Search

Political representation of ethnic minorities in a liberal democratic system is a crucial step towards having the interests of ethnic minority groups heard. The under-representation of ethnic minorities in a political institution can exacerbate inequality between majority and minority populations and increase feelings of alienation among minority groups. As a country observing increasing ethnic diversity, Australia saw record-level ethnic minority candidates elected in the 2022 federal election. However, the shares of candidates and elected Members of Parliaments with ethnic minority backgrounds are still much lower than their relative shares in the population. In this regard, Australia has lagged behind other major settler countries. In this paper, we examine the political representation of ethnic minorities in Australia's federal election. Drawing on data from the 2022 federal election and 2021 population census, we find a positive association between ethnic minority concentration and ethnic representation. However, for the two major parties, ethnic minority candidates are less likely to be in safe seats, even when the seat observes high ethnic minority concentration. Findings suggest that ethnic voting is evident but it is perhaps too early to celebrate higher levels of ethnic representation in Australian politics as political parties act as gatekeepers in safe seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters' attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic. [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]

Political processes are shaped by the gendered ways in which women and men are selected to run for political office. This paper examines the increase in women entering the parliamentary arena and employs a feminist historical institutionalism approach to understand how and why change in female representation occurs. We examine the interplay between formal rules and informal practices on candidate selection through the case of Queensland, Australia. Drawing on policy developments and analysis of election reports, we explore the difficulties in changing the gendered nature of political parties, the formal and informal processes, the pace of change and the political struggles and opportunities along the way. Factors supporting increased representation included leadership, sanctions, placement mandates, as well as vacancies and a 'glass cliff' political environment. Support for formal rules and quotas – despite resistance at the informal level – has gradually improved opportunities for women in one political party in this jurisdiction and achieved very positive outcomes. In contrast, the other major party has opposed quotas relying instead on informal practices and rules, which result in less positive outcomes for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The percentage of women elected in the Australian Parliament is comparatively low. This poor track record has generated debate within political parties about the necessity of gender quotas (or targets) to increase women's representation. Using the 2016 Australian Election Study, this paper proposes to test support for different measures aiming to increasing women's representation in Australian politics. More specifically, I investigate the role of partisanship in explaining gender differences in support for gender quotas. I find that differences in support for quotas are greater among women, and among men, than between women and men. The paper also demonstrates that the role of political values in explaining differences in support for gender quotas is non-uniform. Indeed, attitudes towards government intervention, minority rights, and gender equality are more crucial in explaining differences in support for legislative quotas among men than among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change increases hazards for coastal cities where a large proportion of the world's population lives. Adaptation to its impacts ought to be a key focus for planning and policymaking in highly vulnerable countries like Australia. This responsibility, however, has been largely left to local councils with mixed results. This leaves substantial parts of the population at risk where adaptation plans are lacking. Even worse, since the impacts of climate change do not respect jurisdictional boundaries, there is a spill-over risk where good adaptation planning by one council may be undermined by the lack of action in an adjacent council. These risks can be reduced if state and federal governments provide more consistent support and guidance. This paper takes an integrated approach in comparing the relevant legislation, policies, plans, and strategies related to coastal management across the national and state/territory jurisdictions in Australia. The findings indicate that there are major differences, with some states (South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, and Queensland) having more detailed policies and plans for addressing sea level rise and coastal flooding. The findings have implications beyond Australia, particularly for those countries with more devolved or federal systems of government, and provide key lessons for adaptation to climate change. Key policy insights In the absence of national guidance and leadership, climate adaptation responses will remain uneven across jurisdictions placing more of the population at risk and undermining what adaptation plans there are. National, state, and territory policies or plans are more effective if they are consistent over time, but they are undermined by reversals when governments change between political parties that have widely varying views on climate change. Effective long-term adaptation policymaking and planning therefore require a bipartisan commitment and consistent political will across the major political parties to prioritize the problem and commit significant public resources to a response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether