Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: a conceptual review and application

This article adapts the theoretical construct of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ in political science to an analysis of one important initiative in policy‐making in Australia between 1992 and 1994, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS). Originally an initiative of the Queensland Government, NALSAS sought to advance the teaching of Asian languages and studies of Asia in Australian schools. The then Director General of the Queensland Office of the Cabinet, Mr Kevin Rudd, was its key protagonist. The article identifies and analyses Rudd's adroit policy entrepreneurship that was needed to overcome significant resistance and deliver the subsequent policy outcomes. It does this by carrying out a two‐level analysis that considers individual and contextual factors and concludes that, even though Rudd displayed many of the individual characteristics of a policy entrepreneur, his actions were heavily mediated by contextual factors. The article also demonstrates how a concept developed elsewhere, in this case North America, can be applied in other contexts, and calls for more scholarship on policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Australia.     

Limiting Politics: Howardism,Media Rhetoric and National Cultural Commemorations

The electoral terms of the federal Coalition government under Prime Minister John Howard have been characterised by a blend of economic fundamentalism, neo-assimilationist social agendas, privatisation of infrastructure and of risk, and nostalgic politics. This is a particular Australian version of a wider neo-liberalism and, given the leadership role of the Prime Minister in this amalgam of doctrines and policies but also its considerably wider purchase, it is best designated as Howardism. To understand the successful acculturation of Howardism in the Australian body politic involves study of a range of factors. One of the least investigated, but also one of the most ubiquitous, is the role of media rhetoric. We present a selected history of recent media output and its relaying and amplification of key tropes of Howardism, focusing on three national commemorations.     

Educational Policy Analyses: Three Recent Works

Books reviewed in this articles:
Derrick Ben, ed., Shades of Brown; New Perspectives on School Desegregation
Michael E. Manley-Casimir, ed., Family Choice in Schooling
Michael A. Rebell and Arthur R. Block, Educational Policy Making and the Courts: An Empirical Study of Judicial Activism     

Recreational Fishing in Australia: Review and Policy Issues

Recreational fishing, otherwise known as angling, is both a significant resource use and a leisure activity in Australia. It has not received much scientific or policy attention, having been perceived as unimportant relative to commercial fishing and characterised by poor social, biological and economic data. Attention is increasing, however, as the ecological, economic and social significance of the activity is realised. The article briefly reviews recreational fishing and discusses the reasons why the activity has traditionally been ignored by policy-makers and researchers. Current policy issues are identified, and a generalised framework suggested for policy and research.     

Cultural landscape protection in Australia: The Wingecarribee Shire study

Abstract

The concept of cultural landscapes as remarkable windows onto the past, and rich historical documents that can be read has gained increasingly wide acceptance in Australia over the past few years. Allied to this, and informing it. is the way in which landscape as a cultural construct plays a major role in attachment to place and sense of Australianness. The understanding of cultural landscapes as a setting where human history is on display is a community movement as well as a professional one. This paper reviews one particular study which focused on heritage evaluation of an historic rural landscape and moves for its protection.     

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: A Review Essay of McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics

The homeostatic method, which was developed to reconstruct the number of inhabitants of a city or even a country in pre-statistical periods, has yet to receive much attention from demographic historians. Applied first to Amsterdam during the years from 1586 to 1865, the method has subsequently been used to compute the population of other places, including England from 1541 to 1871. The author reviews major schools of thought in historical demography and shows that the homeostatic method, with its emphasis on fertility regulated by marriages, logically extends some schools and is both simpler and more accurate than others. He then explains the method in detail, applying it to Dutch and English cases, and compares its estimates with those obtained through the use of other techniques.     

Policy options for full employment: Which way forward for Australia

This paper seeks to review the long‐term policy choices Australia faces if full employment is to be restored. Using cross‐national data for the period 1972–88, it identifies the variety of routes taken to mass unemployment and full employment It then discusses the diverse policy strategies underlying routes to full employment and examines the possibility and desirability of their adoption in Australia.     

Tourism and Foreign Investment in Australia: Trends,Prospects and Policy Implications

Processes of internationalisation and structural economic change have had profound impacts on the pattern of regional economic activity in Australia. The 1980s was a decade of rapid growth in foreign investment, reoriented to the property and services sector, including tourism. It was also a boom time for international tourism, which emerged as the nation's leading export industry. In addition to the national gateway city of Sydney, the rapidly growing coastal cities of Gold Coast and Cairns in Queensland emerged as major international tourism destinations underpinned by significant levels of foreign investment, particularly from Japan. The 1980s boom years for tourism and foreign investment are revised and raises policy implications raised for the longer-term development of tourism and the role of foreign investment.     

Bruce Smith,Edward Shann,W.K. Hancock: The Economic Critique of Democracy in Australia

This paper argues that there were a number of writers in Australia from the late 1880s to the early 1930s who developed what is best described as an economic critique of the workings of democracy. The three writers considered by this paper, Bruce Smith, Edward Shann and W.K. Hancock, all developed critiques of Australian democracy along similar lines. The central feature of their argument was that Australian majoritarian democracy was making poor policy decisions because it attempted to override the laws of economics in the name of the popular will and ethics. They seemed to have believed that this problem would only be resolved once Australia possessed a mature and economically literate population.     

Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms: The Politics of Health Insurance in Australia

This paper analyses the substantial financial subsidy, alongside other regulatory changes, introduced to support private health insurance in Australia at the end of the 1990s. The concept of policy layering is developed and refined theoretically in terms of changes in policy paradigms in order to chart a lengthy period of tense layering in Australian health-care politics between private and public health insurance and the bipartisan convergence on a universalism plus choice policy paradigm during the 1990s. This is the key dynamic underlying the Coalition's support of private health insurance after 1996 rather than a neo-liberal ambition to dismantle the health-care state and return to a predominately privately financed health-care system with a residual, public safety net.     

A Climate of Fear: Recent British Policy and Management of Coastal Heritage

Abstract

This article discusses the various environmental threats that exist to British coastal heritage sites and the steps currently being taken to monitor, manage, and address such threats. The article concludes by considering the possibilities of enhanced site management that could be offered by recent legislative reform.