Deliberation and Resecuritization: Australia,Asylum-Seekers and the Normative Limits of the Copenhagen School

In the lead-up to the Australian federal election in 2010, both major political parties represented the ‘unauthorised’ arrival of asylum-seekers as a security issue. This article explores the dynamics of this resecuritization of asylum in Australia, suggesting the case has important implications for both the securitization framework and Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers. The relationship between securitization and calls for an open debate about asylum-seekers challenges the securitization framework's normative claims about political debate and deliberation as a progressive development illustrative of desecuritization (the removal of issues from the security agenda). This case also illustrates that without political leadership to engage with the social and cultural context that allows the securitization of asylum to resonate with large segments of the Australian population, the exploitation of this issue for short-term political gain will continue.     

Has Québec Become a Northern Mexico? Public Opinion and America's “Long War”

In contrast with Mexico, a consistent pattern of anti-Americanism has never been present in Québec, but there has been an ostensible upsurge in anti-American sentiment recently. This article asks whether Québec has become a “northern Mexico” with respect to societal attitudes displayed toward the United States. To answer this, we first explore the argument that Mexico is effectively an axiomatically anti-American land. We then examine public opinion in Québec, with a view to contrasting it with Mexican views, especially on the all-important question of the use of force in international politics. We argue that Quebeckers show themselves to be more supportive than Mexicans of the idea that the “international community” in certain instances does have both a right and a duty to intervene in the domestic affairs of states.     

Australian Labor and the Socialist Tradition

Amidst the turmoil of the so‐called ‘death of socialism’, both in Australia and elsewhere, there has been renewed debate about what socialism should be taken to mean. This paper attempts to come to terms with the competing claims about, in particular, socialism within the Australian Labor Party and, in general, how better to understand the meaning of socialism. A comparison and contrast between the first principles of liberalism and socialism helps to illuminate some of the inadequacies of Marxist criticisms of parliamentary Labor. In addition, the argument is made that if we are willing to give greater emphasis to questions of means and ends, socialism can be seen to be part of Labor's historic mission. Far from being a defence of the Hawke administration, however, the case is made that there has been, under Hawke, a fundamental break with the democratic socialist tradition; that the difference is in kind, not degree.     

A break from the past: The labor party and the political economy of Keynesian social democracy

Arguments about the nature of the Australian Labor Party have been somewhat revived over the past few years. Those who argue that there has been a fundamental break with Labor tradition are criticised from both the right of the labour movement and the Marxist left. Both, interestingly, argue that to see the Hawke‐Keating years as too distinct is to misread history. Both schools of thought argue that those who defend a Labor tradition ‐which is fundamentally different from contemporary Labor are glorifying the past. This paper gives an account of Keynesian social democracy, and employs a comparative case study of economic debate in the 1940s and 1980s, in order to argue that there has indeed been a fundamental change in Labor's approach to political economy.     

The pitfalls of participatory democracy: A study of the Australian Democrats' GST

This article analyses the operation of participatory democracy within the Australian Democrats, with reference to the development of the party's 1998 Goods and Services Tax (GST) policy and its subsequent application to debate in the Senate. The study extends beyond an evaluation of the formal participatory mechanisms codified in the party's Constitution, to their operation in practice—revealing the tensions faced by a small participatory party within a competitive electoral system. Difficulties include the primacy of the parliamentary party in everyday political decision making, and the importance of leadership and strong personalities, which sit uneasily with the formal democratic power accorded to the membership. The study also highlights a key debate applicable to all parties: whether parliamentarians represent the membership, party activists or the electorate, and how these levels of representation may be reconciled.     

The politics of Antarctic minerals: The Greening of white Australia

On 22 May 1989 the Australian Government announced that it would not sign the Antarctic Minerals Convention that had been concluded in June 1988. Australia had been a strong supporter of the minerals treaty approach to regulating Antarctic mineral development. This case study in Australian foreign policy examines four well known approaches to foreign policy making in order to explain Australia's volte face on the minerals treaty. It is concluded that domestic politics best explains Australia's decision and that students of Australian foreign policy need to pay more attention to the domestic determinants of the policy making process.     

