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The crucial question in realising basic needs strategies concerns the effort to include those areas, peoples and their requirements which tend to be excluded from the existing benefits of growth, and especially from existing distributive programmes. However the achievement of much more inclusive coverage is difficult, partly because of its political implications and partly because of the types of decision‐ making and calculation which would be required. In particular, the effort to provide a state‐guaranteed and inclusive minimum has always under‐rated the institutional and administrative problems of implementation. Concern with the concept of the minimum has a long history in both ideas and policy, revealing a need to solve problems of institutional processes. But these solutions in turn require alternative types of politicisation and control in the programmes themselves. It is not that the choices involved in basic needs strategies are unreal, but rather that they do not advance far in solving long‐standing problems of distribution, decision‐making and the control of institutions.

“Neither is it to be passed over in silence that this dedicating of colleges and societies only to the use of professory learning hath not only been an enemy of the growth of sciences, but hath redounded likewise to the prejudice of states and governments: for hence it commonly falls out that princes, when they would make choice of ministers fit for the affairs of state, finde about them such a marveilous solitude of able men; because there is no education collegiate designed to this end.” Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I Copyright

Defense policy and civil-military relations are now well established fields for political science. They raise problems that are important and exciting in their own right and as dramatic instances of general institutional problems of policy-making and control. Comparative and particular aspects of this field should be appreciated. What are the special characteristics of the Australian type of situation?

Arecent commentator has suggested that the value to political science of looking at new states is that “one is forced to deal with the most basic questions of politics—the entire set of questions involved in the creation and maintenance of political societies.” Certainly this appears to be true time and again. One is forced to look at the largest questions to the smallest, both because they are vivid and apparent, and because they are also urgent. The basic problem of obligation—why we do things we do not want to do, and allow unpleasant things to be done to us by political leaders, or why we accept the authority of power—is for us either a matter of analysis or of sociological inquiry. Clearly it is more than that in a new state. There the question is a living one, sometimes for a large minority, sometimes for many small sections or groups. The state and the nation are not, as yet, one. Rousseau or Hobbes have come to life.

Summary This paper defines a particular sense of social planning as a problem about data, anticipation and decisions by officials concerned with social instruments. Certain special difficulties are indicated about the differential impact of such official action and about areas, variations and clientele relations and so about anticipations by the official decision‐makers. Some assistance in these difficulties might come from network analysis, machinery of government checklists and categorizations of types of social instruments or services. Such devices have their limits, and difficulties remain, e.g. about just when and why innovation (rather than adaptation) would be needed, about relations with innovating groups, about bureaucracy (especially in clientele relations) and about measurements. Hence there is a special need for analysing and organizing the information system for social planning and an approach to this, in terms of certain sorts of triggers, data categories and indicators, is outlined.

Labelling in Development Policy reveals how labelling is perceived as natural and objective by sheltering behind an ideology of rationality. In reality labelling is an instrument of power through which the relationships between class interests and institutional processes are constructed and sustained. The book focuses on labels which arise in development policy areas as an aspect of the donative political discourse associated with the development agendas of poor countries. It refers to the process by which people, conceived of as objects of policy, are defined in convenient images.