, Australia's public foreign policy discussions have centred upon Australia's "China Choice" in the context of growing strategic rivalry between these dominant powers. This debate has sought to grapple with the options available to Australia in managing its relations with an increasingly assertive China and an unpredictable US. This article examines the public debate on China policy since the election of the conservative Liberal‐National Coalition government in 2013. It argues the appropriateness of a pragmatic foreign policy in relation to the engagement of great powers has been the central question in Australia's China debate. Yet what constitutes pragmatic action in relation to Australia's China policy is varied and based on differing understandings of how middle‐sized states can and do seek to cope with structural shifts. The paper also argues, however, that an emergent anti‐pragmatist tradition has recently emerged that reflects the unprecedented challenges facing Australian foreign policy and presents "pragmatism" as a threat to Australian sovereignty, principles, and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period 1930-46, drought and wind erosion turned parts of the US and Australia into dust bowls. While the US events are well studied, historical research on similar processes in Australia is less abundant. The first part of the paper focusses on the transnational transfer of soil conservation policy and science from the US to Australia, claiming it stimulated the diffusion of an ecological conservationist's conscience within the wider Australian society. The dust storm years were therefore a key period for the evolution of ecological thought and environmental ethics in Australia. Taking the example of four key figures of Australia's conservation movement of the 1960s and later, the second part of the paper shows intellectual continuities between these precursors and the later conservation movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many high‐income countries are committed to effective climate policy, yet remain heavily dependent on fossil fuel extraction. The contradiction between an intensifying climate crisis and continued policy failure generates new political alignments, constituencies, and agendas. A dialectical process of socio‐ecological change opens‐up, where the climate is "socialised" and society is "climatised". Australia is a high‐income, high‐emitting fossil fuel "superpower" with a thirty‐year stretch of failing climate policy, and offers an exceptionally vivid illustration of this dynamic. The paper explores these themes through the rhetoric of participants in Australian climate policy networks. It is based on sustained involvement the field and a series of in‐depth interviews with organisations that seek to influence Australian climate policy, across business associations, trade unions, environmental non‐governmental organisations, government agencies, and think tanks. It finds extensive strategic reflection across these organisations, with moves to more collaboration and alliance‐building to isolate the fossil fuel lobby, and efforts at creating new constituencies to advance decarbonisation "on the ground". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks why it took ten years after a major famine in Indonesia in 1957 for Australia's food aid to increase in greater amounts, and why food aid was so significant in Australia's foreign aid to Indonesia during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indonesia's reluctance to apply for food aid under the Colombo Plan is the reason for the delay. A combination of humanitarian, commercial and international relations interests converged to shape Australia's rapidly growing food aid to Indonesia after 1966. Food aid contributed to alleviating food shortages and famines in Indonesia. It also supported Australian firms in regaining their share in the growing market for wheat‐based products in Indonesia, and in building market share for Australian rice exports, in competition with United States (US) producers and the US PL480 food aid program. Food aid also allowed Australia to expand its foreign aid program to Indonesia rapidly after 1966, in support of the government of new President Soeharto and improved bilateral relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is a key site for the negotiation of national identity, with the ability to define the past shaping the national narrative on who "we" were, who "we" are, and, crucially, who "we" should be. As such, the teaching of history is a site of intense political debate. This paper examines the history module of the Australian Curriculum to understand the extent to which the history curriculum moves beyond Eurocentric, colonial imaginings of Australia's history towards a more inclusive, multi‐cultural, globally‐oriented, cosmopolitan vision of society. Both the curriculum and teaching resources were examined to ascertain the identities and orientations these materials could provide. The research finds that — despite improvements in presenting a diversity of representations, in particular a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Australia and some orientation to diverse migrant histories, the environment, and Asia — the main thrust of the curriculum is a focus on the nation‐state at the expense of global engagement. The funnel structure which deals with broader world history in earlier years, relegates the rest of the world to a temporal and spatial distance, leaving a somewhat myopic narrative that perpetuates traditional, Anglo‐centric narratives, maintaining the perspectives of "Others" as peripheral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia‐India relations during the Cold War years were tense. The dominant argument in the current literature that explains this tension is the Nehru‐Menzies dissonance, which resulted in fundamentally opposite readings of the Cold War. However, the role of Australian aid to India has been understudied in the bilateral relations literature. India was the largest receiver of Australian aid between 1951–1969, but in 1969, there was a marked decrease in this aid as Indonesia replaced India as the main aid recipient. By drawing on archival