Australia’s major political parties continue to fulfil a representational role. This was often the traditional view of the parties, but has been much criticised in recent decades by scholars arguing they have largely converged, moderating their policies and abandoning their links with civil society. Here I outline a theoretical framework – supported with evidence from four empirical tests – that characterises the major parties as interest aggregators representing electoral alliances made up of politicians, activists, financial contributors and voters, united by key economic policy goals. These actors create a centrifugal force, pushing party policies away from each other in salient areas. Using this framework, I theorise that the parties matter for policy outcomes, building on the assumption that cleavages in the social structure are reflected in the political system, with policy implementation the result of the competing demands and interests of the parties’ constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to enter the current debate over the future of the South Australian Legislative Council by critiquing recent reform proposals and then outlining some modest suggestions for reform. The paper contends that a number of recent reform proposals are explicitly partisan and seek to enlarge the role of large parties and majority government. On the contrary others would ban political parties. The paper contends that whilst the Legislative Council exhibits many of the characteristics of an effective and useful upper house, reform of four areas would enable its review function to be improved. These areas include: the size of the Council; the term lengths of members; the method for resolving deadlocks; and the method for replacing retiring members. The paper then critically examines the proposal to ban political parties; and argues instead that instituting the Robson Rotation system would promote freedom of association and freedom of choice by voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationship between the growing dominance of career politicians in the Australian federal legislature and models of party organisation. Using data on MPs in the Australian federal parliament, this study maps changes in models of party organisation to the occupational profiles of MPs between 1949 and 2007. The findings show a correspondence between the phenomenon of cartelisation and the appearance of legislators whose previous occupation was in the political sphere. The authors suggest that there is a relationship between different modes of party organisation and both the supply of candidates and the demand-side factors influencing party selectors. The paper concludes that theories of recruitment should include a greater emphasis on models of party organisation to explain better the uniformity of recruitment outcomes across advanced democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper employs ethnographic method to theorise about the ethnic contribution networks enabled by major Australian political parties, with specific regard to Chinese Australian formations, and in the context of globalisation's impact upon 'de-nationalising' political institutions. The paper expands upon the notion of the contribution network by situating it within network theory literature, asserting the need for stability in the diffuse forms of resource exchange indicates that it is sustained by mixed and weak network ties. The character of the contribution network as a significant mode of political engagement by ethnic Chinese network actors, moulds participation in the political process that is both party ambivalent and politically apathetic. Its impact upon Chinese Australian political incorporation raises important questions about the role of progressive political theory, which through the politics of recognition has sought to legitimate modes of group representation, including clientelistic formations, as a means to enhancing the political inclusion of marginalised Australian migrant and ethnic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Australian monarchy-republican debate ought to be understood as competing interpretations of the relationship between political theory and practice, reflected in competing views on the ability of Australian democratic government to withstand the introduction of a republic. These interpretations, named 'minimalist' versus 'maximalist' republicanism, transcend traditional theories of monarchism and republicanism. The first part of the paper contextualises and explains the minimalist-maximalist distinction as a way of understanding the debate. The second part of the paper analyses the language in texts of key political parties and organised movements in the debate in the 1990s. The focus on elites rather than the public is an innovative approach to this debate, as is the engagement of discourse analysis which recommends these methods to other socio-political settings. [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]

Social democratic parties have been agents in the neo-liberal transformation of public policy in recent decades. There has been debate about the reasons why social democrats have embraced market policies, with particular emphasis given to ideological trends, globalisation and electoral factors. This paper aims to shed further light on this debate by examining the case of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), which was a prominent social democratic exponent of neo-liberalism during its time in office in the 1980s and 1990s. In Labor's case, the primary cause of the shift from pledging social reform and interventionist government to neo-liberalism was the lower levels of economic growth that followed the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s. Social democrats rely on strong economic growth to fund redistributive policies. Thus when recession occurred in the 1970s it eroded the economic base