The ‘arc of instability’ and Australia's strategic policy

The proposition that Australia faces an ‘arc of instability’ to its north has been an important feature of the Australian strategic debate in the early twenty-first century. Prompted by worries in the late 1990s over Indonesia's future and East Timor's uncertain path to independence, the ‘arc’ metaphor also encapsulated growing Australian concerns about the political cohesiveness of Melanesian polities, including Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. While tending to overlook the divergent experiences of countries within its expanding boundaries, the ‘arc’ fed from Australia's historical requirement for a secure archipelagic screen. As such it has became an important weapon in the debate over whether the locus of Australia's strategic priorities should be increasingly global in the ‘war on terror’ period or remain closer to home in the immediate region. The ‘arc of instability’ metaphor was consequently adopted by leading Australian Labor Party politicians to argue that the Howard Coalition government was neglecting South Pacific security challenges. It became less prominent following the Howard government's greater activism in the South Pacific, signalled by Australia's leadership of the East Timor intervention in 2003. But its prominence returned in 2006 with the unrest in both Honiara and Dili. In overall terms, the ‘arc of instability’ discussion has helped direct Australian strategic and political attention to the immediate neighbourhood. But it has not provided specific policy guidance on what should be done to address the instabilities it includes.     

Australian Security and Development in Solomon Islands

This paper considers the Australian intervention in Solomon Islands as evidence of Mark Duffield's claim that the concept of development has been reinterpreted or ‘radicalised’ in the post-Cold War period. Duffield's contention that development now incorporates more transformative measures to address the concern among Northern states for conflict resolution is presented as a manifestation of the security–development nexus. The following argues that although Duffield's analysis cannot be applied to Solomon Islands without qualification, his claims provide insights into the disjuncture between Australian governmental declarations, policy and policy outcomes in regard to the ongoing Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.     

The Country,the City and the State in the Australian Settlement

The Australian Settlement, as formulated by Paul Kelly, had a sixth pillar: a settlement between the city and the country in which the state compensated people living in the country for the costs of remoteness and sparse settlement. This was underpinned by the reliance of Australian export performance on agriculture, by nation-building commitments to peopling the continent, and by agrarian beliefs in the virtues of country life. Australia's egalitarianism had a spatial and regional as well as a class dimension. Changes in Australia's economy, demography, and political culture have eroded these foundations, leaving rural Australia vulnerable to the neoliberal agenda. The dismantling of tariffs, the restructuring of agriculture, microeconomic reforms driven by National Competition Policy, and regional policy which stresses self-reliance, all treat rural Australia as a minor part of the nation rather than its economic and cultural foundation, and reject claims to special treatment. To give country Australia its own pillar makes visible the magnitude of the historic shifts which have taken place in the state's relationship to rural Australia since 1983 and brings it into the main frame for understanding Australia's abandonment of protective statism.     

International Human Rights Conventions and Australian Political Debates: Issues Raised by the 'Toonen Case'

In April 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee communicated its view to the Australian Government that Tasmanian anti-gay laws were inconsistent with Australia's international human rights obligations. Issues of Australia's human rights protection, treaty accession and Commonwealth-State relations, each of which have traditionally been characterised by major partisan differences, were brought to the fore of political debate. While the HRC decision at first appeared to give the coalition much scope to advance its arguments, subsequent developments highlighted considerable weaknesses in the rhetorical strategies of conservatives, and the difficulty of using the Tasmanian laws as a federalist cause ce le bre. In the long term, ironically, the coalition may well have weakened the efficacy of sovereignty-based arguments in Australian political debate.     

Re-examining the Australian public's attitude to military casualties: post-heroic or defeat-phobic?