material, this article suggests an additional explanation for the dramatic change to the Australia‐India relationship. By examining the role of Australian ministers and senior bureaucrats, this paper argues that between 1951–1969, Australia's aid to India was driven by its strategic interests in India. However, by 1966 Australia's strategic interests in India became tenuous due to the souring of United States‐India relations, primarily because of the stresses of the Vietnam War. Thus, a sizeable cut in Australian aid to India was made in 1969 and the subsequent decision to make Indonesia the foremost beneficiary of its aid was a result of strategic reassessments in Australian foreign policy, to adhere more closely to United States (US) interests in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion in prime ministerial engagement with Anzac, and in particular, the marking of Anzac Day with a national address. Correspondingly, there has also been enormous interest in Anzac from members of the academy, but there has been little systematic analysis of the breadth and depth of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses. This paper seeks to correct this omission by conducting a critical discourse analysis of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses from 1973 to 2016 in order to sketch their imprecise, but increasingly institutionalised and consistent, genre boundaries. The paper delineates the various thematic and characteristic features of these addresses, including where and when the addresses have been delivered; the fixity and hybridisation of the prime ministerial Anzac speech genre; the thematic and tonal representations of Anzac; the wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with; and who Anzac's agents are. As will be shown, whilst Australian prime ministers may closely adhere to the traditions of Anzac with their addresses, they also subtly renovate understandings of Anzac in alignment with their policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014 the Coalition government announced a 320 million dollar package for drought-hit farmers. In describing this initiative as a 'hand-up' not a 'hand out' Prime Minister Tony Abbott encapsulated more than 150 years of tension over whether government drought response should be unconditional limited relief or conditional longer-term assistance. This paper considers the long history of drought assistance in Australia as seen through government legislation, year books, newspapers and personal papers. It argues that despite changing political and social circumstances, contradictions in the approach to government drought response, as well as in public and personal reactions to those policies, have remained remarkably consistent. We further suggest that lack of consensus over the inherent nature of drought is not sufficient to explain the dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Percy Spender, the Australian Foreign Minister in 1950, played a critical role in the establishment of the Colombo Plan. The programme was proposed by Commonwealth ministers in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in January 1950. In May, Spender hosted the first meeting of the Consultative Committee to work out the modalities for the aid programme. Using Canadian and British sources, the article re-examines Spender's diplomacy at the Sydney conference. It demonstrates why his conduct elicited such strong condemnation from his fellow ministers and almost precipitated a crisis in Commonwealth relations. It argues that Spender antagonised Commonwealth ministers unnecessarily with his tactics without achieving the objectives he had set for himself. His diplomacy did not advance his vision of the aid programme; instead, the British vision of the Colombo Plan prevailed in Sydney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greens challenge the Australian two-party system by promoting an alternative political agenda and by facilitating democratic processes. Their recent successes in federal and state elections suggest that the party itself deserves closer scrutiny. This paper shows how the Greens are organisationally different from other parties currently active in Australian politics due to both their internal processes and their parliamentary practices. Recent theories of parties argue that party organisation has changed significantly for major parties, adopting an electoral-professional or cartel model that centralises power and decision-making in party representatives within parliaments. This paper shows how a smaller party uses identity formation processes to establish a distinctive organisational style. We examine the Greens' party organisation by analysing the interdependent relationships between the party membership, the state and national offices, and Green MPs. The paper is based on original research including in-depth interviews undertaken with state and federal Greens members of parliaments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the last vestiges of the remarkable, Indigenous‐controlled, Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme were removed, Australia entered a post‐CDEP era in 2013. In its place, in remote areas only, the rigid and externally imposed Community Development Programme (CDP) has been installed. The CDEP scheme had been a successful work‐creation strategy that produced positive social, economic, and political outcomes for First Nations citizens across Australia. In contrast, the CDP has operated like Work‐for‐the‐Dole on steroids and its introduction has seen high numbers of unemployed Indigenous participants exit the welfare system altogether. In this article, I look at how we got here. Guided by postcolonial theory and implementing the toolkit provided by Carol Bacchi's "What's the Problem Represented to be?" approach, I pay close attention to the way in which Indigenous policy has been represented over the past 25 years. In particular, I examine the construction of the problem of "Aboriginal welfare dependency" by the Liberal/National Coalition Government led by Prime Minister John Howard between 1996 and 2007. This interconnected problem representation, I argue, has been instrumental in changing the way