The Politics of Broadband: Labor and New Information Technology from Hawke to Gillard

Labor's broadband policy influenced key regional independents to support the formation of the minority Gillard government. However, analysing information technology policy doesn't only demonstrate continuing differences between Labor and the Coalition. It also demonstrates changing Labor attitudes on issues ranging from neoliberalism, globalisation and social inclusion to conceptions of market failure and the rising power of Asia. In particular, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes of the Rudd government to those of the Hawke and Keating governments, arguing that the Rudd government placed much more emphasis on the role that market failure had played in contributing to Australia's poor broadband provision. The resulting policy involved an increased role for government in rolling out broadband not only to the cities but also to regional Australia. That approach benefitted Gillard. It also reflected ideological differences between not just Labor and the Liberals, but also between Rudd and his Labor predecessors.     

Labor and globalisation: from Keating to Latham

This paper documents the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party's (FPLP) approach to globalisation under four different leaders, starting with Paul Keating in the early 1990s, and ending at the early stages of Mark Latham's leadership in 2004. It argues that, despite some notable differences, there was a considerable degree of consistency in Labor attitudes to globalisation under successive party leaders: globalisation was seen as inevitable, irreversible, as beneficial for the majority of the population, and as destructive to states' capacity to intervene in the economy. The paper suggests that a number of factors explain Labor's continued support for globalisation in the face of growing public discontent, including the pressures of international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and big business, ideological factors, and comparatively low levels of economic growth, both in Australia and internationally.     

The political anatomy of community health policy in Australia, 1972–1982

This article seeks to account for the survival of the 1973–1975 Labor government's new Community Health policy during the conservative coalition government (1975–1983) (which had managed to completely abolish Labor's national Medibank health insurance program). Through extensive interviews with 74 people who were directly involved in the policy process at national, state and local levels, as well as from other sources of information, inquiry is made into the issues and circumstances that were taken into account in the decisions that affected the course of policy from 1972–82. The important political and economic forces included party politics, federal‐state relations, the national economy, the direction of other fiscal and health policies, private and governmental interest groups, administrative nets, and the mass media. The not surprising conclusion is that changes in Community Health policy did not depend on its effectiveness but rather on the balance of political, economic and organizational power of interested groups at particular points in time. Policy‐relevant issues facing the 1983 Labor government are pointed out.     

Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840s–1914

This article examines how police–public relations have evolved during the nineteenth-century expansion of formal policing. Following recent critiques of the ‘state monopolization thesis’, it dismisses the idea of a ‘policeman-state’ progressively assuming dominion over the governance of crime, generating vicious antagonism between police and public, and effectively coercing the latter into obedience. In order to chart changes in police–public relations across the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the analysis draws on Antwerp police statistics from 1842 until 1913. It assumes that movements in different types of offences reflect the initiative of different actors and also constitute a valuable index of conflicts between police and public. The article argues that although police activity in Antwerp did significantly increase towards the end of the nineteenth century, priorities in crime control were not merely dictated from ‘above’ (the police and authorities) but also delivered from ‘below’ (the people). It shows how police interventions were shaped by shifting policy concerns, by the interests of different urban interest groups, and by the practical constraints of police work. Finally, it counters the idea of a repressive police disciplining a hostile public with evidence of growing public use of the police and of complex popular attitudes towards the ‘blue locusts’.     

Class,Religion and the Foundation of the Australian Party System: A Revisionist Interpretation

The Australian party system's historic affiliation between religious identification and party support has generally been explained in terms of overlapping cleavages, with the coincidence of Catholicism and working-class socio-economic status given greatest agency. The evidence, however, is inconclusive for working-class predominance amongst Catholics at the time of Fusion. The accepted explanation fails to recognise the power and agency of religion and so overlooks the role of Protestant values and beliefs in the Deakinite Liberals' response to Labor's organisational demands for the subordination of individual judgement to party discipline, and in the subsequent rhetoric of the nonlabour parties. Nonlabour's easy slippage between the vices of Labor and those of the Roman Catholic Church explains why Catholics preferred Labor more convincingly than does the accepted class-based explanation.     

A revisionist interpretation of the impact of Queensland's electoral scheme

In December 1989 Queensland voters changed their government from National Party to Labor Party. Labor had been out of office since August 1957, a record period of opposition for a major party. How is that very lengthy Labor period in the wilderness to be explained? The orthodox interpretation is that there has been a gerrymander in Queensland. This article argues, however, that Queensland's electoral system is the same as that of other mainland states. While it is true that electorates are malapportioned in Queensland (and in Western Australia), nevertheless the method of single member electorates with preferential voting is in use for all mainland states. Such a system does not translate a party's percentage of votes into a similar percentage of seats in the Legislative Assembly. The elections of 1956 and 1989 each saw Labor getting a first preference vote in excess of 50 per cent— with which Labor won in excess of 60 per cent of the seats. At no election between these dates did Labor secure a majority of votes, either first preference or two party preferred.     