to Labor's programme. While this paper focuses on the story of the ALP, it may provide some answers as to why social democrats elsewhere have adopted neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition between candidates representing political parties is usually regarded as a central feature of a liberal democracy. However, where competition between parties fails to provide the public with an effective choice of candidates, the real competition between candidates is displaced to a competition for party endorsement within particular parties. The paper examines the democratic implications of this displacement, and reports the findings of an audit of candidate-selection procedures within the principal Australian parties. The paper argues inter alia that the closed nature of electoral competition and the public status of Australian political parties imply that their internal affairs should be conducted democratically. The paper defines internal party democracy in structural and procedural terms. It applies realistic standards - realistic, because too much internal democracy could render a party ineffective and restrict electoral competition - in conducting an audit of the candidate-selection rules and the composition of candidate-selection voting panels for the principal Australian parties. The paper concludes with a suggestion for policy reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By-elections have the capacity to result in political outcomes beyond simply filling casual vacancies when they arise. This paper examines data pertaining to federal by-elections in Australia since 1949 in order to ascertain the extent to which there have been changes in these special electoral contests. This paper argues that, although the rate of representational change has not been great in federal by-elections, there has nonetheless been an evolving notion that these contests give non-major party candidates greater scope to influence the political debate. However, it is also argued that this enhanced scope for non-major party `trouble-making' has been the product of an emerging feature in Australian by-elections--specifically, the increasing incidence of strategic absenteeism by the major political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS CHAPTER seeks to move the discussion of labour and politics beyond the contest of political ideologies in the movement and the constraints of the liberal democratic state. To explain the different political histories of the Australian and Canadian movements we use a model with three dimensions: the changing balance between labour and politics; the different social forces that labour seeks to represent; and the different conceptions of politics that labour holds. After a discussion of the literature on labour and politics in the two countries, the paper applies this model to distinguish two periods, a formative period up to the early 1920s, in which labour entered politics. and the period from the 1920s to the 1950s when parties or governments took politics into the labour movement. The model enables us to characterize the politics of the Australian Labor Party as a form of class-based labourism, with significant moments of working-class socialism. We characterize the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party as a form of populist socialism. The paper concludes with some insights gained from using a common model in a comparative exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Liberal National Party ('LNP') won 78 out of a possible 89 seats in Queensland's 2012 state election. Facing a budget blowout, the new Government soon used its control of the state's unicameral parliament to implement a contentious public sector reform agenda. The LNP's amendments to Queensland's employment laws struck at the very heart of many of the accepted 'ground rules' of industrial relations. Perhaps most significantly, the Government used its parliamentary majority to remove job security commitments given to public servants, paving the way for the loss of thousands of jobs. This paper sets out the key industrial relations reforms adopted by the LNP. The authors discuss the Government's rationale for the changes, and the reaction from Queensland's trade union movement. The article concludes with some general observations about the changes adopted during the LNP's term of Government; a period which will undoubtedly be remembered as a controversial part of Queensland's industrial relations history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for increased regulation are sometimes made in response to what is dubbed an ‘arms race’ in elections – a cost explosion in electoral expenditure driven by the competitive dynamics of elections. In 2010, New South Wales (NSW) adopted the first comprehensive caps on electoral expenditure in Australia on this basis. This paper examines the evidence for a cost explosion over the course of three NSW elections (1999–2007). It finds a significant but unevenly distributed increase in electoral expenditure – over 3 per cent per annum over and above inflation and the growth in voter population. In terms of explaining this spending increase, it finds a close relationship between electoral expenditure and the availability of campaign funds but a less clear one between such expenditure and the ‘winnability’ of the elections. 由于选举中发生的“军备竞赛”——选举的你追我赶造成选举成本的暴增——人们呼吁加强管制。2010年，新南威尔士对选举开销出台了封顶的详细规定，在澳大利亚尚属首次。本文考察了新南威尔士三个选举过程（1999—2007）中成本激增的情况。作者发现选举开销重要但分布不规则的增长——高于通货膨胀及选民增长百分之三。如何解释选举开销的增长呢？作者发现选举开销与选举资金获得的难易程度关系密切，而与选举获胜机会的大小的关系模糊。 