Indigenous affairs is thought about, with concrete implications for policy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is one of the largest coal exporting nations in the world and its economy is underpinned by the availability of cheap fossil fuels. It is well documented that it has failed to act on climate change, and that the conservative Howard government was particularly hostile to international action. It is also well documented that 2007 was an agenda-setting period when climate change was elevated to national prominence. This paper details and interrogates the ultimately successful Labor national governments' efforts to establish an Australian carbon pricing mechanism. It considers whether irresistible normative forces for climate policy change overcame the previously immovable object of economic and political self-interest, and the power of the carbon lobby. In explaining complex climate policy dynamics, temporal scales and politics, it finds great utility in John Kingdon's pragmatic 'policy window'1 as an explanation for Australia's climate policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has recently been conjecture as to the decline of the major political traditions and the rise of a more fragmented politics in Australian cities. This paper uses a 'slice history' approach to explore the evolving concept of 'the West' in Sydney, New South Wales, its place in public debate, and the interplay between centre and periphery during the single 'axial' year of 1985. New South Wales Legislative Assembly debates are tabulated, analysed and discussed in the context of larger government programs and public debates. The paper concludes that the concept of 'The West', while of vital political importance in both state and Federal politics, is an elusive term which has been used in unreflective, and often self-defeating, ways by those tasked with providing the region with services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many have remarked upon Prime Minister John Howard's “use” of the Anzac legend for political purposes, our understanding of the nature and dynamics of such use remains fragmented and underdeveloped. Using the area of foreign policy as a case study, this essay approaches Howard's Anzac Day and related ceremonial rhetoric as examples of the epideictic genre, which presents speakers with a combination of unique rhetorical opportunities and strict generic constraints. While often perceived as apolitical and inconsequential, the genre embodies a form of argumentation that serves not only to increase the “intensity of adherence” to certain values, thus laying the groundwork for later deliberative appeals, but also creates a “disposition to act at the appropriate moment”. This paper will argue that Howard's employment of Anzac was bounded and defined by the nature and dynamics of the epideictic genre, of which Howard proved to be a savvy user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trade Practices Act 1965 was widely criticised as being weak and unproductive. It was a significantly watered-down version of the original Bill overseen by Garfield Barwick. Although the final form of the Act was perceived as ineffective at the time, it is now viewed as an important step towards a national competition policy and a precursor to the opening up of the Australian economy. This paper outlines the economic, political and social background to the introduction of the legislation. We specify some of the factors that explain why its creation caused controversy and its importance in initiating change in Australians' attitudes towards collusive behaviour and economic protectionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most widely-endorsed norms in Australian politics is the requirement for bipartisanship in the management of defence and security policy. This norm is assumed to lead to good policy creation, foster political unity, and protect those who implement national policy (particularly the military). The paper argues that evidence for all three of these claims is overstated. In addition, the effects of the norm are often counter-productive and even harmful to the conduct and management of Australian policy. The paper concludes by arguing that the norm of bipartisanship for Australian defence and security policy should be abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ten years (1963-1973) of visits to Australia of Italian Communist Party (PCI) officials. In particular, the visits' origins, meaning and ramifications are analysed and framed against the background of post-war migrant worker identity discourses and radical politics. They appear to have shaped markedly the direction of the experience of Italian communists in Australia, especially in Sydney, and their interaction with both the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the PCI. Ultimately, they helped spread the message of Italian communism among migrants and encourage the replication on Australian soil of the successful experience of the Europe-based PCI federations with thousands of worker members. For the CPA, which had been looking for new ways to break through to the hearts and minds of the migrant proletariat, the visits heralded a stronger partnership with its Italian members, a closer link with Eurocommunism, and a potential new stream of recruits that would have reversed the hemorrhaging of membership. The visits were instrumental, as argued in this paper, for the establishment and promotion of an Italian cultural and language space for which far-left Italian migrants in Australia had long yearned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A scholarly analysis is presented of the article “Frontier Vigilantism? Australia and Contemporary Representations of Australian Antarctic Territory" by Klaus Dodds and Alan D. Hemmings which appeared in the Vol. 55, number 4, 2009 issue. The authors contend that the article uses inappropriate language and misinterprets the Australian Strategic Policy Institute paper "Frozen Assets: Securing Australia’s Antarctic Future." Other subjects discussed include Australia's Antarctic policy; the international Antarctic Treaty System, and the accuracy of the map used to illustrate the article.

