The Australian aid program: dealing with poverty?

The Australian government's White Paper on aid provides a blue print for the Australian aid program for the next decade. While it ostensibly has a focus on poverty, it still sees economic growth and effective government as the path to poverty reduction. This article analyses and highlights the issues associated with this approach to poverty. These are: growing inequality and vulnerability, the rural–urban divide in poverty outcomes, and increasing social exclusion leading to increasing social and political insecurity. The article then examines the alternative policies adopted by the British aid agency, DFID, and concludes with some suggestions on how the practice of the Australian aid program can better match the goal of poverty reduction.     

The 1984 Australian elections: Find the women?

There was a record number of women candidates in the 1984 Federal Elections. 105 (25%) ran for the House of Representatives enlarged from 124 seats to 148. 53 (25%) ran for the 48 positions at the half Senate Elections. This resulted in increased representation for women, with 2 new MHRs (including one who moved from the Senate) and after some musical chairs one extra Senator.⁽¹⁾ These were not the numbers predicted by some politicians and commentators on the eve of the December Elections and the increase was certainly not in proportion to the greater number of candidates and seats, taking 1983 as the base year.⁽²⁾     

Modernizing Democracy: Constructing a Radical Reform of the Planning System?

This paper evaluates the Labour Government's programme of modernizing local government and assesses the impact on the delivery of the town planning service. Four key elements of this strategy have been identified: a programme of democratic renewal, a new ethical framework, the promotion of best value in local service provision, and a revised local government finance system. The paper anticipates how these new ideas on sharpening the performance of local government will impact on the English planning system which is also coming to terms with the creation of two new regional agencies. New opportunities for democratic governance and alliance building are thus being generated. The paper argues that the accretion of rules over time and the conflicting demands on the planning system will act to circumvent the intentions of the present Government to reinvigorate citizen participation.     

Office location in Australian metropolitan areas: centralisation or dispersal?

As office activities have become even more centralised in A ustralia's largest cities they have also become more suburbanised. Taking account of the recent expansion of intermediate (mostly office-based) services and their locational requirements, this article examines the existing and potential strategic planning policies for achieving a better organised, more equitable, and efficient distribution of office activities in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth. Preference for policies based on suburban office centres represents a convergence of ideas. Some of the factors which make it difficult to implement these policies are examined. The role of the CBD and adjacent office areas, however, should not be underrated given the established patterns of office location behaviour and the changing structure and origin of demand for non-local market metropolitan offices.     

The global spread of preferential voting: Australian institutional imperialism?

In recent years, a number of countries have adopted versions of the ‘Australian’ electoral system of preferential voting for both national and sub‐national elections. This article examines the diffusion of preferential voting systems around the world. It distinguishes between various types of preferential voting manifested in both majoritarian (eg alternative vote) and proportional (eg single transferable vote) contexts. It then examines the empirical record of the adoption of preferential voting in Europe, North America and the Pacific, identifying three ways in which the ‘Australian’ system has been transferred to other countries, via colonial transplanting, international imitation, and normative appeal. While the first two approaches have been traditionally influential, in recent years the normative appeal of preferential voting systems has become paramount. This is in part because of the globalisation of electoral assistance, which has provided an important opportunity for the diffusion of what have been, until recently, distinctively ‘Australian’ electoral procedures.     

Sympathy for the Devil?: Australian Unionism and Public Opinion

Public opinion on trade unions is influenced by a variety of factors, including direct experiences of industrial conflict, socialisation, the consonance of union behaviour with values and norms, and the general climate of debate, opinion and propaganda. Union sympathy (general support for unions) slowly declined between the 1940s and the 1960s, deteriorated sharply during the early 1970s, and recovered slowly under the Accord. The deterioration after the 1940s may be attributable to anti-communism's association with anti-unionism. The deterioration during the 1970s was associated with a significant rise in industrial conflict and the slow improvement in sympathy during the 1980s and 1990s was probably linked to the Accord-related fall in it. The decline in union density since the early 1980s cannot be directly attributed to a shift in union sympathy. Despite low levels of disputation in the late 1990s, however, union sympathy then appeared weaker than in the 1940s. Its low level in Australia, compared to other countries, may partly reflect the influence of anti-communism, but especially of arbitration, which rendered strikes illegitimate.     

Re-examining a modern classic: does Putnam's Making Democracy Work suffer from spuriousness?

What makes democratic institutions work efficiently? Robert Putnam argued in Making Democracy Work that a mixture of political participation and immersion in associative and social networks in the community, conceptualised as ‘civic community’ or ‘social capital’, is the explanation. Ever since its publication, many questions have arisen about the validity of Putnam's theory. Among the most relevant concerns stands the influence of the Italian Communist Party on Putnam's empirical tests. This paper aims to fill the gap left in the literature by testing Putnam's hypothesis against the political party in the regional government and the PCI's electoral support. Supporting Putnam, this paper finds that variations in the quality of democratic governments in Italy's regions are a function of civic community even after adjusting for the presence of the Italian Communist Party.