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite a steady erosion of the major parties' share of the vote in Australia, minor parties have been unable to attract more than 15 per cent of the vote. Employing a variation of Katz and Mair's cartel party thesis, this paper argues that the major parties have an advantage in defining and limiting power sharing arrangements and setting and reacting to the policy agenda. They can act together to deny a third-party oxygen, or can deflect criticism of controversial policies onto the third party. A critical appraisal of seven cases of government formation involving the Australian Greens and Australian Democrats, along with two case studies of legislative negotiation shows that the electoral backlash is often borne by the minor parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia's main parties have experienced rapid deterioration in levels of membership but most have been reluctant to follow the lead of many of their counterparts in Western Europe and embrace more radical, inclusive pre-selection formats to arrest declining numbers. This paper offers a partial explanation of why the Liberal and Labor parties have been disinclined to look to reforming candidate selection as a strategy to combat their shrinking rank-and-file membership. It argues that compulsory voting in conjunction with high levels of party identification has reduced the imperative for Australia's major parties to resort to candidate selection reform as a device to stabilise their voter base. This study underscores the important role of the institutional setting in affecting the incentives for parties to use pre-selection reform to combat a shrinking membership base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 NSW election produced the largest two-party swing in recent Australian election history, ending 16 years of Labor government. It raises the prospect of the end of Labor's dominance of NSW politics. This paper focuses on the consequences of ALP instability for the Party's electoral opportunities and strategy in the lead-up to its 2011 defeat. The authors single out the mass departure of Labor MPs prior to the election and the loss of Greens preferences as interesting problems for empirical analysis. They explore both loss of incumbency and preference effects in a seat-level (n = 93) regression model and comment on the significance of the findings for NSW Labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes issue with the widespread assumption of constancy in the meaning and measurement of party identification over time and space. It holds that the partisan dealignment common to established democracies has eroded the validity of the Michigan scale's assumption that voters can identify with only one party, arguing instead that dealignment can encourage secondary attachments to other parties. To persist with an exclusivist conceptualization of party identification under these conditions is shown to risk the misspecification of voting models since the effects of these secondary attachments can be misleadingly attributed to short-term influences, like leaders, associated with those parties. The dynamics of the voting decision can thereby be seriously distorted. The force of this argument is demonstrated through a comparison of general election outcomes in relatively aligned Australia and relatively dealigned Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, members of a political party are expected to vote as a block on the instructions of their party. Occasionally a 'conscience vote' (or 'free vote') is allowed, which releases parliamentarians from the obligation to maintain party discipline and permits them to vote according to their 'conscience.' In recent years Australia has had a number of conscience votes in federal Parliament, many of which have focused on bioethical issues (e.g., euthanasia, abortion, RU486, and embryonic/stem cell research and cloning). This paper examines the use of conscience votes in six key case studies in these contested areas of policy-making, with particular attention to their implications for promoting democratic values and the significance of women's Parliamentary participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the extent to which party law influences the internal organisation of parties in four Commonwealth common law states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The research engages with recent comparative party literature that emphasises the increasingly close relationship between political parties and the state, in particular the cartel party thesis. My findings indicate that over the last few decades parties have become subject to greater legal regulation, which supports the claim that parties are now managed more closely by the state. However, it is important to distinguish between legislative and common law (judicial) regulation, as each has a different impact on the organisational autonomy of the cartel party. I argue that parties (as autonomous actors and the authors of parliamentary decrees) have been able to shape legislative regulation to their advantage by eliciting significant financial support from the state, yet minimising the corresponding degree of legislative intrusion into their internal activities. However, cartel parties have not been able to prevent judicial scrutiny of their internal workings, and have lost a significant degree of organisational independence as principles of administrative law (usually reserved for state bodies) are being increasingly applied to their structure and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1931, the All for Australia League and other 'citizens movements' mounted a major challenge to the established conservative parties. Traditional views of the League saw it as a reflection of economic group interests, whether of the business establishment or dissident capitalists such as manufactures. More recent scholarship has stressed middle-class concerns with 'sound finance' as the inspiration of the League. This paper instead situates the League in the historical context of centre party projects in New South Wales, and of progressivism, in particular industrial psychology. The economic crisis and the rightward shift of the nationalists enabled a group of political entrepreneurs to transform the League from a