Explaining the demise of the national–New Zealand first coalition

This article considers the fall of New Zealand's first coalition government under the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, through the prism of a ‘unified’ model of Cabinet durability. This model incorporates both the ‘structural attributes’ of the government at the time of its formation, as well as the stochastic ‘critical events’ that occur over its lifetime. However, the conventional attributes of the National–New Zealand First coalition were considered favourable, and the critical event that precipitated its demise did not by itself appear to be a sufficient condition for termination. It is argued that the hitherto unspecified structural attribute of intra‐party stability was a significant factor for this particular coalition, and that this case also demonstrates the cumulative impact of non‐terminal events in undermining the incentives for continued cooperation between coalition partners.     

Protecting the sterling area: The chifley government's response to multilateralism 1945–9

In 1942 the Australian Labor government accepted multilateralism in the form of Article VII of the Anglo‐American Mutual Aid Agreement. Some historians have argued that this was the beginning of a turning point in Australia's economic history: a movement away from the declining British empire towards the United States. I have two arguments in this article. The first is that Labor's acceptance of multilateralism did not lead, at least in the first five years after the war, to a deterioration in Australia's economic relationship with the United Kingdom. The reverse was true. Because of the acute shortage of dollars in the postwar world, Australia was obliged to expand her trade within the sterling area and to discriminate against American goods. The second argument is that although the Chifley government supported multilateralism as a theoretical concept, it opposed vigorously what it regarded as the Americans’ precipitate moves to dismantle the sterling area. The Chifley government sought to protect this cooperative system of exchange and import controls as a bulwark against the dollar shortage and against the possibility of a depression spreading from America.     

Crises and policy responses within the political trilemma: Europe, 1929–36 and 2008–11

The recent debate on the Eurozone failed to appreciate a particular characteristic of European crisis experiences, namely their fundamentally political character. To make my argument, I borrow from Dani Rodrik (2000) the framework of a “political trilemma” between cross-border economic integration, national institutions and democracy (in the sense of mass politics) and discuss its relation to the more commonly known “macroeconomic trilemma” as well as some limitations of the framework. The recent experience of a European debt crisis and the experience of Europe's Great Depression can be interpreted as a “political trilemma”: both reflect the problem of designing effective policy responses to major economic shocks within the environment of deep economic integration across political boundaries and the regime choices that this involves. Within this framework I highlight some aspects of the 1930s that are informative to the policy choices in Europe today. Once we accept that some policy choices should be avoided, attention should be shifted to the remaining options and the obstacles that prevent their implementation, notably the challenge to transform democracy beyond national borders.     

The politicisation of Australian nurses: Victoria 1984–1986

This paper examines the nursing disputes in Victoria between 1984 and 1986 against the background of moves by nurses to acquire professional status. It investigates the reasons for the disputes and argues that the politicisation of nurses in Victoria is in part a result of their historical relationship to the dominant profession in the health systems and of their previous reluctance to use industrial action in support of improved working conditions. Our research is discussed in relation to findings in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The conclusion is drawn that political action by nurses is indicative of a particular trend in white‐collar unionism and that it is inextricably linked to the process of professionalisation.     

The Italian government's response to the problem of Jewish refugees 1945–1948∗

This article deals with the fall of Palestinian-Arab Jaffa in the 1948 war. As the largest Arab city in Palestine, its accelerated social and military collapse came as a surprise to many, despite Jewish dominance in the Jaffa region. While previous research has mostly neglected this question, the present study aims at revealing the underlying causes, besides Jewish military pressure, for Jaffa's collapse and the resulting exodus of its Arab population. The article describes the precarious social and military Palestinian-Arab situation in Jaffa as a case study for Palestine as a whole during the December 1947–May 1948 inter-communal war.     

Infinite conditions on the road to peace: the second New Labour government’s foreign policy approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after 9/11

This article examines how a resurgent clash of Arab and Israeli nationalisms created tensions within New Labour as the leadership sought to reconcile claims of duplicity in its Middle East policy after 9/11 while retaining party unity and an international consensus for a war in Afghanistan. It argues that as European and international pressure to prioritise Middle East peace before pursuing a war with Iraq increased, Tony Blair’s emphasis on economic progress as a prerequisite to creating a state of Palestine was expanded to determine that Palestinian national rights also be considered on the evidence of fundamental reform and modernisation across the spectrum of political, civil and cultural life. These objectives, however, were not to be achieved following the deployment of a UN peace-keeping force, but the prevailing conditions of the Israeli occupation, provisos later inscribed in the US-led goal-driven, performance-based Road Map for Peace. This focus ran in parallel with his assumed role as a transatlantic ‘bridge’, and collectively helped to transform the multilateralist template of the Quartet into a classic trilateralist negotiating model—bilateral Arab-Israel talks, unilaterally overseen by the US—enacting the further exclusion of key European partners.     

New Zealand and Chile: partnership for the Pacific century?

The research note investigates the growing economic and political interaction between two important Pacific Rim players, Chile and New Zealand, and analyses the rationale for the Closer Economic Partnership that is currently under discussion. Having analysed the data on trade between the countries it suggests that a mixture of strategic and symbolic geopolitical/geo‐economic factors are driving the agreement rather than the desire to increase bilateral commodity exchange. As it is presently constructed, the agreement is likely to bestow disproportionate benefits on specific corporate actors in certain sectors. A research agenda for monitoring the broader impacts of the agreement is offered.     

Welcome to Australia? A reappraisal of the Fraser government's approach to refugees, 1975–83

The Fraser government's response to the Indo-Chinese refugee crisis and the presentation, for the first time, of asylum-seekers arriving in Australia by boat is almost universally acclaimed as having been proactive, generous and humanitarian in spirit—the antithesis of both the preceding Whitlam Labor government and subsequent governments, particularly since 2001. Adopting a policy of ‘forward selection’ of refugees from camps in South-East Asia, the Fraser government was able to stem the flow of boats and oversaw the relatively uncontroversial resettlement of nearly 70,000 Indo-Chinese. However, the author argues that this was not the brave and principled course of action for which Fraser and his immigration ministers are regularly fêted, but rather a delayed response that was motivated by fear and desperation rather than pure humanitarian intent. The celebrated outcomes of Fraser's policies belie the self-interested way in which they were constructed and neglect the fact that the government did not act until it was forced. Fraser's policies were neither a departure from the past nor the antithesis of current polices; to the contrary, they were the seeds of the contemporary Australian model of asylum.