This article considers the way in which recent commentators have represented Australia's relationship with Antarctica including current and future challenges. While successive Australian governments from the 1950s onwards have sought inter alia to develop and protect the country's southern oceanic and Antarctic interests, concern has persisted about the activities of other parties. The signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty helped to ensure that the territorial status quo prevailed with regard to the Australian Antarctic Territory. The entry of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) into force in 1994 created new opportunities for further expressions of sovereign rights in this region. While mindful of the evolving legal geographies affecting Antarctica, our paper asks a series of questions about this relationship with the far south: how has Australian national identity been informed and influenced by Antarctic engagements? Will UNCLOS actually weaken the Antarctic Treaty System? Finally, do contemporary Australian pronouncements on the Antarctic hint at anxieties reminiscent of the 1950s? We conclude with a warning that nationalistic evocations may well unsettle a delicate balance concerning the Southern Ocean and disputed ownership of Antarctica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of high levels of informal (or invalid) voting in Australian national elections using a social exclusion framework. The rate of the informal vote is an indicator of social and political exclusion with particular groups of Australians experiencing inordinate electoral disadvantage. Poorer voters, voters from non-English speaking backgrounds and those with low education levels are especially disadvantaged by factors peculiar to the Australian voting experience. We begin by exploring the character and pattern of informal voting and then canvass the technical and socio-economic factors which explain it. We conclude by considering proposed options for reducing informality, some of which are: the abandonment of compulsory voting, major structural change to the voting system as well as ballot re-design, electoral education and community information initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is my intention to present some of the findings of my PhD research, in which I have considered Italian migrants’ material and discursive practices about the body, through the analysis of a corpus of more than 1,000 original letters written by Italian migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns in the Italian Australian-language newspaper La Fiamma. The specific focus of this article is on letters written by Italian migrant women in which a psychological discomfort or a psychiatric disorder was expressed. Many of these women wrote more than one letter over a span of two or more years. Despite important events in their lives, such as pregnancy and divorce, or admission to or release from a psychiatric hospital, they essentially continued to repeat the same discourse in every letter, as if they were trapped in a situation from which it was impossible to escape — as if nobody was actually listening to what they were trying to say. This paper is an attempt to give back a voice to some of these women through my own personal and theoretical approach to their histories of madness and abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from being incidental, what is taught at primary school can reveal key beliefs about the world and its future held at a given period. I compare Victorian primary school curricula and reading resources of the 1930s and 1950s, attending particularly to references to war and cultural difference. I find that in the 1930s war was to be avoided by valuing cultural differences, whereas in the later decade the aim was effacement of difference through modernisation. I argue that this attitude to difference, combined with the imperialism and internationalism of the 1930s, engendered a moral form of identity in Victorian primary school children. In contrast, under the economic nationalism of the 1950s, children were taught to be good citizens taking little moral responsibility to those who were not Australian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the ongoing international debate concerning the efficacy or otherwise of the NPT and IAEA in preventing or managing nuclear proliferation, Australia's undertaking to enter a nuclear cooperation agreement with the People's Republic of China (PRC), once identified as a “strategic competitor” of Australia's major alliance partner the United States (US), suggests that Australia's approach to proliferation issues is being re-evaluated. This paper argues, utilising an analysis of the relationship between the evolving US approach to nuclear issues and Australian policy, that the Howard government's evolving approach to nuclear issues can be characterised as an attempt to balance the competing imperatives of maintaining Australia's reputation as a nuclear non-proliferation standard bearer, regional strategic and economic considerations and the weight of the Australia-US alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War was a theatre for the demonstration of Australia's contribution to the Empire, and the role of science and technology. This paper explores this relationship by tracing the history of the Melbourne University Respirator, a gas mask developed by scientists at the University of Melbourne during the Great War. In the immediate post-war period, the Respirator was used as a political technology to educate citizens about the actual and potential contribution of scientific research to national and imperial defence. Scientists in this manner promoted national scientific and technological development and a more equal partnership with Britain. The political use of the Respirator was staged in the vivid medium of an exhibition, in which sentiment was conceivably used to motivate political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian government's 1997 policy ban on in-market mergers among the largest four domestic banks has been a key intervention shaping the direction of bank consolidation in Australia as such mergers significantly accelerated from 1997 through 1999 in developed economies. This paper will show that the knowledge about the social and economic impacts of the bank mergers and the Treasurer's merger veto power made the policy debate exoteric (political and public) by including interests outside the banking policy community (i.e., interest organisations of employees, customers, and farmers, as well as political parties, and the broad public). Thus, the merger policy discussions were not esoteric, technical and limited to a small number of influential public and private sector institutions leaving policy discussions vulnerable to be structured to favour the interests of large, financial firms over other interests. This, in turn, created significant pressure on government for to retain the policy. The paper also outlines the significance of the domestic political conflicts and electoral politics in a world of global finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an overview of various issues in Australian foreign policy from July to December 2004. Issue of bipartisanship in the country's foreign policy; White Paper on terrorism released by the government entitled "Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia"; Developments in the trade sector.