Attitudes Towards Divided Government and Ticket-splitting in Australia and the United States

Divided party government has become a frequent occurrence in both the United States and Australia in recent years. In the United States, Morris Fiorina has argued that this result is intentional on the part of the voters, who do not fully trust either party to govern by itself. We test this theory in both the United States and Australia by comparing the voting patterns of those who prefer divided versus united party government. It is hypothesised that Fiorina's theory will actually work better in Australia than in the United States, due to the presence of a strong party system as well as a voting system for the Australian Senate that facilitates strategic voting on behalf of small parties. Indeed, near-identical logistic regression models demonstrate that Australians' attitudes about divided government are a very significant predictor of straight-ticket voting even when a host of other factors is controlled for, whereas in the United States such attitudes are insignificant.     

New light on How Labour governs: re‐discovered political writings by V. Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), the foremost prehistorian of his day, was an active socialist intellectual within the Australian Labor Party between 1917 and 1921. Unable to accept that intellectuals could be active as intellectuals in the Labor Party, commentators have misconceived the argument of How Labour Governs and distorted Childe's political position. Some have argued that Childe set out with a Second International model of the Labor party (a conduit for working class interests) that he was forced by the end of his book to renounce. Socialists, on the other hand, have seen the book as Childe's rejection of labourism in favour of syndicalism. The four rediscovered political essays by Childe considered in this paper show continuities and an important change in Childe's thought Before and after the publication of How Labour Governs Childe advocated a positive role for the Labor party in socialist politics. Moreover he came to understand that the party played an active role in the formation of the class, a role that could either bring forward or set back the prospects for socialism.     

Defence,the Family and the Battler: The Democratic Labor Party and its Legacy∗

The split in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) of the mid-1950s had a lasting impact on both the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. In electoral terms the creation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), and the DLP's second-preference strategy, in particular, had adverse consequences for the ALP. This article re-examines the DLP in terms as a political party, a promotional pressure group and as part of a social movement. The article argues that as a party, the DLP was a failure largely due to its narrow focus on anti-communist defence and foreign policies. But as part of a social movement, it was far more successful and its legacy was still evident in 2007, and was found in the non-labourist social conservatism of the Howard government.     

Measuring or Creating Attitudes? Seventy Years of Australian Public Opinion Polling about Indonesia

This article critically evaluates the relationship between public opinion polling and foreign affairs. It plots key trends in public opinion polls of Australian attitudes towards Indonesia from the 1940s to the present day. Despite variations in polling companies and questions, Australian attitudes to Indonesia appear surprisingly stable, especially since the 1970s. Reading across multiple polls over this period reveals that, both as a mass and among individuals, Australians held complex views in which positive appraisals of Indonesian people and culture co-existed with an underlying fear of Indonesia as a potential military threat. Yet rather than accepting these findings at face value, this article calls for nuanced scrutiny of the role played by polling companies and the media in the construction and representation of so-called “public” opinion. Sensitive to recent developments in the historiography of public opinion polling, it suggests that public opinion polls not only attempted to measure Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, but also helped construct Indonesia as an object of popular and political concern.     

Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade

The interaction between religion and politics is varied, complex and often heated. It involves constitutional issues, voting behaviour, party composition and electoral competition, faith-based public administration, advocacy and lobbying by churches, mutual criticism by churches and the state, and the public presentation of religious values. This article is a comprehensive mapping and discussion of a range of the major religion and politics issues in Australia since the election of the Howard government in 1996. This has been a decade in which religion has had a higher political profile than at any time since the 1950s Labor Split. One feature has been the rise to prominence of Catholics in the Coalition parties, whereas they featured heavily on the other side during the Labor Split. It is a more intellectually interesting decade than the 1950s because the influence of religion has crossed denominational and faith boundaries from the mainstream Christian churches to the newer Evangelical Christian churches and to non-Christian religions such as Islam. The overall impact of religious intervention appears to have favoured the Coalition parties, but many unanswered questions remain about the motivation and impact of these developments, and there are numerous opportunities for further research.     