front group ]hr business into a populist movement. However, the shift of mainstream conservatism back to the political centre fatally undercut the League's support base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we re-evaluate explanations, derived from the Australian Election Study surveys, for the Coalition's winning office in 1996 and holding it ever since. We show that, in occupational terms, electoral support for the major parties is less distinct than it was in the Hawke and Keating years. We document the shift to the Coalition, net of other factors, among older respondents, those with little education, and Catholics. And we show the shift to Labor among respondents from non-English speaking backgrounds. At the same time, we point to the failure of respondents on low or middle incomes to move in either direction. This leads us to an explanation for the Coalition's success grounded not so much in Labor's eroding blue-collar base but in terms of Howard's ability to construct a form of populist politics. We also demonstrate the significance of various issues, the part played by perceptions of the economy and the state of household finances, and the importance of voters' thinking that election outcomes matter. If we are right, not only are earlier analyses mistaken, but much of the political history of the period needs to be rewritten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties - virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party 'two-horse race', television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a 'presidential'-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2004 Australian federal election established the Australian Greens (Greens) as the third largest political force in the country behind the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal Party in electoral terms. Despite the Greens’ electoral achievements, the party has been largely dismissed as a radical single-issue political party. This paper will argue that while radicalism is an institutionally entrenched feature of the Greens in both organisational and programmatic terms, there are also strongly pragmatic aspects to the party's modus operandi. It suggests that the Greens are astute political operators who use radicalism in a highly pragmatic way to achieve their political objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses GIS and spatial modelling to relate voting outcomes at the 2001 federal election for polling booths across Australia with the socio-economic characteristics of polling booth catchment areas. The data and analysis used are more detailed and comprehensive than previous studies. It is conducted at a fine level of spatial disaggregation across the whole nation to examine voting outcomes for both major and minor political parties. Because the aim of the paper is to distinguish voting outcomes between political parties rather than to predict voting outcomes for particular political parties, a discriminant analysis is used rather than regression analysis. The statistical discriminant analysis identifies two main socio-economic dimensions that are able to predict polling booth outcomes with a relatively high degree of accuracy. That analysis shows how, at the 2001 federal election, the middle ground, in terms of socio-economic characteristics, was being claimed by the Liberal Party, Country Liberal Party, The Greens, and, to a lesser extent, by the Australian Labor Party. However, the Australian Democrats, National Party and One Nation had more distinctive constituencies, with the National Party and One Nation Party competing for areas with similar socio-economic characteristics. Using GIS mapping tools, examples of actual and predicted polling booth voting outcomes are given, along with selected socio-economic characteristics of booth catchments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of lower-house seats at Australian State and federal elections rely on a distribution of preferences from Independent and small-party candidates before seats can be awarded. Actors have attempted to gain political capital from this situation by claiming that the preferences of particular small parties have affected election outcomes. This paper uses the events of the Western Australian State election held in 2001 to explore the validity of such claims. More specifically, it investigates the widely propagated contention that the One Nation Party' s anti-sitting-member preference strategy was a key determinant of the Coalition's electoral defeat. It concludes that the increased number of candidates contesting elections makes it difficult to assess whether the second and subsequent preferences of any particular small party were critical to the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore recent Australian electoral politics using both Inglehart’s ideas on postmaterialism and also a broader conception of postmodern attitudes. We begin by demonstrating that the widely-used postmaterialism measure based on Inglehart’s four-item question gives completely counterintuitive results for the most recent significant Australian party, the One Nation Party. This appears to support Warwick’s argument that this measure actually reveals pro-democracy propensity. Subsequently, we develop a much broader measure of postmodern attitudes and use this in conjunction with an index of left-right attitudes to explore the positioning of party supporters in the resulting two-dimensional space and the practical consequences of this. Among other things, this demonstrates that a single left-right dimension is inadequate to describe the positioning of minor parties in particular, but that it is overall of more significance in predicting vote than is the postmodern dimension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the impact of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media? We examine these questions with two types of data—a questionnaire of party communication