This paper details the threats to civil liberties in Australia attendant upon rushed legislative efforts (during 2002) to deal with international terrorism. It is therefore indicative of the dangers of opportunistic political responses in countries which have not incurred terrorism directly and which may need more sustained debate about the nature and appropriateness of unprecedented and extra-judicial powers. The potential for the criminalisation of politics is demonstrated here through an examination of the ASIO Act Amendment Bill 2002 and the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 . The paper criticises the detention, proscription and executive control of normal political activity which these Bills proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America on Australian democracy. It argues that the way Tocqueville approached democracy in America – the questions he posed, the problems he saw, the predictions he made – were influential for subsequent thinkers who examined the newer democracies such as Australia. To bring to light this Tocquevillian influence the paper examines two major works that have Democracy in America as their implicit or acknowledged theoretical starting point: Bryce’s Modern Democracies and Hancock’s Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been limited sustained analysis of the lived reality of citizenship amongst Indigenous Australians exempted from protectionist legislation last century. Through examining the diaries of Daisy Smith, this paper explores how her household, exempted from such legislation in Queensland, experienced citizenship during the 1940s and early 1950s. The diaries show that Daisy Smith and her family exercised civil, political and social rights of citizenship, enjoyed meaningful lives and had a sense of belonging to the Australian nation. However, they also show that Daisy Smith constantly worked hard to uphold the conditions of exemption and protect her family's exempted Aboriginal status. These conditions required the Smith family to deny and relinquish all connection with their Indigenous heritage and embrace the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture or risk losing exemption. In this way, their inclusion in the Australian nation and enjoyment of citizenship rights were conditional upon them being manifestly normative Anglo-Celtic citizens. Their experience of citizenship was by its nature restrictive and coercive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour governments around the world are struggling to renew labour and social democratic values in the modern era. The South Australian Labor government, led by Mike Rann (2002-11), presents a striking case of a labour government that pursued a renewal of social democracy. By offering a critical examination of the ideological contours of the Rann Government, this paper contributes to wider debates about the flux of social democracy. In Australia, debates about Labor's identity tend to focus on the federal rather than state level, which this article seeks, in part, to redress. The Rann government's economic and social inclusion policies are examined and compared with its South Australian historical forebears, and the Rann government is located within the various labour 'traditions'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a specific controversy over the control and content of sex education in South Australia in 1985 that was triggered by concerns about homosexuality. Drawing on Foucault's idea of the "deployment of sexuality", the paper examines the way in which the issue of homosexuality became the focal point for a concerted struggle over sex education in state schools. It is argued that the idea of homosexuality, or more accurately male homosexual sexuality, served as a boundary marker that both defined and revealed the content and scope of school-based sex education. It is shown that this controversy was an instance of the "deployment of sexuality" through which public opinion was concentrated and mobilised to ensure that prevailing heterosexual norms remained the defining parameters for sex education. Thus it is also demonstrated that sex education is deeply implicated in both the construction and maintenance of prevailing (gendered) sexual norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]