Language as a public good and national identity: Scotland's competing heritage languages

The preservation of one or several historically and culturally important languages may be a salient political issue in some polities. Although they may not be used as an active means of communication, these languages can also serve a symbolic identitary function. These ‘heritage’ languages can be seen as ‘public goods’ and that even non‐speakers of these languages can have opinions regarding their importance to national identity. In the Scotland example, while Gaelic has been the focus of proactive government legislation and education initiatives, Scots is still struggling for status as a recognised language. Both languages are in some way constituent parts of Scottish identity that at times may seem in competition with one another. Using original survey data, we delve deeper into questions of language, identity and politics in Scotland. First, we describe how public opinion is divided over the importance of Gaelic and Scots to Scottish identity. Second, we use attitudes towards these languages as a dependent variable looking at Scottish identity and attachment. Finally, we use these attitudes towards Gaelic and Scots as an independent variable in models for party identification in Scotland.     

Border protection,the 2001 Australian election and the coalition victory

While the issue of refugees and asylum-seekers has preoccupied many European countries, until the November 2001 federal election Australia had largely been immune from the problem. In the election, border protection—combining the Tampa crisis with the ‘war against terrorism’—were central electoral issues. Analysis of the 2001 Australian Election Study shows that border protection cost Labor the election. Labor suffered defections to the Democrats and Greens over its position on refugees and asylum-seekers, and defections to the Coalition on terrorism. Negative public attitudes towards asylum-seekers rested on oppo sition to immigration, but also on a particular dislike of arrivals from the Middle East. By contrast, support for the ‘war on terrorism’ was based mainly on notions of fairness and democracy. Of the two border protection issues— asylum-seekers and terrorism—terrorism was the more important of the two in shaping the election outcome. If 11 September had occurred but the Tampa crisis had not, the Coalition would in all probability still have won the election.     

Divided Government and the Rise of Social Regulation

Political scientists have debated the causes of divided government since the Reagan administration. In addition, a handful of scholars have also pondered the possible consequences of divided party rule for politics and policy. Still, one serious oversight in the divided'government literature is the potential consequences of divided party rule for the types of policy pursued during divided and unified party regimes. Divided government may create incentives for conflicting institutions to use social regulation debates, often considered the most divisive public policy debates, as "wedges" in order to damage the opposing party in future elections. Each party also has an incentive to embrace social regulation in order to reaffirm its allegiance to its core constituency. This article tests the hypothesis that divided government produces more important social regulation votes than unified government. I define the population of important votes as all Key Votes in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1998. The data analysis reveals that important social regulation votes are in fact more prominent during eras of divided government than during unified party control. This finding has potential implications for the tenor of our national politics as well as the public trust.     

Party development in the early decades of the Australian parliament: a new perspective

This study offers a new perspective on the development of political parties in the Australian House of Representatives. We analyse a data set of 3060 legislative votes to estimate how parties influenced the behaviour of 287 legislators who served in the first 12 parliaments (1901-31). We show that the socialisation of members and cohort replacement effects, as well as a decline in private member business and committee votes, explain why partisanship increased over time. Our results challenge two widely held beliefs about the organisation of political parties in the legislative arena and the Australian party system. First, the analysis demonstrates that the government’s ability to increase party discipline through control of the legislative agenda is limited when parliament is engaged in nation-building projects. Second, our study suggests that introducing restrictive parliamentary procedures played a role in consolidating Australia’s unique two-party system, which opposes Labor to the Liberal–National coalition.     

The 2019 European Elections: a ‘second-order’ vote with ‘first-order’ effects

ABSTRACT

In this article we provide a general interpretation of the results of the 2019 elections of the European Parliament in Italy. The Italian case contains several elements that are, at the same time, ambivalent and interesting, especially if observed in a larger, European-wide comparative perspective. Besides a general interpretation of the vote for the European Parliament, the article discuss also the consequences of the elections results for the transformations of the Italian party system and the patterns of government formation in a context characterized by an increasing process of political integration in a multilevel political system. Finally, we discuss the trend of Euroscepticism in the Italian public opinion and the role played by radical or ‘sovranist’ parties in promoting a feeling of distrust or detachment towards the European Union.     

