Law Commons^™

Australian Politics Explainer: Robert Menzies And The Birth Of The Liberal-National Coalition, Gregory C. Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

It has become an established fact of Australian politics that when the non-Labor side of politics is in power, the government will be a coalition of the Liberal Party and the National Party. This has been the case for almost 100 years, since the formation of the Country Party in 1920. Even on those occasions when the Liberals have won a House of Representatives majority in their own right, the Coalition has held

The Fatal Lure Of Politics, Rowan Cahill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

After many years of scholarship, teaching in the academy, and activism, colleague Terry Irving is putting together what he envisages being the definitive account of the life and politics of Australianborn leftist archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). Best known in Australia for his pioneering, seminal critical account of the Australian labour movement in and out of Parliament, How Labour Governs (1923), Childe is more widely known internationally for his pioneering work in prehistory, author of 26 books on archaeology and history, and at the time of his suicide in 1957 in the Blue Mountains (NSW), probably Australia’s most …

Pain, Politics And Volunteering In Tourism Studies, Ryan Frazer, Gordon R. Waitt

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper is an ethnography of how six Australian volunteers experience a house-build project in the Philippines. Contingencies of empathic pain arising from the living conditions of those they aimed to help were felt through their bodies. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's ideas on pain enabled us to explore the politics of volunteer tourism. We suggest the intensification of volunteers' empathic pain constitute ambivalent spaces. In some volunteering contingencies, pain led to a blurring of conventional boundaries of 'them' and 'us', giving priority to difference over dominance. In others, volunteers reproduced dominant understandings of volunteering that mobilised neoliberal and colonial discourses. …

Curriculum Reform: A Transformation Or Consumption Model For Politics And International Relations?, Susan N. Engel

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

For decades, politics and international relations (PaIR) programs across Australia have taken a smorgasbord or student consumption approach to curriculum development. This article examines whether, with the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), there has been a systematisation and transformation of curriculum. It surveys 21 programs and majors in the field offered at 10 universities. It analyses directions in program structure, content and to a lesser extent delivery in order to discover whether there is a shared picture of graduate outcomes. The model of curriculum as a product students' select elements of to consume has largely continued and there has been no …

Leaking: Practicalities And Politics, Brian Martin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

When you want to reveal information in the public interest, consider leaking. To be effective, you need to be very careful and to understand both practical and political aspects.

Papuans And Jokowi Are Hostage To Indonesian Politics, Stephen Hill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Indonesian President Joko Widodo recently announced the end of the decades-long restriction on foreign journalists in the provinces of Papua and West Papua, Indonesia’s territories in the island of New Guinea. While the president, popularly called Jokowi, says he is committed to human rights in the Papua provinces, the military and police continue to murder Papuans with virtual impunity.

Quality Of Politics And Political Reporting Is A Two-Way Street, Stephen J. Tanner

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese recently bemoaned the decline in the quality of political reporting in Australia. Albanese is not the first current or ex-politician to question the standard of reporting. Many politicians – federal and state – have accused journalists and the organisations they work for of bias and incompetence, or both.

But Albanese’s statement is interesting in that it links the decline in the reporting of politics to the enormous technological and structural changes that have transformed the media in recent years.

It is further interesting in that it comes now that Albanese is in opposition. Would he be …

A Secular Australia? Ideas, Politics And The Search For Moral Order In Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Century Australia, Gregory Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article argues that the relationship between the religious and the secular in Australia is complex and that there has been no simple transition from a religious society to a secular one. It argues that the emergence of apparently secular moral orders in the second half of the nineteenth century involved what Steven D. Smith has termed the 'smuggling in' of ideas and beliefs which are religious in nature. This can be seen clearly in the economic debates of the second half of the nineteenth century in Australia in which a Free Trade based on an optimistic natural theology battled …

'Medieval' Makes A Comeback In Modern Politics. What's Going On?, Clare Monagle, Louise D'Arcens

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

According to Hansard, in the parliament of John Howard's first term of government the adjective "medieval" was used eight times. In the following term, however, it cropped up 46 times. What happened? Why did our members and senators suddenly need to describe things as medieval? What happened was 9/11. The spectacle of planes crashing into skyscrapers prompted myriad politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, to denounce the perpetrators as "medieval" What we have seen in recent weeks is medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology. Abbott is not alone; it has become commonplace to describe Islamic State …

Cinema Of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking In The Season Of Image Politics By Yuriko Furuhata (Review), Michael Leggett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy, the character connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome are relative, nuanced and complex.

Picnics And Politics, Kate Bagnall

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

IN FEBRUARY 1912 Chinese around Australia celebrated the founding of the new Chinese republic following the downfall of the Qing dynasty. In Perth, a chartered steamer flying the republican flag took a group of more than 300 on a river excursion to Applecross. In Townsville, a day of celebrations began with fireworks and flag-raising, followed by a picnic lunch and foot-races at Cluden. Adelaide’s Chinese drove out to the hills, where they lunched, competed in sports races and listened to tunes played by a Chinese string band. The streets of Melbourne’s Chinatown were festooned with flags and electric lights, and …

Indigenous Identities And The Politics Of Authenticity, Michelle Harris, Bronwyn Carlson, Evan S. Poata-Smith

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The very question of Indigenous authenticity, as Jeffrey Sissons reminds us, ‘‘…has deep roots within colonial racism’’ (2005, 43). Racialisation and the practice of creating and imbuing racial categories with seemingly impermeable boundaries and indestructible meanings has, after all, underpinned a range of colonial practices from the systematic alienation of Indigenous land and resources to child abduction. Regimes of biological and cultural authenticity continue to shape state policies and practices that regulate the everyday lives of Indigenous people around the world. Indeed, in some contexts, expectations of Indigenous cultural purity or environmental naturalness exist alongside the imposition of varying degrees …