staff and content analysis of a representative sample of party Websites. Our findings show, first, that Australian parties have taken a fairly cautious approach to the new medium, using it primarily as an information storehouse rather than putting it to more innovative use. Second, while almost all Australian parties have a Web presence, there is a divide between those parties with parliamentary representation and those without in terms of their site quality and visibility on the Web. The study concludes by interpreting the findings in the context of research on parties' use of the Internet worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most federations, including Australia, have systems of fiscal equalisation which transfer income between States. Economists have long studied the economic efficiency and equity arguments for and against such transfers. This paper concentrates instead on the political aspect; namely, it asks whether federal political parties wishing to maximise their expected votes at election time would ever support a system of equalisation, particularly one which mandates efficient transfers of the type studied by economists. The answer, found using a two-State model of a federation in which voters are mobile, is in the affirmative: the political process delivers an efficient and equitable system of equalisation. However, the result depends on certain assumptions. The implications of these assumptions are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1996 election campaign, the Liberal-National Party Coalition pledged that if elected it would partly privatise Telstra. The pledge was a central part of its campaign pitch. This paper argues that the proposal came at a time when the tide of public opinion had moved against privatisation; it shows how the Opposition used poll data both to present its own proposal in the most favourable light and to portray the difference between its position and that of Labor Government's as minimal; and, using the surveys commissioned by both sides, it evaluates the success of this strategy. More generally, it suggests that in a "post-ideological" age, party ideology remains important. And it illustrates how polls can be used by parties not just to establish what the majority thinks but to galvanise support, neutralise opposition and convert those who harbour doubts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most familiar theories about politics in Australia, as in Britain, is that the political parties are divided fundamentally on class lines. But the strength and nature of the link between class and party remains both controversial and unclear. This paper brings new evidence to bear by applying powerful multivariate techniques to national sample survey data from Australia, Britain and the USA. We distinguish three separate aspects of class: the categorical distinction between blue- and white-collar workers which informs the standard definition of class in political science; an occupational status aspect which ranks jobs on a continuum running from low to high; and conflict aspects, based on 'ownership of the means of production', on the 'exercise of authority in the workplace', and the cleavage between public and private employees. We show, first, that these quite distract aspects of class have different effects. In Australia occupational status has important effects on income and class self-image but is politically irrelevant. The much maligned blue-collar/white-collar distinction is, indeed, financially irrelevant but, none the less, has appreciable effects on class self-image and political preferences, while the conflict aspects have modest but dear effects on income, class self-image and politics. Whether or not an individual is a public employee is consistently important in all three countries. Second, the impact of class on party is relatively modest, albeit cler. Finally, these patterns are quite similar in Australia, Britain and the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to identify and explain the main differences in the structures and strategies of the national union movements in Australia and Canada during the 20th century. Parallel historical narratives reveal that the differences between the two union movements ebbed and waned. They were most similar to each other in the 19th century and after the 1960s, while there was more convincing evidence of divergence in the intennediate period. Following Ross Martin, the explanation offered for these trends emphasises the relationships between unions, political parties and the state. The earlier growth of mass unionism and the political strategies adopted in Australia after their defeats in the 1890s produced more sympathetic state policies (specifically compulsory arbitration from around the turn of the century), which allowed Australian unions to prosper in ways which Canadian unions did not begin to enjoy until the 1940s. At the same time, differences in the types of state policies in the two countries subsequently affected both the structure of unions, Canadian unions being more fragmented at national level than their Australian counterparts, and the strategies they employed, Canadian unions relying more on decentralized collective bargaining compared to the more centralized arbitration approach of Australian unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Labor Party government in Queensland. The government is led by Wayne Goss, the Prime Minister of Queensland. Goss exercises lot of control over all aspects of the government. The government had prepared itself seriously for office following the elections that were held in the year 1986. It had to plan strategic policy initiatives based on the themes of decentralization of decision making and devolution of power. It released key policy papers over the 12 months period before its election. The government has tried to fight prostitution which is a major source of police corruption.