Editorial opinion and the Whitlam government

Half of the editorials in nine Australian newspapers referred in some way to the national Labor government between December, 1972 and March, 1975. Those editorials were 21 per cent positive towards the government, 37 per cent balanced, and 42 per cent hostile towards the government. The negative 42 per cent kept editorials negative on balance for three‐quarters of the time. Only one poper, The Age, was on balance (mildly) favourable towards the government, the rest were hostile. In their month by month variations in opinion towards the government the papers tended to move up or down together, and they made two general movements downwards and two general movements upwards. Editorial opinion towards the government and public opinion towards the government moved up and down together, with changes in editorial opinion tending to foreshadow and hence possibly helping to shape changes in public opinion. Papers in the states did not resemble each other, and whether papers in the same ownership chains did so depended on the chain. Public opinion varied more with changes in the level of employment than did editorial opinion.⁸     

‘Slightly Constitutional’ Politics: Fianna Fáil's Tortuous Entry to the Irish Parliament, 1926–7

Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a single-party government. Despite this impressive electoral and parliamentary history, the party's constitutional origins are fraught with ambivalence towards Irish state institutions. Fianna Fáil's early years, perhaps eclipsed by subsequent electoral successes, have received relatively little attention from historians and most general works content themselves with a couple of lines about the oath of allegiance with an underlying assumption that entry to the Irish parliament was inevitable. The aim of this article is to show how the process that brought Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics was haphazard and unpredictable. Through extensive use of party literature and parliamentary party minutes from the 1920s, this article presents a detailed account of Fianna Fáil's evolving attitude towards the oath of allegiance and how it succeeded in overcoming ideological reservations to take its seats in the Irish Free State legislature.     

International development in transition

International development is in a period of transition. While the outcome of this is still unclear, this article argues that there are at least four areas in which the project of international development is changing. First, there is a debate, especially within the World Bank, about development strategy and how we think about development, particularly in terms of the balance between states and markets. This is evident in the debate over state failure and the new structural economics. Second, there is increasing evidence of a shift in lending, away from projects of ‘small’ human development, perhaps best encapsulated by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, towards more transformative ‘big’ development projects such as infrastructure. Third, ‘non‐traditional’ aid donors and new forms of private philanthropy are playing a more significant role in development financing and this, in turn, offers developing countries a new range of choices about what kinds of development assistance they receive. Fourth, aid relations are changing as a result of the renewed agency of developing states, particularly in sub‐Saharan Africa, and shifts towards increased South–South cooperation are growing as evidenced by increased funding from regional development banks and increased trade flows. The article reviews these changes and suggests a series of questions and challenges that arise from them for analysts of international development, developing countries and traditional aid donors.     

‘The dilemmas and paradoxes of public bodies performing commercial tasks’: The rhetoric of rationality and the rejection of traditional labor philosophy on the role of the state.

Traditionally a commitment to an active public sector has been a centrepiece of Labor's official thinking. Rhetorical conflict between Labor and non‐Labor has always focused upon the role of the State. The most recent instance of this was the debate between Labor and non‐Labor over the Fraser Government's Review of Commonwealth Functions (commonly known as the ‘Razor Gang').

Traditions have been changing and developing on both sides. The changes made by E. G. Whitlam have been widely discussed. Three years and as many months after the election of the first Hawke Government Labor traditions themselves are being rewritten.

In this paper I shall use the policy area of the function and administration of public sector enterprises in order to demonstrate the depth and significance of this change. It has been said also that the Hawke Government has reduced politics to pronouncements from the Kirribilli Cabinet and non‐productive factional squabbling. The ‘fourth graders’ of the Hawke Government, which apparently includes members of the outer Cabinet as well as the backbenchers, have been excluded from the policy‐making process. This is notwithstanding the firm intentions of the Report of Task Force on Government Administration.

The public sector area can be used to demonstrate shifts along four axes, (i) Significant frontbenchers have been bent upon changing the rhetoric, so that the activities of public sector enterprises are assessed in terms like ‘efficiency’ and ‘dollar rationality’. Change in rhetoric is part of a wider tendency to reject appeals to traditional Labor imagery (such as equality, welfare, the public sector as a good in its own right and other social as opposed to economic goals).

(ii) This, in turn, is related to a rejection of the traditional Labor practices whereby the Labor Party Platform (which could broadly be seen as a pro‐public enterprise document) is no longer seen by significant members of the Labor front‐bench as the most important guide to policy, (iii) Other sources of policy have become more salient, in the case of public sector enterprises, the rhetoric and ideas of the Department of Finance have become prominent (iv) The changing tone of the rhetoric has reflected to a small extent changes being made to official party theology as expressed in the Party Platform. Key individuals have successfully opposed left‐wing challenges to maintain and to shore up the role of the public sector and of public sector enterprises. To the extent that the Platform will retain its traditional symbolic role these activities are significant.

Policy‐making has been about domination from above and the ‘crowding out’ of traditional ideas and their sources. Control, however, has not always been successful. Sources of objection have included the Left Faction of Caucus, key Ministerial Departments (viz. Transport and Communications) dealing with public sector enterprises, and the Ministers themselves.