Australia, like most other developed democracies, is often alleged to suffer from ‘casualty phobia’. The perception that the Australian public will not tolerate casualties in foreign conflicts has shaped the decisions of both civilian and military policy makers. Measures taken to protect Australian forces from casualties may, for instance, also serve to increase the risk to civilians in the country to which they are deployed. The USA underwent a similar debate some years ago. Innovative public opinion research techniques—especially ‘survey experiments’ which allow researchers to establish causal relationships by consciously manipulating one variable while holding others constant—have established that the American public are not reflexively casualty-phobic and that the impact of casualties on public opinion can be outweighed by other factors, such as the public's confidence in the mission's overall success. In this article, the author replicates one of the key survey experiments from the US debate, suitably adapted to Australian conditions, with a nationally representative sample of Australian voters. The author finds that the same pattern holds in Australia as in the USA: casualties do lower public support for a given mission, but the mission's chances of success matter more.     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

Australia's Actions towards Accepting Indonesian Control of Netherlands New Guinea

In the 1950s and early 1960s the Indonesian–Dutch dispute over the sovereignty of West New Guinea was of great concern to the Australian government. Canberra pursued policies to deny Indonesia control of the territory and encourage the Netherlands to retain its presence there. However, in mid-January 1962, the Australian Cabinet realised the disadvantages of continuing to resist Indonesian claims and gave de facto approval for annexation by Indonesia. This paper examines the reasons for Canberra's policy reversal, arguing that the primary factor was Australia's desire to avoid an Indonesian–Dutch war and prevent the possible Communisation of Indonesia.     

The problem with counting preferences: the example of one nation party preferences at the 2001 Western Australian legislative assembly election

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.     

Theory and the analysis of Australian politics

Sharman's 1989 APSA Presidential Address is a welcome critique of the interpretation of Australian politics, but the questions that it raises need to be taken further. The importance of Australian political experience in the formation of an indigenous political tradition is recognised, but it is misleading to see it as stemming from the desire to limit executive power. This article explores the nature of this indigenous governmental tradition, and goes on to consider what we learn from this debate about the nature of constitutional theory, and the relationship of academic debate to constitutional models.     

Did the 1996 Federal Election See a Blue-collar Revolt against Labor? A Queensland Case-study

In the immediate wake of the 1996 Australian federal elections pundits variously attributed the ALP's defeat to the loss of its 'heartlands', to the party's failure in government to retain the support of 'battlers', or even to the collapse of Labor's traditional blue-collar 'core' constituency. Using Queensland as a case-study, and drawing on aggregate as well as survey data, this research note provides support for claims that Labor's traditional support base deserted it in 1996.     

Learning About Regionalism from Europe: ‘Economic Normalisation’ and Beyond

This paper critically analyses the European Union's regional policy framework and considers its implications for Australia's multi‐level governance system. The analysis is made with reference to the ‘new regionalist’ debates in Europe and North America that have asserted the importance of regional economic development in the context of globalisation. New regionalism's advocacy of ‘economic normalisation’ as a leading regional policy aim is critically evaluated against the EU policy experience. Conclusions about the adequacy of new regionalist claims are drawn for Australian policy debates.     

The Double Movement of Immovable Property Rights in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable property was already showing signs of instability in the late colonial period, and this instability has been greatly magnified in the post-colonial period. The areas of land subject to some form of partial alienation have increased along with the ways and means by which immovable property has been ‘mobilised’, while a variety of customary claims to previously alienated areas have grown stronger over the same period. Although Karl Polanyi's idea of a ‘double movement’ can throw some light on this phenomenon, the PNG case also reveals a new side to the application of this concept.     

Passionately internationalist: Fred Halliday and nationalism studies

The aim of this academic obituary is to briefly consider Fred Halliday's (1946‐2010) contribution to nationalism studies. The article will first discuss Halliday's understanding of nationalism, which he defines as a set of ideas that asserts that the world is divided into distinct peoples with a particular history and various entitlements, and his position in the theoretical debate on nationalism. It will then focus on Halliday's combat with the ethical doctrine of nationalism, more specifically the tension between the moral claims of the latter and what he loosely terms Enlightenment principles. The article will conclude by a brief discussion of Halliday's political commitments and his internationalism.     

West Papua and the Australia-Indonesia relationship: a case study in diplomatic difficulty

This article is a study of West Papua's impact on the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. Its purpose is to enhance understanding of various diplomatic challenges emerging from West Papua, the origins of these challenges, and how they impact upon the relationship. This will be achieved through an analysis of a particular incident in 2006 in which 43 West Papuan refugees arrived in Australia. This led to a diplomatic storm between the Indonesian and Australian governments, and a highly charged public debate. Insights will be gleaned from the incident and its aftermath to broaden our understanding of West Papua's impact on the Australia-Indonesia relationship.