The Politics Of Gene Sharp, Brian Martin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Gene Sharp's contributions to the understanding of nonviolent action provide a useful lens for understanding developments in the field in recent decades. Sharp built on Gandhi's pioneering endeavours, but moved away from Gandhi by providing a pragmatic rationale for nonviolent action. Three important contributions by Sharp are his classification and cataloguing of methods of nonviolent action, his consent theory of power and his framework for understanding nonviolent campaigns. However, few academics have paid much attention to Sharp's work, and policy-makers have largely ignored it. In contrast, activists have taken up Sharp's ideas enthusiastically. Sharp is an imposing figure in the …

Punching, Prodding And Blocking: The Opposition's Changing Role In Politics, Gregory Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Australian parliamentary politics has always had a reputation for a certain rough and tumble. In the 1850s, British economist William Stanley Jevons commented on the rowdiness of the proceedings of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly.

Some decades later parliamentarian John Haynes rained blows down on Paddy Crick in the parliament, affectionately known as the “bear pit”.

In comparison, today’s parliamentary politics are a somewhat tame affair, with any aggression playing out verbally.

Cultural Politics: Who Cares About The Arts?, Marcus O'Donnell

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The fact that the arts haven’t starred in this election and its media coverage is perhaps no big surprise. But it sends a disturbing signal about the place of the arts in our public discourse.

When Arts Minister Tony Burke and shadow arts spokesperson George Brandis addressed an arts forum in Western Sydney last week it was one of the few moments when the arts got a focus in media reporting, but even then coverage was scant. A single story appeared in the Fairfax papers, The Australian followed up their debate story with a Brandis profile and this week the …

Rudd Rewrites Playbook On Wedge Politics, Marcus O'Donnell

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

It’s the end of day eight and Kevin Rudd’s surprise debate announcement on same-sex marriage is still making news - maybe he is the suppository of all wisdom.

SBS Evening News led with an exclusive from Karen Middleton that even Julia Gillard was thinking of changing her mind on the issue. The staunchly anti-marriage-equality, former PM was apparently seeking a meeting with Ellen Degeneres and her Australian born wife Portia de Rossi during their Australian visit in March. Middleton reported Gillard was considering using a photo-op with the stars to announce a change of heart. But it didn’t come off.

Target: Biomedicine And Racialized Geo-Body-Politics, Shiloh Krupar, Nadine Ehlers

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

On August 1, 1896, W. E. B. Du Bois began a fifteen-month sociological study of "forty thousand or more people of Negro blood . . . living in the city of Philadelphia." Commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, and eventually published as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), this work is widely recognized as the first great empirical book on black life in American society. Part of Du Bois' study included an analysis of the health conditions of Philadelphia's black population and might be seen as an example of a race-specific biopolitics of health. For Michel Foucault, biopolitics is …

Modern Politics Is Too Clever By Half … And We’Re Worse Off For It, Gregory Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In 19th century Australia, democrats such as Henry Parkes could not emphasise too much how important it was to elect a Parliamentary representative who was honourable, decent and able to work on behalf of the public good.

He provided some advice for those voting for the first time when universal manhood suffrage was introduced into New South Wales. The primary quality he said to look for in a representative was “personal integrity”.

Displaced Persons And The Politics Of International Categorisation(S), Jayne Persian

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Between 1947 and 1952 170,000 Displaced Persons (DPs) arrived in Australia as International Refugee Organisation (IRO)-sponsored refugees. This article sets out the international historical and political context for the migration of DPs to Australia, and interrogates the "bureaucratic labelling" inherent in the category "Displaced Persons". The post-war refugees were presented internationally as "Displaced Persons"; "refugees"; "political refugees"; and eventually, in an effort to solve the population crisis, as potential "workers" and "migrants". This article will describe the historical origin of the terms "Displaced Persons" "refugees", "political exiles" and "migrants"- terms which were, and continue to be, relevant and problematic.

The Transcolonial Politics Of Chinese Domestic Mastery In Singapore And Darwin 1910s-1930s, Claire K. Lowrie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Feminist and postcolonial scholars have long argued that the home was a microcosm and a symbol of the colony. To exercise power in the home, to practice domestic mastery over colonised servants, was an expression of colonial power. At the same time, intimate contact and domestic conflicts between non-white servants and their employers had the potential to destabilise hierarchical distinctions, thereby threatening the stability of colonial rule. As Ann Laura Stoler puts it, the home was a site where "racial classifications were defined and defied" and where relations between coloniser and colonised could sustain or challenge colonial rule. The vast …

The Practice And Politics Of Leaking, Kathryn Flynn

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Civic-minded people who encounter what they believe to be corrupt and illegal conduct in the workplace may take it upon themselves to release relevant confidential information. This is done either through an open disclosure, where the identity of the whistleblower is publicly known, or an unauthorised disclosure where the identity of the leaker is not revealed. This information is typically leaked to journalists or activists who may be able to seek redress. Leaking is an alternative to whistleblowing and carries fewer risks of reprisals but leakers need to be alert to pitfalls with this practice.

Sovereignty And Cooperation In Regional Pacific Tuna Fisheries Management: Politics, Economics, Conservation And The Vessel Day Scheme, Quentin A. Hanich, Hannah Parris, Ben M. Tsamenyi

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Who's Afraid Of The Bem? The Politics Of Excellence, Clive Harfield

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Examines the adoptation and application of the EFQM Business Excellence Model within British policing as a model of performance management.